Climate Links: Sept 2019

World 'gravely' unprepared for effects of climate crisis – report. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Sept. 10, 2019.

Trillions of dollars needed to avoid ‘climate apartheid’ but this is less than cost of inaction

Join the Global Call to #AdaptOurWorld. Global Commission on Adaptation.
Climate change is upon us and its impacts are getting more severe. We must adapt. 

World leaders from the Global Commission on Adaptation are calling on governments, businesses and local community leaders to take urgent action to advance climate adaptation solutions.

ONLY A GREEN NEW DEAL CAN DOUSE THE FIRES OF ECO-FASCISM. Naomi Klein, The Intercept. September 16 2019.


Only a Global Green New Deal Can Save the Planet. And Bernie Sanders has a plan for that. Tom Athanasiou, The Nation. Sept. 17, 2019

But the true genius of Sanders’s Green New Deal—its secret weapon for achieving the massive emissions cuts he promises—has gone unnoticed by mainstream news organizations and even most climate activists. He clearly recognizes that eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, as some climate activists have demanded, is all but impossible in an economy as enormous and energy intensive as the United States’—at least without paralyzing transportation systems, endangering food supplies, and otherwise triggering a social backlash. But rather than just endorse the 2030 deadline anyway, as some activists insist, or pretend that the science is negotiable, as most politicians do, Sanders has found a credible way around the dilemma. 

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What makes the Sanders plan special is that he accepts the hard scientific truth that steep emissions cuts are essential but he makes such cuts feasible by refusing to limit his vision on how to achieve them. Rather, he adds another hard truth: If humanity is to stabilize the global climate system, rich nations must do their fair share by going beyond domestic action and providing support for emissions reductions in poorer countries. Sanders is the first major American political figure to face the reality and scale of this necessity.

The Prospect of an Elizabeth Warren Nomination Should Be Very Worrying. Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Sept. 23, 2019.
The differences between Warren and Sanders are critically important…

... Let’s just forget Bernie, a relic of 2016, and all settle on Warren. 

Why, then, does the prospect of a Warren nomination make me deeply worried? What is it that makes me instinctively feel it would be a very bad idea? Why does it feel to me like there’s something so wrong about the “airtight argument” that’s difficult to articulate?  

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Personally, I feel that the difference between Sanders and Warren is gigantic, and that it could have substantial consequences for the future of the world. 

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But I think I know what I’m fearing. I fear this is going to be Obama all over again. 

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Perhaps I would feel less troubled if I really felt like I could trust Elizabeth Warren. 

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She has done so many things that make me suspect she won’t follow through on her radical rhetoric, or will shift to the center in a general election, or won’t be willing to fight as hard as necessary.

What If We Stopped Pretending?  Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker. September 8, 2019.

The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

Don’t bet on the UN to fix climate change – it’s failed for 30 years. Marc Hudson, The Conversation. September 20, 2019.

... amid the hype, it’s worth putting this UN summit in context against the history of 30 years of such international meetings. Is it a vain hope for 197 countries to agree on any meaningful climate action at all, especially when it involves so much money and power? 

Scientists knew from the late 1950s that carbon dioxide was building up and that this could be a problem. By the late 1970s, they knew it would be – it was just a question of when. By 1985, at a workshop of scientists in Villach, Austria, the answer became “sooner than we thought”.

Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns. Bill McKibben, The New Yorker. Sept. 17, 2019.

What if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries moved away from fossil fuels?

Amazon Employees Are Walking Out Over the Company's Huge Carbon Footprint. Lauren Kaori Gurley, vice. Sep 9, 2019.

Nearly 1,000 employees have pledged to walk out September 20 to demand the company go to zero emissions by 2030.

What It’s Like Living in One of the Hottest Cities on Earth—Where It May Soon Be Uninhabitable. Aryn Baker, TIME. September 12, 2019.


World 'losing battle against deforestation'. Mark Kinver, BBC. Sept. 12, 2019.


Climate change: Electrical industry's 'dirty secret' boosts warming. Matt McGrath, BBC. Sep. 13, 2019.


WAR ON THE WORLD. Industrialized Militaries Are a Bigger Part of the Climate Emergency Than You Know. Muraza Hussain, The Intercept. Sept. 15, 2019.


Meat is Murder. But you know that already. Mark Bittman, NYT. Sep. 17  2019.

Book review of:
WE ARE THE WEATHER
Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
By Jonathan Safran Foer




Documentary “Blowout” Follows Climate Cost of Oil Boom from Fracking to Exports. Jerri-Lynn Scofield, nakedcapitalism. Sep. 22, 2019.

