Feature Reference Articles #16

Climate change is not a political issue. Tim Watkis, Consciousness of Sheep. Nov. 1, 2018.

One of the biggest threats behind an increasingly likely human extinction is our tendency to compartmentalise (in order to ignore) information. Each one of us does this unconsciously in a process that psychologist Norman Dixon referred to as “trading safety for peace of mind.” According to Dixon, when faced with danger most humans do not respond rationally; following the course of action (or inaction) that is most likely to keep us safe. Rather, we respond emotionally; taking the course of action (or inaction) that distresses us the least. 

In his book Our Own Worst Enemy, Dixon gives a plethora of examples that ultimately led to tragedy. Among these are: 

• The train driver whose engine exploded because he had hammered a steam valve shut because it was too noisy. Ironically, the explosion blew out his ear drums so that loud (or, indeed, any) noise was no longer an issue for him 
• The airline co-pilot who acquiesced in an unauthorised take-off attempt rather than argue with the pilot; leading to the largest ever loss of life in an air disaster 
• The nuclear engineers at Three Mile Island who opted to believe that their instruments were faulty rather than entertain the possibility that the reactor was overheating.

There is a relatively small part of the human population that is able to process information rationally (although, unfortunately, half of them are psychopaths): People like the NASA engineers who warned their managers not to proceed with the launch of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986. Not, as was the case in that tragedy, that a warning from one or more alert individuals within a particular discipline makes much difference. 

The Challenger disaster was as much the product of politics and economics as it was to do with engineering and chemistry. Managers were under huge pressure from politicians to carry out the launch for PR value. There was also the looming economic threat that the US military (whose payloads made up the bulk of shuttle missions) might develop their own rival system if NASA kept delaying launches. 

In the end, rather than act rationally and delay the launch – with all the emotionally uncomfortable fallout that would have entailed – they found ways to convince themselves that it would be okay to launch. The result, tragically, was that all seven members of the crew died along with any hope of good PR. 

It is in this light that we need to view the recent – more alarming than usual – call for radical change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientists raising the alarm are akin to the NASA engineers warning of the danger of launching space shuttles in sub-zero temperatures. The economists and politicians are like the NASA managers who are under extreme economic and social pressures to avoid saying or doing anything that might emotionally distress themselves or the wider electorate. 

One psychological device commonly employed to begin this process of denial can be found in the headline chosen by the BBC in their coverage of the story: 

“Final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’” (My emphasis) 

In fact, “the world” is doing something akin to what our bodies do when they become infested with an unwanted infection or toxin; it is warming its temperature by a few degrees in order to kill the organism responsible. The world, you see, is in no danger whatsoever. It has been through eons during which temperatures were far higher than we are likely to make them. During those periods it produced stunning natural wonders; insects as big as large dogs, ferns as tall as houses and reptiles the size of trucks. The world can get along fine irrespective of whether humans are present. 

This talk about “saving the world” is merely trading safety for peace of mind so that we do not have to entertain our species’ headlong charge to oblivion in exactly the same way as we individually avoid thinking about the fact of our own mortality. Instead, we fall into another psychological device; assuming that someone else has got our backs. 

The climate scientists themselves do this when they call upon our political leaders to make radical changes to four key areas of our way of life: 

• Energy – shift to entirely zero carbon and carbon-negative energy sources
• Land use – more vegetables, less meat
• Cities – restructuring to prioritise walking and cycling, energy-saving building standards, etc.
• Industry – electrify, cut back on material use, recycle, go digital, etc.

It is at this point that we realise that climate scientists are not up to speed with the emerging energy economics. While a handful of countries in the developed regions of the world have deployed modern renewables in large enough volumes to impact their electricity systems; most of their actual energy consumption has been off-shored to the parts of the world that manufacture the goods they consume. This allows the (trading safety for peace of mind) illusion that these regions are “greener” than is actually the case. The global reality is very different. As energy expert Kurt Cobb explains: 

“I recently asked a group gathered to hear me speak what percentage of the world’s energy is provided by these six renewable sources: solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and ocean energy.  

“Then came the guesses: To my left, 25 percent; straight ahead, 30 percent; on my right, 20 percent and 15 percent; a pessimist sitting to the far right, 7 percent.  

“The group was astonished when I related the actual figure: 1.5 percent. The figure comes from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, a consortium of 30 countries that monitors energy developments worldwide. The audience that evening had been under the gravely mistaken impression that human society was much further along in its transition to renewable energy. Even the pessimist in the audience was off by more than a factor of four.” 

Worse still, none of the renewable energy generation deployed so far has been used to replace the energy generated from fossil fuels; global energy consumption continues to grow remorselessly, and renewables have merely been added to the mix. The only major energy transition has been the shift from coal to gas-fired power stations. 

The common public/political response to the realisation that we are nowhere near even beginning to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, is to (trading safety for peace of mind) call for governments to redouble their efforts. This, however, depends upon the fallacy that governments are doing anything more than adding hot air and volumes of unworkable policy proposals. The reality is that the only difference between Donald Trump and Angela Merkel when it comes to climate policy is that Trump revels in burning coal while Merkel desperately attempts to convince us that she isn’t doing it. 

