Topic: Obama

first published 2014; updated 2018; updated Aug. 2021.

Why I Burning my last bridge with Obama. Carey Wedler. Mar. 13, 2014.

Why I Burned My Obama Shirt. interview with Carey Wedler, via youtube. May 12, 2014.

Michelle Obama.. do me a favor, please! Nov. 7, 2013.

Obama Did NOT Kill Osama bin Laden. Paul Craig Roberts. Aug. 7, 2021.

The American People Live In a World of False Narratives

The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama. Matt Taibbi. Aug. 13, 2021.

On the road from stirring symbol of hope and change to the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism, birthday-partying Barack Obama sold us all out

...

There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.

Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.

Obama did that. He sold us out, and it’s time to start talking about the role he played in bringing about the hopeless cynical mess that is modern America.

Why “Incremental Change” Is Worse Than No Change At All. CaitOz. July 15, 2019.

President Obama was elected on the platform of hope and change. He promised big, sweeping changes, and, at the end of eight years, had continued and expanded all the most depraved foreign and domestic policies of his predecessor while killing the push for universal healthcare and creating a climate initiative which was the equivalent of a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. He now defends his near-complete lack of progress by claiming that compromising with the plutocrats and achieving a small amount of change is better than not compromising and achieving no change at all.

The World According to Ben Rhodes: Hypocrisy in Obama’s Foreign Policy. As`ad AbuKhalil, Consortium News. July 23, 2018.

Ben Rhodes’ interesting new book, The World as It is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (Random House), should be widely read not because of the wisdom or moral message it contains but because it is an unintended, damning account of liberal imperialism.

The book suffers from an acute case of self-congratulation, sanctimoniousness and hubris. The author situates himself (along with Samantha Power and the young Foreign Service officers who worked in the Obama White House) among the liberal advocates of foreign policy. He does not include Obama in this group, and the latter comes across—despite perfunctory praise—as he really is: an unprincipled politician who unfailingly subordinates moral arguments to political calculations.

Obama Goes Full Clinton Foundation With Series Of $400,000 Wall Street Speeches. zero hedge. Sep. 18, 2017.

For a man who once criticized the Clinton Foundation for taking millions of dollars in 'donations' from Wall Street "Fat Cats," Obama seems to be in a rush to replicate the lucrative Clinton scam via his very own Obama Foundation. ... since leaving office in January, Obama has already collected millions in speaking fees from the same Wall Street banks that may have cost Hillary her shot at the White House. 

... 

Now all he needs to do is use his foundation to raise money for Hurricane Irma victims in Barbuda, use that money to hire his buddies to rebuild the island and then sit back and wait for the kickbacks to roll in... then the transition to the Clinton Foundation will be complete.

Obama’s Just the Enemy And Always Was. Ian Welsh. Sep 18, 2017.

Obama’s just an evil man. He has always been an evil man. He has spent his time since office hobknobbing with billionaires and getting rich off the very people he helped bail out as president, and whom he refused to prosecute despite their clear crimes. 

He’s just a bad man. He was never left wing in any sense, and he’d rather see vast amounts of cruelty than see any sort of socialist anywhere near power.

Ilhan Omar: Obama's just a prety face who got away with murder. NYPost. Mar. 8, 2019.

If Progressives Don’t Wake Up to How Awful Obama Was, Their Movement Will Fail. Caitlin Johnstone, Observer. May 2, 2017.

... the answer, of course, is America. That’s what America is now. The man who continued and expanded all of Bush’s most evil policies, created a failed state in Libya, exponentially expanded the civilian-slaughtering US drone program which Chomsky calls “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” to unprecedented levels, facilitated the Orwellian expansion of the US surveillance state while prosecuting more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined, and used charm and public sympathy to evade the drastic environmental policy changes we’ll need to avert climate disaster and lull the progressive movement into a dead sleep for eight years now gets paid nearly half a million dollars an hour to continue bolstering the exploitative corporatist nightmare he’s dedicated his life to. 

... 

I can understand why pro-establishment liberals are defending this man; he stands for everything they stand for. If all you stand for is vapid tribalism and vanity politics and you are willing to sacrifice integrity along with economic and social justice and the lives of other people’s kids in corporatist wars overseas in order to feel like you’re on the right team, Obama is your man. But if you’re an actual, real progressive and not just a latte-sipping NPR listener with a sense of self-righteousness and a pro-choice bumper sticker, you’ve got no business regarding Obama with anything but disgust.