Timely reminder that Trump didn’t create the climate crisis – although he’s certainly making it worse. As the RNN touts this interview, “ [t]he new film follows the U.S. oil supply chain, covering health, climate and environmental justice impacts. And it points to the president who was central to creating the current reality: Barack Obama.”

And They Made a Desert: 80 to 90% Drop in Nutrients in Food. Ian Welsh. Sept. 17, 2019.

The Industrial Era has been the Era of Locusts. We think we’re rich, but most of what has been happening is that we’re consuming resources far faster than they can be replaced. Meanwhile, we’re poisoning ourselves and the earth; shattering ecosystems which we do not know how to repair (or even understand), and altering Earth’s climate cycle ... 

This is crazed behaviour. This is the behaviour of children who have no self-control at all. Even when we know what we are doing is destructive, we keep doing it..

The super-optimists are fools. Yes, it is possible we’ll get out of this, but it’s not possible if we keep telling ourselves that the hole we’ve dug is no big deal.

Divining Comedy. Wen Stephenson, The Baffler. Sept. 5, 2019.

Amitav Ghosh’s new novel is set amid climate disaster—yet it steers toward the mythic and the comic

Amitav Ghosh: I must say, when I started writing Gun Island, it did sometimes seem to me that it was unwise to create a challenge of that kind for myself. I can’t say that it cramped me or worried me in any way, but as you know very well, once one starts thinking about this climate stuff, it just permeates everything; you can’t get away from it. It’s just so completely all around you.

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AG: You see, one of the things which is so problematic about the world, which is again unraveling, is this idea of time as a progression. You know, that time is always taking you toward, as Obama used to say, “the right side of history.” Whereas anyone who looks at the climate stuff knows that, no, that’s the one thing that you can’t say. And so what do you substitute for that? It has to be some sort of cyclical idea of time, and disaster, catastrophe. That’s a part of it, if you like.

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AG: I think one very important aspect of it would be simply to acknowledge how wrong we’ve been about everything. Just that. That we acknowledge that the dominant ideas and culture of our time have been wrong about everything.

WS: Everything?

AG: Almost everything, I would say.

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AG: Until just last year, I’d say, 2018. But even now you have prominent Democrats saying this can’t be the main issue. It can be recognized as an issue, but there are bigger issues.

WS: Right. And yet, when one really comes to grips with the climate science, one realizes that to be serious about climate is to be radical.

AG: That’s right.

WS: In fact, even revolutionary. But until very recently, the left has been almost completely absent on climate change. It’s almost as though the implications of climate science are too radical, even for radicals. What do you make of that?

AG: I think it’s very important. It’s absolutely true that the left—and you’re talking about the American left, but I can tell you that in India, the left never even took local environmental questions seriously. Even after the Bhopal tragedy.

WS: But I feel like we have to ask ourselves, do any of us really take climate politics seriously? It’s easy for me to say, so-and-so isn’t serious because they’re not radical enough. But am I radical enough? I mean, our survival is at stake. A rational response would be a truly revolutionary politics, when we consider what is actually happening, and the amount of time we have to deal with it.

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AG: I must say, I find Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion incredibly invigorating.

WS: And yet they’re only an extension of the kind of activism we’ve already seen. It’s not truly radical. It’s not revolutionary.

AG: Let me just say, I feel a lot of sympathy, especially for the people you wrote about in your book, and these young activists, my heart goes out to them. But you know, the thing that I can’t forget, because of the part of the world that I’m from, and that I think a lot of people involved in this often forget, is that this is not in the hands of the West anymore. This is going to be decided in Asia, and Africa.

WS: Absolutely. Although, if the United States and Europe were to embark on a crash program to decarbonize their economies by 2050, that would have some effect on the trajectory that China and India take.

AG: It would. But look, America’s addiction to fossil fuel energy isn’t just technological. It’s strategic. It’s through energy that America controls global strategy. If renewables could be adopted at scale, the whole strategic calculus of the world would be completely upended.

WS: Again, it’s unthinkable, right? But revolution is very often unthinkable to those in the historical moment in which it occurs. There are people right now who are absolutely certain that there’s nothing to be done, that it’s over, that all is lost, that we’re doomed. But, actually, there’s a lot of uncertainty still. We don’t know the future. We don’t know what is still possible. The human element, the political and social part, is highly uncertain. We actually don’t know.

AG: Absolutely. We don’t know.

WS: And how one responds to that uncertainty is everything.

AG: That’s right. It’s how bad it will be. This is what it’s about

Book Review: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. by Amitav Ghosh. Published 2016.

as reviewed at:
Outside imagination. Tabish Khair, The Hindu. Jul. 23, 2016.

Amitav Ghosh says climate change is a crisis not so much of nature as of culture. 

