Climate -- and related -- Links April 2020

I Am a Mad Scientist. Kate Marvel, Drilled News. April 22, 2020.


Weird Al Yankovic and the Global Phase Shift. Peter Watts. April 28, 2020.

“We’re living by science and data, not our constitution. That’s wrong. We are not safe if we are not free.” —Darwin Award contender, protesting in Pennsylvania

... Yet here I am again, with yet another mea culpa about my limited imagination: because my scenario described a gradual reduction in our impact, a fear of breeding that would take decades to manifest in any ecological sense. I never imagined that a relatively benign bug could cause us to drastically reduce emissions, to change our very lifestyles literally overnight. Which is why I think it would’ve been cool if C19 had been conjured up in a lab and deliberately released: not as a bioweapon, but as an object lesson. A teaching moment. An inspiration. 

Because we know, now, that we can do it. We can live without the luxuries. We can live without the billiona—sorry, the job creators. We know who the essential members of this society are, and we can identify the parasites1. We can watch with awe as New Zealand kicks Corona’s ass: we can whoop with schadenfreude as church-going evangelicals and MAGAmaniacs re-enact the airlock scene from Avenue 5, while their stumbling demented child-king cheers them on. We can clear the skies in a matter of days; you’ve all seen the pictures. All it takes is for us to be in imminent fear for our lives. 

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but let’s put that aside for the moment. Let’s ignore William Hanage, accept that Covid-19 will subside in a few months (outside the US, at least), and restrictions will ease enough for us to come outside again and rub shoulders with the occasional stranger before the second wave comes back and does it all over again. We’ve learned some important lessons over the past weeks. We’ve learned how many “impossible” things were actually just inconvenient to the guys holding the reins. The question now is, will any of those lessons stick? 

Because all those reduced emissions, all the before/after pics of the sky over Paris, the whole ecofriendly mass-migration to work-from-home—none of it matters. 2020 is still on track to be the hottest year in recorded history. The Great Barrier Reef is still in the throes of yet another devastating bleaching event. A whole shitload of fold catastrophes will still be taking out ecosystems in sudden waves, starting within the decade. We’ve been fouling the air for generations; a few months of lowered emissions isn’t even a drop in the bucket. (I’m pretty much on-side with climate scientist Kate Marvel on this score, right up until she tries to absolve us of all blame and hang responsibility on the plutocrats. I hold us to blame as much as them. But that’s a whole other post.)

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There’s some cause for hope. The Democrats, for example, came out of the mid-pandemic election with a massive majority (thanks largely to their exemplary handling of C19) and have embraced the Green New Deal, pledged to end the nation’s reliance on coal, and to go carbon neutral by 2050. Looking for a silver lining that’s less nihilistic than Hey, at least it’s reduced the number of idiot hominids fucking up the planet? Look no further than the Democratic Party. 

(The South Korean Democratic Party, that is. Over here, the US Democrats are still helmed by people who pledge craven fealty to Wall Street, who treat the Green New Deal like a magical unicorn some six-year-old girl wants for her birthday, and whose Chosen One’s strongest selling point is that he hasn’t been accused of sexual misconduct as often as the sitting president.) 

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 To which I say: hey, you know who was ranting about the threat of climate change way back in 1977? Weird Al Yankovic, during his high school valedictory address. Not a scientist. Not a prophet. He couldn’t even look things up on the Internet (which barely even existed back then, and couldn’t be accessed by high school students in any case). A nerd with an accordion saw the writing on the wall over forty years ago—three years before Exxon officially (if not publicly) recognized the global threat of climate change in its own internal memos— and we’re supposed to feel sorry for an obscenely-profitable multinational subsidy-siphoning parasite because they never bothered to diversify over the past four decades? We’re supposed to pity the poor blue collars laboring on the rigs who had access to the same wall, could see the same writing— and who continued to shit on the tree-huggers and elect haploid brainstems like Ralph Klein and Jason Kenney? 

Fossil had all the money in the world and almost half a century to prepare. All they did was spit on those who tried to raise the alarm. Let them rot.

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I keep saying this is only the beginning. I’ve said it so often that people are starting to say “Peter Watts predicted a global virus pandemic in 2019”, as though the predictions actually were mine, as though I wasn’t just repeating what other, vastly-better-informed experts have been saying for years. But just as each new outbreak reflects an interaction of different causal variables, pandemics themselves are but one factor in a wider, even more catastrophic cascade. This isn’t just about pandemics, it’s not just about climate change: it’s about emptying the oceans and strip-mining the seabed, it’s about cutting down the world’s forests, it’s about hormone disruptors and plastics and insect pollinators cratering in fast-forward. It’s about a civilization built out of cards and supply lines that span hemispheres; an economic system so out of touch with reality that oxygen and clean water are accorded zero value, while mine tailings in a river are accorded zero cost. 

We appear to be headed towards a scenario described in Nafeez Ahmed’s recent essay “Coronavirus, synchronous failure and the global phase-shift”: a series of synchronous failures along multiple axes that will pretty much gut The Way Things Are from the inside out. What comes out the other side—whether we come out the other side—depends on how well we can transpose the lessons we’re learning during this mild, training-wheels minipocalypse.