As with proposals to totally re-engineer the global energy systems, proposals for the radical reform of cities, industry and land use are beyond us. The fundamental flaw is visible in the way we deploy so-called renewable electricity. Rob Mielcarski summarizes the problem: 

“Renewable energies cannot stand on their own without fossil energy to create, install, and maintain their materials and infrastructure. For example, wind turbines use large quantities of concrete, steel, and copper that cannot be made without fossil energy. Renewables are at best fossil energy extenders. At worst they accelerate economic growth and burn up the remaining fossil energy faster to capture some wind or solar energy with equipment that will wear out in less than 50 years when there will be little or no fossil energy needed to replace the equipment.” 

There is simply no good way in which we can switch to a renewable energy-powered economy without burning so much of the remaining fossil fuels and consuming so many of the remaining resources that we accelerate the very crises we are seeking to prevent. 

When climate scientists and politicians call on us to redouble our efforts – one even called for the kind of mobilization seen in World War Two – they neglect to point out that we have neither the capital, energy nor the resources available both to feed the existing population and to even scratch the surface of the transition to a zero-carbon economy. As Professor of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering, Tad Patzek points out: 

“To compare the WWII industrial effort with the global dislocation necessary to ameliorate some of the effects of climate change is surprisingly naive and proves that the three professors got Ds in their history electives, if they had any. This comparison also neglects to account for the human population that has almost quadrupled between the 1940s and now, and the resource consumption that has increased almost 10-fold. The world today cannot grow its industrial production the way we did during WWII. There is simply not enough of the planet Earth left to be devoured.” 

While it is true that key states were industrialized in 1939 (or 1941), the majority of the world was not. It was only after Europe and Japan emerged from their post-war reconstruction efforts in the early 1950s that the full-blown economic growth of the global economy really took off. As historian Paul Kennedy explains: 

“The accumulated world industrial output between 1953 and 1973 was comparable in volume to that of the entire century and a half which separated 1953 from 1800. The recovery of war-damaged economies, the development of new technologies, the continued shift from agriculture to industry, the harnessing of national resources within ‘planned economies,’ and the spread of industrialization to the Third World all helped to effect this dramatic change. In an even more emphatic way, and for much the same reasons, the volume of world trade also grew spectacularly after 1945…” 

It is no coincidence that this economically magical twenty-year period is also the period when global oil consumption grew exponentially; or that the economic upswing ended when exponential oil production growth ceased. Remarkably, even as this short period of our history recedes into the fog of the past, economists continue to treat the once-and-for-good conditions in those two decades as the “normal” that we are supposed to be trying to get back to. 

There is one, very simple way that we can keep global temperatures from reaching the point where our species goes extinct. We stop burning all fossil fuels immediately. 

If we do so, of course, we will be plunged into a new dark age as all of the life support systems we depend upon would collapse within hours. From the ashes, a much smaller – 1 billion at most – population will be able to restore the kind of renewables-only economy of the Atlantic slave economies in the seventeenth century. 

It is, of course, very emotionally challenging to acknowledge that one way or another, this is the type of economy humans – if they do not become extinct – will have to adopt. Instead, we trade safety for peace of mind by continuing with a way of life that we readily admit to being unsustainable in the vain hope that clever people somewhere else are going to come up with a new energy source that is both carbon-free and capable of providing sufficient net energy not just to power continued economic growth; but to simultaneously repair the damage we have already done to the human habitat. 

Patzek understands the politics of the crisis better than most: 

“Our children have far less access to the luxuries of the global amoeba and to that extent they are more in tune with reality. But they are mostly passive, alienated from the natural environment, and brainwashed by living with smart phones and Facebook. So, by and enlarge, our children don’t vote and don’t try to change what they see coming. 

“My generation, though, consists mostly of the frightened, self-centred cowards who hope that preserving the governing narrative will protect us from the inevitable. Welcome to the overpopulated world with the climate change, increasing international chaos, growing nationalism, xenophobia, racism, fascism and religious intolerance…”

So no, climate change is not a political issue; it is a profoundly psychological one. Until and unless far more of us are prepared to drop our comfort blankets and look our predicament in the face, extinction is our most likely fate. As Mielcarski puts it: 

“When a crisis forces action we will probably blame the wrong actors. Our responses are not likely to be rational or optimal. Expect chaos. 

“A few people have broken through inherited denial. So it is possible. But scaling this to the majority will be a challenge.”

And even if a majority can bring themselves to stop trading safety for peace of mind, the time is running short. The seas are rising faster than anyone thought and the time we have left to act can be counted in months rather than decades. It may be that none of us will survive the storm that is about to break around us.

The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse. Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

“My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
~ David Buckel 

Today’s global consumption of fossil fuels now stands at roughly five times what it was in the 1950s, and one-and-half times that of the 1980s when the science of global warming had already been confirmed and accepted by governments with the implication that there was an urgent need to act. 