... 

When you’re dealing with a government that in 2013 gave itself the legal right to use media psy-ops on its own citizens, you can’t afford to have any stray strands of sympathy laying around out there. The war we’re fighting against the oligarchy is first and foremost a media war, and we may be certain that any sympathies progressives maintain toward their establishment oppressors will be exploited. By letting ourselves really see Obama for the vicious ecocidal warmongering corporatist that he is and letting the resulting disgust wash through us, we are inoculating ourselves against sympathy for him and everyone like him. That disgust will serve as a kind of psychological gag reflex that rescues us from swallowing any more of their bullshit.

Obama Starts to Cash In. Ian Welsh. Mar. 1, 2017.

This is why I don’t get very worked up about Trump’s conflicts of interest. They are real, but the only difference is that he’s getting paid now as opposed to later. Politicians exist to do what rich people want, Trump is only cutting out the middle man and the partial delay. 

This is an important point, and I want to encourage you to read this longer article on how politicians are paid by rich people to fuck over ordinary people. It’s not about donations for elections. 

Obama continued the trend, which has gotten worse for decades, of the rich getting more and more of all the gains of the economy. He did not try, in any way, to reverse it. And that’s because he knew he was being paid to funnel money to the rich. That was his job, he did it, and now he is getting his reward.

Obama’s Department of Justice’s Prime Job Is to Immunize Rich Wrongdoers. Ian Welsh. Oct. 8, 2016.

This is deliberate government policy and, yes, it comes from the top, from Obama. 

Obama and his DOJ engage in what should be considered routine criminal behavior, as far as I’m concerned: Helping criminals get away with their actions is itself criminal and that’s even before we talk about his actions in Libya, and so on. 

Scum. Absolute scum. People die when lifesaving drugs are raised to high prices. This is is immunizing negligent homicide. 

I want to be real clear, corporate criminals generally do more actual harm than the worst serial killer. 

Meanwhile, “liberals” act like Obama’s the greatest president ever, even though he left the US economy far worse for most Americans, was a warmonger, and engaged in the largest immunization of corporate crime in at least 90 years. 

He talks pretty but the man is scum. Scum to the bone. He took Bush’s America and regularized most of it and made some parts worse: kicking out more Hispanics, being far worse on whistleblowers, continuing to sign continuations of the AUMF and so on. 

That Obama is scum does not mean, for the less bright, or more partisan, that he is not better than certain alternatives. Beelzebub being the lesser evil to Satan doesn’t mean you want to sup with him. 

Scum.

I Am So Happy About Gay Marriage Being Legal in the US. Ian Welsh. Jun 26, 2015.

Obama, as a rule, is happy to give you things that the oligarchy doesn’t mind. They don’t, overall, mind gay rights. A large chunk of the oligarchy wanted Obamacare (it was and is a huge subsidy to insurance and pharma companies, among others). There is a reason the public option was never seriously considered by Obama; it was a potential threat to insurance companies. 

None of this is to say Obama is all bad, he certainly isn’t. But he is not your friend if you want widespread economic prosperity, and he never has been. Nor will he ever be. Nor, to point out what should be obvious, is Hilary Clinton (also not always for marriage equality). 

You set yourself up for immense hurt when you trust the wrong people with political power and it is important not to engage in revisionism about what is, after all, very recent history.

The Obamacare Fiasco. Ian Welsh. Nov 14, 2013.

When you are dealing with bad people, you must assume bad faith; bad behavior. You must plan for it. The best option was always Medicare-for-all (and I was told by at least one House staffer that they could pass it if they really wanted to and were willing to go nuclear.) The problem with Obama has always been this sickening need to be one of the boys. He appears to genuinely like and genuinely admire the people who have “made it” in this society—people like Jamie Dimon and the people who run insurance and drug companies. He thinks you can make deals with these people, and make sure everyone wins. 

You can’t. These people are the most successful parasites ever produced by our nasty form of sociopathic capitalism. You can only give them what they want or you can rip them from the body politic, so they stop sucking the blood from the host they’re killing. 

So the insurance companies have bitten the hand that fed them. Obama gave them everything they wanted and made sure nothing of importance they didn’t want (like a public option) was in the bill. Now they’re chomping and chewing, destroying what remains of his presidency. 

He has reaped as he sowed.