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At the same time, I can’t help but wonder—like a myriad others— why we can respond so effectively to this relatively small immediate crisis but not to the gargantuan one that’s been swallowing the planet for generations. Even as one part of my brain serves up the same old answer— the future isn’t real to us, we’ll run like hell from the charging grizzly but we couldn’t care less about the slow boil— another part doesn’t quite buy it. Put aside the mind-boggling statistics, the three million infected and two hundred thousand dead. The gut doesn’t do numbers. It goes by immediate experience— and for most of us C19 is still something we watch from a distance, far less “real” than the countermeasures implemented to fight it. We’ve watched our cities shut down. We’re in this quarantine. So many of us are suddenly unemployed, staring destitution in the face. Next to that, how many of us even know someone who’s died of Covid-19?

I don’t for a split nanosec buy into that idiotic bullshit about The Cure Being Worse Than the Disease—but dammit, it must feel that way to the gut. And yet most of us are buckling down, against all my expectations. Most of us accept the need for drastic action. 

Could the molehill have possibly, finally, primed us to deal with the mountain?

The Coronation. Charles Eisenstein. March 2020.

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them? 

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power. 

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? Covid has interrupted what looked to be like a military regime-change operation in Venezuela – perhaps imperialist wars are also one of those things we might relinquish in a future of global cooperation. And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead. ....

Is This Sustainable? Tim Watkins, Consciousness of Sheep. April 14, 2020.

Just as the pandemic crisis has exposed the dangerous inequalities in our economy – with most of the highest paid people currently twiddling their thumbs at home, while the truly important (and usually poorly-paid) workers struggle to keep civilisation from imploding – so it has shown what we might be able to do if we treated climate change and environmental destruction more urgently.  Both revelations have led to a widespread insistence that things must not be allowed to go back to the old “normal” when this is all over.

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The assumption that the pandemic crisis is teaching us how we might change the way our economy operates is fanciful at best. Mostly it is rooted in the entirely wrong belief that it is possible to do away with all of the supposedly non-essential and frivolous consumption that we engage in while keeping the essential components. But that is not how it works.

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the critical infrastructures that we all depend upon – the electricity grid, water and sewage, road networks, etc. – are only viable because discretionary use spreads the cost of operating it sufficiently to make it affordable. If we only did the essential things, the price would be so high that it couldn’t function (and even nationalising it would require a diversion of funds via the tax system that would crush a large part of the economy). Even the oil industry itself operates only because of technically frivolous consumption. Diesel fuel is the lifeblood of the economy. But diesel is only a small fraction of what is refined from a barrel of oil. A waste product – petrol/gasoline – is by far the largest fuel to be produced. In a sense – as the response to the pandemic is demonstrating – most of us could dramatically cut back on our petrol consumption because most of our journeys – including the daily commute – have been shown to be non-essential. The problem is that our collective petrol consumption effectively subsidises the cost of diesel. So if we stopped using it, the oil industry would have the double whammy of having to increase the price of diesel (which the economy would likely be unable to afford) and to find something else to do with all that petrol (which will also likely come at a high cost).

This brings us to the fundamental error of thinking when looking at the current response to the pandemic as a model for tackling climate change; the idea that what we are doing is in any sense “sustainable.”

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In the longer-term, millions of the jobs that have been lost will not be coming back. Nor, with the economy facing a depression worse than the 1930s, is there any guarantee of replacement jobs arriving for years to come. Indeed, if the 12 years following the 2008 crash are anything to go by, the majority of over-50s workers laid off because of the pandemic will likely never be in employment (beyond the low-paid gig-economy) again.

Despite this, though, anybody who is paying attention understands that even this is not sufficient to reverse the process of global warming. The best this will achieve is a temporary dent in our emissions before economic necessity once again trumps the need to deal with the growing environmental crises. Rather than political action it will be resource shortages – themselves the result of fast declining net energy – which will impose that kind of economic contraction upon us. As Tim Morgan explained recently:

“… the coronavirus pandemic has triggered two fundamental changes that were, in reality, due to happen anyway.

“One of these is a systemic financial crisis, and the other is the realisation that an era of increasingly-cosmetic economic ‘growth’ has come to a decisive end.

“The term which best describes what happens from here on is ‘de-growth’. This is a concept that some have advocated as a positive choice, but it is, in fact, being forced upon us by a relentless deterioration in the energy-driven equation which determines prosperity.”

The current lockdown measures are only “sustainable” for as long as national currencies maintain their value. National currencies, in turn, are only sustainable for as long as the myth of a bigger and wealthier future can be sustained. That myth depends upon growth in the net energy available to the economy that ceased sometime around 2005. There is already a growing list of things that we used to be able to do that – for net energy reasons – are no longer possible; from the collapse of commercial supersonic flight at one end to the growth of such things as bicycle delivery services and hand car washes at the other. In the aftermath of the pandemic, we will likely say goodbye to many more things that we used to take for granted until such time as investors notice and either markets and asset prices collapse for good or stagflation arrives to remove the paper wealth that western economies currently run on.

There is nothing sustainable about the current lockdown. But, then again, there was nothing sustainable about the “normal” economy we were operating anyway. The future is not green growth but de-growth; not more and better, but make do and mend.

not much sense excerpting, just read the full articles!
At the zenith of complexity. Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics. April 8, 2020.

At the end of “new abnormality”. April 16.


okay, I will make a small exception; here is a small excerpt:

It doesn’t require a Pollyanna approach to understand that, just as “growth” has been a mixed blessing, de-growth offers opportunities as well as threats. 

If you really valued ‘business as usual’, were looking forward to a world of widening inequalities and worsening insecurity of employment, enjoyed the glitz of promotion-drenched consumerism, and were unconcerned about what a never-ending pursuit of “growth” might do to the environment, you might find the onset of de-growth a cause for lament.

If, on the other hand, you understand that our world is not defined by material values alone, you might see opportunities where others see only regrets.