Tomes of scientific studies have been logged in the last several decades documenting the deteriorating biospheric health, yet nothing substantive has been done to curtail it. 

More CO2 has been emitted since the inception of the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 than in all of human history. CO2 emissions are 55% higher today than in 1990. Despite 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and an international treaty that entered into force in 1994, man-made greenhouse gases have risen inexorably. 

If it has not dawned on you by now, our economic and political systems are ill-equipped to deal with this existential threat. Existing international agreements are toothless because they have no verification or enforcement and do not require anything remotely close to what is needed to avoid catastrophe. 

The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, with the top four in the past four years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s and Greenland’s pace of ice loss has increased fourfold since 2003. The Arctic ocean has lost 95% of its old ice and total volume of ice in September, the lowest ice month of the year, has declined by 78% between 1979 and 2012. With grim implications for the future, Earth’s air conditioner —the cryosphere— is melting away.  

An article from a few months ago lays bare the reality that throughout the past two hundred years and with recent “alternative” or “renewable” energy sources, humans have only added to the total energy they consume without ever having displaced the old, polluting ones. An alternative energy outlook report by Wood Mackenzie foresees that even in a carbon-constrained future, fossil fuels would still make up 77% of global energy consumption in 2040. The world economy remains hopelessly tethered to fossil fuels. We are kidding ourselves if we think there will be any sort of orderly transition to sustainability with which modern civilization appears to be wholly incompatible. We are, as Nate Hagens says, energy blind. 

Modern civilization has become so intertwined with petroleum-based products that their remnants are now found in our excrement. It seems no living thing can escape microplastics, not even the eggs of remote Arctic birds. 

This should come as no surprise if you look at the scale of the problem. Plastic production has grown from 2 million metric tons in 1950 to roughly 400 million metric tons today (more than 99% of plastics made today are with fossil fuels and only a tiny fraction of it recycled). There are five massive oceanic gyres filled with pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other human detritus; one of the these gyres, named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is three times the size of France and growing exponentially. The health and environmental effects are grim; organized society may not even be around to examine the long-term effects of these persistent synthetic materials: 

“Health problems associated with plastics throughout the lifecycle includes numerous forms of cancers, diabetes, several organ malfunctions, impact on eyes, skin and other sensory organs, birth defects” and many other impacts, said David Azoulay, a report author and managing attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law…” And those are only the human health costs, they do not mention impacts on climate, impacts on fisheries or farmland productivity.” 

Making things more efficient and convenient has its limits, but humans keep trying to beat the consequences of Earth’s dwindling natural resources while ignoring the environmental costs. Jevons paradox be damned! To make matters worse, the fossil fuel industry has employed a well-financed and highly effective global disinformation campaign to confuse and sow doubt in the public mind about the reality of climate change. And to top it all off, we have a leader who reinforces the ignorance of climate change deniers:

It’s a cruel irony that this President’s emergency declaration for building a border wall comes at a time when migration from Latin America is near a 40-year low and the majority of those now seeking asylum are families fleeing climate change-related disasters. This President and the craven politicians who line up behind him are an abomination! 

At a time when compassion, cooperation, and scientific reasoning are needed to deal with the multiple crises we face, politicians are instead conjuring up xenophobia, racism, and conspiracy theories. As inequality grows and the once-stable climate continues to unravel, expect the super-rich to barricade themselves behind heavily fortified mansions while treating climate refugees and the most vulnerable among us with extreme prejudice. A new study shows increasingly severe weather events are fueling the number of ‘food shocks’ around the world and jeopardizing global security: 

These “food shocks” —or, sudden losses to food production— are hitting local communities hard, in addition to impacting the global economy, with long-term implications. “Critically, shock frequency has increased through time on land and sea at a global scale,” the study notes. “Geopolitical and extreme-weather events were the main shock drivers identified, but with considerable differences across sectors.” 

Douglas Theobald in his study at Brandeis University calculated that there is less than a 1 in 102,860 chance that all life did not arise from a common ancestor. In other words, humans are related to all life on Earth and share much of their DNA with other organisms. Despite earning the title of ‘superpredator‘, humans are dependent on intact and functioning ecosystems. 