If you’re pro-Obama you’re an idiot, on the payroll, or evil. Ian Welsh. Aug. 4, 2011.

Look folks, at this point, Obama has made possible what a Republican president like McCain couldn’t do. What a Republican president like Bush failed to do: he is gutting social security and Medicare. 

Americans would have been better off with McCain because the Democratic party would not have allowed what just happened, and the GOP would have just passed McCain’s debt limit increase. 

This doesn’t mean the next Republican president won’t be worse than Obama, he probably will. But he will be worse in large part because of Obama, because Obama has institutionalized Bush’s constitutional order and taken it even further, in creating the so-called Super Congress to end run the democratic process. He will be worse because Obama, by legitimizing “deficits are evil” and delegitimizing civilian Keynesian stimulus (by screwing it up, which I predicted the day he announced his botched stimulus bill) he has made the only possible Keynesian stimulus a military one. At some point President Teabag will realize that the only thing which will provide enough help to the economy to get him reelected is a new, even bigger war.

Obama isn’t about compromise. Ian Welsh. Dec. 3, 2010.

People, Obama is not and never has been a left winger. Nor is he a Nixonian or Eisenhower Republican, that would put him massively to the left of where he is and to the left of the majority of the Democratic party. Instead his a Reaganite, something he told people repeatedly. 

Until folks get it through their skulls that Obama is not and never was a liberal, a progressive or left wing in any way, shape or form they are going to continue misdiagnosing the problem. That isn’t to say Obama may or may not be a wimp, but he always compromises right, never left and his compromises are minor. He always wanted tax cuts. He gave away the public option in private negotiations near the beginning of the HCR fight, not the end. He never even proposed an adequate stimulus bill. He bent arms, hard, to get TARP through. 

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. 

... 

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security.

Obama's Whitewash. Arthur Silber, Power of Narrative. March 19, 2008.

Obama states: "I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy." What Obama has "condemned, in unequivocal terms" is the truth -- the truth that is forbidden by the fictions that feed the myth of American exceptionalism. Obama has fully embraced the lies at the heart of mythologized America -- an embrace that is underscored by his inclusion of this phrase: "a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." In this manner, Obama confirms that he will continue our policy of global interventionism including our endless interventions in the Middle East, which have been unceasing ever since World War I. Obama embraces all the lies that support that policy, and he will challenge none of them. (See "Songs of Death" for many more details concerning Obama's embrace of this murderous policy.) 

Almost every politician lies, and most politicians lie repeatedly. Yet in one sense, Obama's speech is exceptional, rare and unique -- but not for any of the reasons offered by Obama's uncritical, mindless adulators. It is exceptional for this reason: it is rare that a candidate will announce in such stark, comprehensive terms that he will lie about every fact of moment, about every aspect of our history that affects the crises of today and that has led to them, about everything that might challenge the mythological view of America. But that is what Obama achieved with this speech. It may be a remarkable achievement -- a remarkable and detestable one, and one that promises endless destruction in the future, both here and abroad. 

Is that what many Americans want? Tragically, the answer appears to be yes. Truth must be destroyed, no matter how many lives and how much suffering are required. Americans will accept anything else -- war, genocide, economic collapse, further terrorist attacks in the U.S. -- but the truth must be denied.

8 ways Obama sucks on climate. Ben Adler, grist. Feb 17, 2015.

The new conventional wisdom among the political class is that President Obama is doing everything he can without the cooperation of Congress to fight climate change. His administration set higher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. It has proposed the first-ever regulations on carbon emissions from power plants, and on methane leakage from oil and gas wells and pipelines. He got China on board with a plan to limit emissions, potentially paving the way for an international climate agreement later this year in Paris. Obama feeds this perception with his public statements, such as emphasizing the importance of climate change in his State of the Union address and musing to Vox.com about how the media fails to cover climate change with the urgency of other national security threats. But many of the administration’s moves, including a string of recent actions by federal agencies under Obama’s control, show this conventional wisdom to be false.

Why “Incremental Change” Is Worse Than No Change At All. CaitOz. July 15, 2019.

Another reason why the so-called “centrists” pose such a grave threat to our world is because their platform of slow, moderate, incremental change is actually worse than no change at all.