There was one negative consequence of Amitav Ghosh’s major international success as a novelist in recent years: it obviously prevented him from writing any extensive book of non-fiction. This, for admirers of In an Antique Land (1992), was a matter of serious regret. But the drought is over: The Great Derangement is here. 

Ghosh’s book is about droughts — and cyclones and floods. It is about climate change and thinking (or not being able to think) about it. This set of concerns should not surprise anyone who has read Ghosh’s recent novels, especially The Hungry Tide (2004), but it is a natural development of authorial concerns that distinguished Ghosh’s earliest works too. 

As a major cross-generic work of non-fiction, In An Antique Land was partly about those other human routes, links, stories that are erased by dominant discourses. These small human voices behind and under the Empire-Enlightenment-capitalised ‘Human’ had also concerned Ghosh in the two novels that he had published before In An Antique Land, and they were turned into a brilliant sci-fi narrative in the novel that followed: The Calcutta Chromosome (1995). What we speak is not just our speech, as one character suggested in that novel. 

With The Great Derangement, Ghosh moves from hidden human voices to the many, and even more obscured (but by no means powerless) non-human voices that echo us when we speak. And he basically asks the question: when can we learn to listen to — let alone speak with — the non-human voices of the earth that have always spoken to us as ‘humans,’ and will do so with greater urgency in an age of ‘unthinkable’ climate change? 

Like most people who try to stay abreast of an accelerating world, I occasionally read books on climate change, though probably more to assuage my conscience and pamper my intellect than because I feel that I, or the books, can make a difference. Usually, the books are full of facts, numbers and figures, which are impressive, but oddly deadening. 

Even though Ghosh’s The Great Derangement is informed by research in the area — and in related areas like the evolving fields of Dark Ecology and Non-Human Studies — he hardly uses numbers and figures, and never succumbs to academic jargon. Instead he approaches the topic with what human beings have always used to think with most naturally and powerfully: stories. 

This does not just make the book immensely readable, it also sustains Ghosh’s main axis of argument. For the book is a three-legged stool. One of the legs is the fact of climate change and our inability to think about it. The other two are its relationship to fiction and politics. 

Ghosh argues that contemporary culture has largely failed to confront climate change, partly because of the historical elision of various modernities in favour of the one monolithic paradigm of European modernity, currently being toted even by supposedly West-sceptic ideologues, such as those of Hindutva. And recent fiction has failed in particular, because of its self-definition of being ‘en avant’, not despite it. 

In this book, climate change is not viewed just as a crisis of ‘nature’, but also as “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”. Not only does Ghosh (expectedly) break with the romanticism of earlier environmentalist thinkers, he also (unexpectedly) critiques the ‘moralism’ of current ones, and offers convincing grounds for it. 

Climate change is uncanny, because, as is the case with the uncanny in Gothic fiction, it is the “mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms”. But being too powerful, grotesque, dangerous and accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, elegiac or romantic vein, climate change has not been fully confronted in literature, particularly in the novel, where the realist “concealment of its scaffolding of events” is essential. Magic realism, Ghosh shows, also fails in this context. 

At its simplest, Ghosh’s three-legged argument can be put in these words: the uncanniness of climate change is rendered even more unthinkable in contemporary culture because of historical developments that have turned both fiction (especially the novel) and politics into just “a search for personal authenticity, a journey of self-discovery” for many people. 

Ghosh illustrates this development by stitching together widely separated narratives, such as that of the construction of ‘Nature’ and the ‘Human’ in the light of Enlightenment discourses and the powerful argument that our shift to the oil economy (from a coal one) has had drastic consequences not just for climate but also for literature and politics. 

As Ghosh points out, referring to Timothy Mitchell, the economy of drill-and-pipeline oil flows is far less in the hands of large numbers of workers than coal extraction and transportation used to be. This has affected literature and politics, the latter because no matter how many people march on the streets, “they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume.” (Roy Scranton) 

This is as much a book about fiction (which Ghosh considers essential to the currently ‘unthinkable’ task of imagining other forms of human existence) and the tragedy of ‘post-political spaces’ where politics, including that of religious fundamentalism, has been “largely emptied of content in terms of the exercise of power” and, like fiction, become a forum for the secular venting of opinions, “a baring-of-the soul”. The main stream of Ghosh’s argument is replenished by minor tributaries that are interesting on their own; for instance, when he discusses the relationship of genre fiction (as science fiction) with literary fiction. Even his two-line aside on Karl Ove Knausgaard says more than entire (predictable) articles that I have read on “one of the literary icons of our age”. 

Like a river in spate, this is a book one travels on precariously and obsessively — thinking, trusting, terrified.