Our chances for long-term survival are ultimately tied to the health of the planet, yet we are carrying out ecocide on a planetary scale. Being a mere 0.01% of all life on Earth, humans have managed to destroy 50% of wild animals in just the last fifty years and 83% since the dawn of civilization around 3,000 B.C.. Who knows how many plant species have gone extinct: 

Hawaii is losing plant species at the rate of one per year, when it should be roughly one every 10,000 years. “We have a term called ‘plant-blindness’… People simply don’t see them; they view greenery as an indistinguishable mass, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals…” 

The bedrock of our food, clean water and energy is biodiversity, but its loss now rivals the impacts of climate change. Without biodiversity, our food sources, both plants and animals, will succumb to diseases. Microbes and hundreds of different life forms interact to make soils fertile. Without them, soils will be barren and unable to support life. Monocultures can only be held together through artificial means (fossil fuels, inorganic fertilizer and toxic pesticides) and are highly vulnerable to diseases, yet industrial monoculture farming continues to dominate the globe. Most worrisome are the recent studies indicating that biodiversity loss raises the risk of ‘extinction cascades’. Insect numbers, the base of the terrestrial food chain, are in steep decline and starfish, a common keystone species in coastal ecosystems, are facing extinction due to some sort of wasting disease likely caused by climate change: 

“Many of these outbreaks are heat sensitive. In the lab, sea stars got sick sooner and died faster in warmer water… A warming ocean could increase the impact of infectious diseases like this one…We could be watching the extinction of what was a common species just 5 years ago.” 

These disturbing headlines indicate to me that the Sixth Mass Extinction is gathering pace and the real stock market underlying our very existence and survival is crashing before our very eyes!!! 

The human endeavor has grown much too large for the Earth to support; climate change, plastic pollution, and biodiversity loss are just a few of the symptoms of this global ecological overshoot. The people who have studied this problem for years and from every angle have come to the same conclusion — technology simply won’t save us, but that won’t stop humans from experimenting. By far the most effective way to reduce future emissions and resource consumption is to reduce human birth rates, yet the global population is still increasing at about 90 million people per year despite the geographic shift in fertility rates. 

Humans recognized decades ago the threats they are now facing, yet nothing was done due to political inaction and industry malfeasance which continues to this very day. 

The scientists who wrote The Limits to Growth decades ago were expecting our political institutions to take action back in the 1970s, but they were met with ridicule and now we stand at the doorstep of modern civilization’s collapse. 

Political inaction and regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry appear to be an intractable barriers that have condemned the human race to a hellish future. 

Anyone waiting for some sort of seminal climate change event that is going to galvanize the world’s leaders into action will be tragically disappointed. 

If seeing the world’s coral reefs dying, its glaciers disappearing, permafrost melting, and the steady uptick in extreme weather events does not spur them to action, it is much too late to hope that any one event will ever do so. The time to act would have been before we were seeing all these environmental degradations and tipping points, not afterward. There is no way to put the CO2 genie back in the bottle. A myth that many uninformed people hold is that biospheric health will quickly bounce back after we humans get our act together. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the damage we are already seeing is irreversible on human time scales. Positive feedbacks were already occurring at less than 1°C of warming. Many carbon sinks are on the verge of becoming or have already become carbon sources. We are leaving behind a “forever legacy” and humanity is still accelerating towards a hellish future with no realistic way to stop.

Why the Anthropocene is not ‘climate change’ — and why that matters. Julia Adeney Thomas, Asia Global Online. Jan. 10, 2019.

Climate is just one part of the Earth System. If we focus on that alone, we will misunderstand the complexity of the danger posed by unprecedented planetary change.

“Anthropocene” is a widely proposed name for the geological epoch that covers human impact on our planet. But it is not synonymous with “climate change,” nor can it be covered by “environmental problems.” Bigger and more shocking, the Anthropocene encapsulates the evidence that human pressures became so profound around the middle of the 20th century that we blew a planetary gasket. Hello, new Earth System. Hello, Anthropocene. 

The phrase “Earth System” refers to the entirety of our planet’s interacting physical, chemical, biological, and human processes. Enabled by new data-collecting technologies like satellites and ever more powerful computer modeling, Earth System science reframes how we understand our planet. Climate is just one element of this system; if we focus on that alone, we will misunderstand the complexity of the danger. 

The term “environment” helps us understand ourselves as part of ecosystems, but fails to capture the newness of our current situation. We have always lived in the environment; only very recently, just as Asia began its skyrocketing development, did we begin living in the altered Earth System of the Anthropocene. 

The Anthropocene requires a new way of thinking 

The Anthropocene is a multidimensional challenge. Our future is more unpredictable than ever, with new phenomena like Category 5 megastorms, rapid species extinction, and the loss of polar ice. This change is irreversible. NASA says that levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) are higher than they have been at any time in the past 400,000 years — well before our species evolved — causing the atmosphere to warm. 

The climate has certainly changed, but so too have other aspects of the planetary system. Take the lithosphere: 193,000 human-made “inorganic crystalline compounds,” or what you and I might call “rocks,” now vastly outnumber Earth’s ~5000 natural minerals, while 8.3 billion tons of plastics coat the land, water, and our internal organs. Due to modern agribusiness techniques, so much topsoil is washing away that England has only about 60 more harvests left. 

The biosphere is equally altered. Never has the planet been so crowded with human beings. In 1900, there were around 1.5 billion of us; in the 1960s, around 3 billion; today there are upwards of 7.4 billion. Human beings and our domesticated animals comprise an astounding 97% of the total zoomass of terrestrial mammals, meaning that wild creatures make up a miserly 3%. Humans and our companion species occupy considerably more than half of the planet’s habitable land surface. Concerning the hydrosphere, fresh water renews itself at the rate of about 1% a year, but currently 21 out of 37 of the world’s major aquifers are being drawn down faster—in some cases much faster — than they can be replenished. 