President Obama was elected on the platform of hope and change. He promised big, sweeping changes, and, at the end of eight years, had continued and expanded all the most depraved foreign and domestic policies of his predecessor while killing the push for universal healthcare and creating a climate initiative which was the equivalent of a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. He now defends his near-complete lack of progress by claiming that compromising with the plutocrats and achieving a small amount of change is better than not compromising and achieving no change at all.

...

In both the Obama and the Trump administrations, voters ordered a box of hope and change, received a package labeled “slow, incremental change”, then opened it up and found no meaningful change whatsoever.

This pattern has been repeating for years.

Topic: Climate Change Depression

originally posted Sept 2016; most recently updated January July 2019. Dec 2020


F*ck That: An Honest Meditation

Some fruits of meditation. Ian Welsh.

2020 addition:

Hiding in Plain Sight. Jonathan Foley. Dec. 5, 2020.

[Dr. Jonathan Foley is a renowned climate scientist, sustainability expert, educator, and public speaker. He is also executive director of Project Drawdown — the world’s leading resource for climate solutions. His work focuses on finding solutions to sustain the climate, ecosystems, and natural resources we all depend on.

Foley’s work has led him to become a trusted advisor to governments, foundations, non-profits, and business leaders around the world. He and his colleagues have made major contributions to our understanding of climate change, ecosystems, and the sustainability of the world’s resources. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including many highly cited works in Nature and Science. He is among the top 1 percent most-cited scientists in the world.]

I’ve been dealing with depression my entire life. It’s been a miserable experience, and it’s taken years to learn how to manage it. But one thing that helped was learning that many people I admire are struggling with depression too. So, despite the risk of going public, I’m going to share my experience, in hopes that it might help someone else.

... In the public sphere, I have been deeply moved by Dr. Susanna Harris, a brilliant young biologist and science communicator who shared her story. I was blown away by Dr. Santa Ono, the President of the University of British Columbia, who now openly discusses his history with mental illness. I am also deeply moved by the books of Matt Haig, who makes depression relatable, and the work of radio personality and author, John Moe.

Articles:

The Best Medicine for My Climate Grief. Peter Kalmus, Yes!Magazine. Aug. 9, 2018.

A climate scientist talks to a psychologist about coping with the crushing stress related to climate change. Here’s what he learned.

... To think daily about climate change and any of its dire implications can be a crushing psychological burden. Each of us is just one mammal, with all our mammalian limitations—we get tired, sad, irritated, sick, overwhelmed—and the climate crisis wields the force of 8 billion humans with infrastructure, corporations, capital, politics, and imaginations heavily invested in burning fossil fuel.

“It’s important to remember that inaction is rarely about a lack of concern or care, but is so much more complex,” Lertzman said. “Namely, that we westerners are living in a society that is still deeply entrenched in the very practices we now know are damaging and destructive. This creates a very specific kind of situation—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Unless we know how to work with this dissonance, we will continue to come up against resistance, inaction, and reactivity.” 

I’ve been working through my own climate dissonance since 2006, back when the atmospheric carbon concentration was just 380 parts per million. That year I reached a tipping point in my own awareness of what was happening and what it meant. It was challenging to carry that knowledge when no one close to me seemed to care. But, said Lertzman, “we need to be careful not to make assumptions about other people’s relationships with these issues. Even if people may not be showing it, research shows again and again that it’s still on their minds and a source of discomfort or distress.” If she’s right, maybe the sea change in public action we desperately need is closer than it seems. It would certainly be helpful if we could talk openly about how climate change is making us feel.

It’s the End of the World as They Know It. The distinct burden of being a climate scientist. David Corn, Mother Jones. July 8, 2019.

So what is it like to be cursed with foreknowledge that others ignore? Peter Kalmus, who received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard and Columbia, respectively, spent about a decade working in astrophysics. He then moved to ecological forecasting based on satellite data, and something shifted for him. “Studying earth science and thinking about climate change is a totally different ballgame than thinking about astrophysics,” he says. “Astrophysics was pure science. I was looking for gravitational waves. It had no implication for the possible collapse of human civilization.” But the unrelenting momentum of climate change does. “I’m always thinking about it,” he says. “That can be a burden. Whenever friends talk about flying off to vacation, I feel compelled to point out the large carbon cost to flying. I’d like to take a vacation from thinking about it. I’m not sure that is psychologically possible.”

... 