The planet’s chemistry has changed too. Warmer oceans interfere with the production of oxygen by phytoplankton, and some scientists predict that with a rise of 6C — which could happen as soon as 2100—this oxygen production could cease. Our production of fixed nitrogen is five times higher than it was 60 years ago; in fact, Earth has never had so much fixed nitrogen in its entire ~4.5-billion-year history. Since World War II, synthetic chemical production has increased more than thirtyfold. Of the more than 80,000 new chemicals, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has tested only about 200 for human health risks. 

Alarming as each factor is on its own, the concept of the Anthropocene brings all these factors and others together. This is the only way that we can understand Earth as a single reverberating system with feedback loops and tipping points that we can’t yet predict. 

The Anthropocene’s interrelated systematicity presents not a problem, but a multidimensional predicament. A problem might be solved, often with a single technological tool produced by experts in a single field, but a predicament presents a challenging condition requiring resources and ideas of many kinds. We don’t solve predicaments; instead, we navigate through them. 

Collaboration among scientists, policymakers, social scientists, humanists, and community leaders is key to contending with the Anthropocene. Technology is important, but the hardest challenges will be about how to alter our political and economic systems. Even the United Nations’ US$24 million Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) concluded that our current systems are not up to the task: we need “significant changes in policies, institutions and practices that are not currently under way.” 

The danger of the one-dimensional thinking of climate change 

So, are the techno-optimists, who believe most world problems can be solved by innovation, wrong? The answer to this question is that they are not so much wrong as misguided, addressing a narrow issue in the narrowest terms. Most begin by gesturing toward the totality of environmental problems, but end by focusing on climate change alone. Sometimes climate change is further reduced to CO2 emissions to the exclusion of all other greenhouse gases, such as methane. 

A favorite example of techno-optimists like economist Jeffrey Sachs is substituting wind power for fossil fuels. Like others, he speaks in confident tones about “decoupling” economic growth from natural resources, contending that “growth can continue while pressures on key resources (water, air, land, habitats of other species) and pollution are significantly reduced rather than increased,” by means of new technologies and market pricing. In short, we can provide for the growing human population (expected to hit 8 billion in 2023) without destroying the ecosystem, without impoverishing future generations, and without bothering to transform our political and economic systems. The status quo is fine if we tighten a few nuts and bolts. 

Let us look at this techno-optimism from the Anthropocene perspective. 

Most offshore wind turbines require rare earth metals sourced from China, which supplies about 90% of the world’s demand and has a monopoly on some elements. Not only are the mines of China’s primary production site, the southeastern province of Jiangxi, being rapidly depleted, but such mining entails shocking environmental and social costs. According to investigative journalist Liu Hongqiao, “Research has found that producing one ton of rare earth ore (in terms of rare earth oxides) produces 200 cubic meters of acidic wastewater. The production of the rare earths needed to meet China’s demand for wind turbines up to 2050 … will result in the release of 80 million cubic meters of wastewater.” 

Once obtained, this ore must be transported and processed to make turbines. These turbines, once positioned, require maintenance, using more resources. Ultimately, though, they will end up as refuse, more trash on our trash-filled planet. There is nothing dematerialized or carbon-free about wind turbines if we look at the total picture. 

Reducing our problem to climate change, then to CO2, and finally to measuring emissions only at the point of energy production is a dramatic misrepresentation of our dilemma. An Anthropocene perspective is needed to keep the totality of the predicament in view. 

Slowing climate change is crucial but navigating its challenges is only possible if it is understood as one facet of planetary overshoot. The challenges of our altered, unpredictable Earth System cannot be met by technological tinkering within the very systems that pushed it over the edge in the first place. There’s nothing for it but to roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of transforming our political and economic systems with the aims of decency and resilience.

Climate change denial (the other sort) is alive and well. Consciousness  of Sheep. Jan. 18, 2019.

There is broad agreement that 2018 was the worst year yet for the environment. According to the New York Times “The Story of 2018 Was Climate Change;” while the Washington Post informed us that: “Extreme weather in 2018 was a raging, howling signal of climate change.” Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic EuroNews warned us that “Europe’s chaotic weather in 2018 is a wake-up call for climate change.” 

Not that any of this made much impression on the world’s climate change denier-in-chief, Mr Trump; who has recently been berated (again) for failing to understand the difference between climate and weather. In response to the wave of winter weather that has descended on the USA this week, Trump decided to troll environmentalists on his Twitter feed: 

“Be careful and try staying in your house. Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”

The tweet was no doubt designed to antagonise Trump’s democrat opponents who are currently engaged in their own version of denial. New Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez swept into the House of Representatives demanding that her Democrat colleagues put tackling climate change front and centre now that they have taken control of the House from the deniers in the Republican Party. This went down like a lead balloon in the office of the new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi; who quickly co-opted Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s support for a microwaved version of the all-talk-but-no-action climate policies adopted in the Obama era. As Anthony Adragna and Zack Colman at Politico note:

“Moderate and establishment Democrats largely prevailed in their first showdown with liberals over the select committee. Whereas protesters, joined by Ocasio-Cortez, stormed Pelosi’s office last November demanding the panel be empowered to issue subpoenas and write legislation, the committee that Democrats will establish Thursday can do neither of those things. It is only authorized to conduct investigations and develop policy recommendations to reduce the effects of climate change. Any legislation would be drafted by standing committees such as Energy and Commerce.”

No sooner had the corporate wing of the Democrat Party succeeded in turning the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis into talking shop (albeit one with a more urgent-sounding name) than Speaker Pelosi and her corporate Democrat followers revealed their true feelings about climate change by dashing off to the airport to fly off on a jolly with the corporate lobbyists down in Puerto Rico. The climate crisis, it would appear, is not quite urgent enough to cause anyone to cancel a flight to a corporate beano… at least, not someone who was booked on a flight. 

The ongoing manifestation of “Al Gore Syndrome” – in which the rich fly around the planet lecturing the rest of us on how we (i.e. not them) have to do something about climate change – is also on display in Davos this week. As Rebecca Ratcliffe at the Guardian reports: 

“David Attenborough might have urged world leaders at Davos to take urgent action on climate change, but it appears no one was listening. As he spoke, experts predicted up to 1,500 individual private jets will fly to and from airfields serving the Swiss ski resort this week.

“Political and business leaders and lobbyists are opting for bigger, more expensive aircrafts, according to analysis by the Air Charter Service, which found the number of private jet flights grew by 11% last year.”

Worse still, an outbreak of penis envy among wealthy delegates has led to a ramping up of the size (and thus the weight and carbon emissions) of private jets similar to the “my yacht is bigger than your yacht” competition that the (largely male) global elite has engaged in for decades. 

The sheer hypocrisy of a wealthy elite whose lifestyles do more to undermine the environment flying off to a luxury sky resort to discuss environmental policy has not been lost on the increasingly strident right wing populist movement that is snowballing across the western states. Michael Bastasch at the right-wing Daily Caller lists the series of climate policy defeats that were inflicted on the neoliberal elites during 2018:

“Despite increasingly apocalyptic warnings from U.N. officials, 2018 has seen a number of high-profile defeats for policies aimed at fighting global warming. Politicians and voters pushed back at attempts to raise energy prices as part of the climate crusade.” 

The list of defeats includes:

• Ontario Premier Doug Ford revoking a carbon tax in June
• Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull failed to pass a carbon reduction bill and was forced to resign in August
• Washington state governor Jay Inslee failed to get a carbon tax adopted during the November elections
• A group of Republicans who do not deny climate change, the House Climate Solutions Caucus, were also voted out in November
• Toward the end of November, French President Emmanuel Macron made his ill-fated attempt to impose a climate levy on diesel fuels; sparking the massive yellow vests protests. 

According to Bastasch, the political fallout in France has persuaded the Pelosi wing of the Democrat Party to tone down their stance on climate change:

“France’s carbon tax revolts sent a clear message to Democratic lawmakers across the Atlantic Ocean. Democrats will take control of the House in 2019 and want to make global warming a central part of their agenda. 

“Democrats and even environmentalists distanced themselves from carbon taxes in the wake of French riots…” 

I leave it to readers to decide which is the more deplorable, the politician who refuses to accept the science or the politician who accepts the science but then behaves as if the science is a hoax. There is, however, clearly a different kind of climate change denial going on here; one that plays dangerously to the narrative of right wing false populists. 

There was a time when I wondered whether it would be different, if only there was someone idolised by the political right who accepted the science and stood up to call for action. Indeed, if only there was such a figure who also had a solid background in the physical sciences. Surely that would have done away with denial; allowing us to have a sensible debate about how to reverse or at least mitigate the growing climate emergency. And then I remembered that there once was such a person… 

On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – the nearest you can get to a secular saint among the political right – gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, calling on world leaders to take action on climate change while there was still time: 

“For two centuries, since the Age of the Enlightenment, we assumed that whatever the advance of science, whatever the economic development, whatever the increase in human numbers, the world would go on much the same. That was progress. And that was what we wanted.

“Now we know that this is no longer true. 

“We have become more and more aware of the growing imbalance between our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order of which we are part. 

“In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man’s activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends. 

“We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.” 

Thatcher even broached issues surrounding the climate crisis that today’s activists shy away from even thinking, still less mentioning in polite conversation:

“The real dangers arise because climate change is combined with other problems of our age: for instance the population explosion; — the deterioration of soil fertility; — increasing pollution of the sea; — intensive use of fossil fuel; — and destruction of the world’s forests, particularly those in the tropics.”

This outline of the crisis – obvious enough to people three decades ago – could have come out of the mouth of any of today’s climate activists. But coming from one of the most revered neoliberals – and a doctor of chemistry to boot – it should have been followed by a serious, worldwide programme of action. It wasn’t; and for good reason. At the end of the speech, Thatcher threw in the one condition that condemned us:

“We have to recognise the importance of economic growth of a kind that benefits future as well as present generations everywhere. We need it not only to raise living standards but to generate the wealth required to pay for protection of the environment. 

“It would be absurd to adopt polices which would bankrupt the industrial nations, or doom the poorer countries to increasing poverty…”

This was to effectively argue that “we have to destroy the environment in order to save the environment.” World leaders could take whatever action they decided upon… provided that it didn’t interfere with the free market. And so it was that we entered into a thirty year stupor based around two proposals that Thatcher mentioned in the speech:

“We [the UK government] now require, by law, that a substantial proportion of our electricity comes from sources which emit little or no carbon dioxide, and that includes a continuing important contribution from nuclear energy… [and] It is sensible to improve energy efficiency and use energy prudently; it’s sensible to improve energy efficiency and to develop alternative and sustainable sources of supply; it’s sensible to replant the forests which we consume; it’s sensible to re-examine industrial processes; it’s sensible to tackle the problem of waste.”

A combination of mendaciously named “renewables,” energy efficiency, recycling and planting trees to act as a carbon sink was all we needed to win the day. Except, of course, that this was denial too. Thatcher could not bring herself to the glaringly obvious conclusion that if the debt-based and fossil fuel enabled global economy that produced the carbon (and other greenhouse gases) was the problem, then the global economy would have to go. Thatcher was not about to sacrifice the neoliberal consensus that she had given birth to in the previous decade. 

In this way we can draw a straight line from Thatcher, through Al Gore all the way to the Pelosis of today. Each, whatever their pronouncements on the climate emergency, determined to maintain the global corporate order whatever the cost. Meanwhile, those within the 99 percent who are not still somnambulant as a result of the opioid promises of windmills and solar panels, have cottoned on to the con-trick. As distrust in politicians and mainstream media gathers pace, a growing mass of ordinary people are standing up against policies that place the cost burden of patently inadequate (renewable energy harvesting technologies account for less than three percent of the world’s energy) responses to climate change on the shoulders of those who can least afford it; while the elites continue to fly around the planet spewing greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere. 

The danger of the false populism of the political right is that it will win the public over to the belief that climate change is a hoax. If they do so, equal fault must be laid at the door of those on the political left and centre who profess to want action on climate change but act as if it wasn’t a problem. Which is, of course, another way of saying what Thatcher should have said at the end of her otherwise ground-breaking speech – if we want to do anything about the climate emergency (and at this stage, mitigation is the best we can hope for) then we need to radically shift away from further economic growth into a managed spiral of de-growth… something that Mother Nature will likely impose upon us anyway if we choose not to act.

Science made us hesitate. Survival Acres. Feb. 19, 2019.

Increasingly dire reports related to future human survival from climate change effects are still being generated. Yet most, if not virtually of them, continue to downplay their exact wording with an emphasis, although not always clearly articulated, on the ‘opportunity’ to mitigate climate change, as if this is something to celebrate. 

Apparently, this type of documentation is intended to create impetus to finally and decisively act on climate change. Except that it won’t. You only need to examine the evidence of the recent past for the proof. 

Here is a current example of what I’m talking about. From the The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment (January 2019)

...

This is the palatable ‘version’ for policy maker and public consumption, and apparently still the best science can still do. It’s readable, unoffensive and waters down the devastating and destructive impacts into nice little bullet statements that are easily digestible – and just as easily, forgettable. 

Science applauds itself with churning out these kinds of documents (in massive quantities). Thousands are produced each year. I’ve yet to see a single one that actually lays out the brutal honesty that is now grossly overdue and in my opinion, urgently required on the topic of global warming and climate mitigation. Science simply won’t write it. So what does it mean then when the experts won’t tell it like it really is? 

Nothing much gets done. Few people get alarmed, policies don’t change much and the problem receives the same general non-attention and widespread ignorance as always. ‘Incremental’ efforts are akin to the often claimed ‘too little – too late’ that plagues the pathetic attempts to-date to effectively address the global issue of warming. 

For science professionals, this is state-of-the-art reporting and deemed more then adequate to inform policymakers. But is it? Globally, policy makers have continued to respond with too little, too late and even outright indifference to this topic critical to all of humanity. Small, incremental and globally inconsequential changes have been made, largely in part because science continues to give policy makers the ‘out’ they ultimately desire and almost always take in their publications – there’s still ‘time’ and ‘opportunity’ and implicit within these claims is their assumption that “we can still fix this”. 

Yet the reality is quite different – it is not being fixed, oftentimes the technology doesn’t even exist, and it absolutely is not being given the priority and the attention that it deserves if we truly want to solve this problem (and save our species). 

Having watched this circus of deception for many years, I’ve seen almost no change in the tone, type, method, severity and urgency taking place. There has been some slight improvements – but not much, and I believe that science shares the burden for the inaction on the most critical issue of our time. 

You won’t find agreement (most likely) with the science community with my position, but I’ll keep making my case, as I’ve always done. 

Science does not take a stand on political inaction. But it’s plainly obvious that they should. The methodology of science and the culture of science tries to separate itself from politics, but anybody that has worked within the science community well understands that politics plays a very large role within science. I myself worked with different scientist years ago and saw this evidence first hand. It’s only gotten worse as politics have permeated pretty much all agencies and government activities. The science community prides itself on being independent of political pressures, but it’s not true. It’s reflected in their reports and in the published materials they generate. You have to be willing to wade into these documents to find it. 

So that’s what I’ve done below. ....

...

Science is afraid or unable to actually convey the real climate emergency that exists. I’m beginning to understand the real reasons why, but that is still no excuse. 

And here’s what you will also notice, but perhaps you haven’t fully understood yet: the real urgency of the ‘science message’ on global warming and what it means for the world is not coming from science writers, authors or researchers. Isn’t that more then a bit odd?  

And why is this happening? 

Science either needs an interpreter to articulate the urgency they allege exists, or to completely revamps its methodology of communication. Not many people will accept the opinions and research of blog authors like mine, even if they are based upon the science that’s been published. I get that, but the problem I’ve identified still exists. 

Science desperately needs to make a firm, clear stance on the existential threat that exists and to stop watering down their expectations. 

I know – you know – that an extinction level event is unfolding right now and they need to flat-out tell the world’s governments, policy makers and stake-holders what is happening with no uncertainty or room for doubt and inaction. The urgency and extreme emergency tone is missing. And they need to plainly state with the same level of urgency and irrevocability what needs to be done. It’s becoming really painful to realize that either they don’t know – or won’t accept any ideas that challenge their own bias and belief systems. 

They’re not serious. And you can find that evidence right in their own published material.

Why We Stink at Tackling Climate Change. David P. Barash, Nautilus. Feb. 21, 2019.

Global threats result from human culture outrunning human biology.

What’s wrong with us? Not us Democrats, Republicans, or Americans. Rather, what’s wrong with our species, Homo sapiens? If human beings are as Hamlet suggested, “noble in reason, infinite in faculty,” then why are we facing so many problems? 

In many ways, people are better off than ever before: reduced infant mortality, longer lifespans, less poverty, fewer epidemic diseases, even fewer deaths per capita due to violence. And yet global threats abound and by nearly all measures they are getting worse: environmental destruction and wildlife extinction, ethnic and religious hatred, the specter of nuclear war, and above all, the disaster of global climate change. 

For some religious believers, the primary culprit is original sin. For ideologues of left, right, and otherwise, it’s ill-functioning political structures. From my biological perspective, it’s the deep-seated disconnect between our slow-moving, inexorable biological evolution and its fast-moving cultural counterpart—and the troublesome fact we are subject to both, simultaneously. ...

Time to Panic. David Wallace-Wells, NYT. Feb. 16, 2019.

The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us.

... David Attenborough, the mellifluous voice of the BBC’s “Planet Earth” and now an environmental conscience for the English-speaking world, put it even more bleakly: “If we don’t take action,” he said, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

Scientists have felt this way for a while. But they have not often talked like it. For decades, there were few things with a worse reputation than “alarmism” among those studying climate change.

... 

In 2018, their circumspection began to change, perhaps because all that extreme weather wouldn’t permit it not to. Some scientists even began embracing alarmism — particularly with that United Nations report. The research it summarized was not new, and temperatures beyond two degrees Celsius were not even discussed, though warming on that scale is where we are headed. Though the report — the product of nearly 100 scientists from around the world — did not address any of the scarier possibilities for warming, it did offer a new form of permission to the world’s scientists. The thing that was new was the message: It is O.K., finally, to freak out. Even reasonable. 

This, to me, is progress. Panic might seem counterproductive, but we’re at a point where alarmism and catastrophic thinking are valuable, for several reasons.

... 

So being alarmed is not a sign of being hysterical; when it comes to climate change, being alarmed is what the facts demand. Perhaps the only logical response.

...

By defining the boundaries of conceivability more accurately, catastrophic thinking makes it easier to see the threat of climate change clearly. For years, we have read in newspapers as two degrees of warming was invoked as the highest tolerable level, beyond which disaster would ensue. Warming greater than that was rarely discussed outside scientific circles. And so it was easy to develop an intuitive portrait of the landscape of possibilities that began with the climate as it exists today and ended with the pain of two degrees, the ceiling of suffering. 

In fact, it is almost certainly a floor. By far the likeliest outcomes for the end of this century fall between two and four degrees of warming. And so looking squarely at what the world might look like in that range — two degrees, three, four — is much better preparation for the challenges we will face than retreating into the comforting relative normalcy of the present.

The day the world ended. Ian Welsh.