Sarah Myhre, a former senior research associate at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography, experiences “a profound level of grief on a daily basis because of the scale of the crisis that is coming, and I feel I’m doing all I can but it’s not enough,” she says. “I don’t have clinical depression. I have anxiety exacerbated by the constant background of doom and gloom of science

... 

Jacquelyn Gill, a paleontologist at the University of Maine who co-hosts a podcast on climate change called Warm Regards, says she’s “not depressed but angry, all the time, and anger can be empowering or debilitating. I swing between both. Being constantly angry is exhausting.” But, she adds, it takes a certain resilience to be a scientist in America: “There are so few jobs, so few grants. You’re always dealing with rejection. You have to have a built-in ability to say ‘fuck it.’”

... 

Katharine Wilkinson, who has a Ph.D. in geography and the environment, is vice president for communication and engagement at Project Drawdown, a group of scientists and activists that assembles proposed climate change solutions. She makes a distinction between denialism and bystanderism, which takes the form of people saying “they care about it” but not engaging in meaningful action: “That’s when I want to shake people and say, ‘You know how little time we have?’” She has noticed that almost everyone in her line of work seems “to have one dark emotion that is dominant. For some, it’s anger or rage. For me, it’s deep grief—having eyes wide open to what is playing out in our world, and we have a lukewarm response to it. There is no way for me not to have a broken heart most days.” 

For several years, Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist-turned journalist, has written about his own efforts to contend with climate change–induced depression. “I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night,” he wrote last year. “I can’t remember how long this has been happening, but it’s been quite a while, and it’s only getting worse.

... 

Michael Mann, the well-known climate scientist who has spent years clashing with climate deniers, observes that “colleagues who have convinced themselves we have crossed a tipping point—physical or political—and we won’t avert catastrophic climate change clearly become depressed.”

Uncovering the Mental Health Crisis of Climate Change: How to move people from apathy to action. Jeremy Deaton, Nexus Media. July 7, 2018.

The Threat Of Climate Change Brings Both Anxiety & Apathy.

The young man believed he only had five years to live. “Not because he was sick,” said Kate Schapira, “not because anything was wrong with him, but because he believed that life on Earth would be impossible for humans.”

The sign on Schapira’s booth read: CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING 5¢ THE DOCTOR IS IN. Time to earn her pennies.

On that muggy June day, she had set up shop in Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Schapira is not a trained therapist — a fact she makes clear to visitors — but she is happy to chat with anyone suffering from anxiety about climate change. “A lot of what I do is listen and ask questions,” she said.

Over the coming decades, rising temperatures will fuel natural disasters that are more deadly than any seen in human history, destabilizing nations and sending millions to their death. Experts say that we need to prepare for a hotter, less hospitable world by building sea walls, erecting desalination plants and engineering crops that can withstand punishing heat and drought, but few have considered the defenses we need to erect in our minds. Some, like Shapira, have called for more talking, more counseling to process our grief. But will that be enough? Climate change will do untold violence to life on this planet, and we have remarkably few tools to deal with its emotional cost.

... 

The tall, sharply dressed man said humans were a cancer on the Earth. He said that he resented his parents for raising him to be “super hedonistic, just monstrously gaining things.” He said he had grown nihilistic, that he wanted to take up chain smoking and die a slow death. When Schapira asked if he was angry at his family, the young man replied, “I love my family. It’s so hard to know that you only have five years left to love people.” 

The man was undoubtedly troubled, his vision of the future decidedly more apocalyptic than the one offered by science. But, his anxieties were real and, perhaps, understandable given the dire predictions of climatologists. While none believes human civilization will crumble in the next five years, the forecasts get hazier 30, 40 or 50 years down the road. 

If we continue pumping out heat-trapping carbon pollution at the current rate, temperatures will rise by 4 degrees C by 2100, a level of warming climate scientist Kevin Anderson has called “incompatible with an organized global community.” As David Wallace-Wells explained in his bracing account of the terrors of climate change for New York magazine, “Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.” 

Climate change promises to take a massive toll, not just on nature or human society, but on our minds.

... 

Lertzman explained that to grasp the full implications of climate change is daunting — to recognize our part in it all the more so. To fire up a car or step onto an airplane is to defile the very air we breathe. People cope by disavowing their role in climate change. “You’re not denying something, but you are choosing not to know,” Lertzman said. “There rarely is genuine apathy,” she added. “What shows up as apathy is a defense mechanism. It’s a way for people to cope with the very complicated feelings that come up around these issues.” 

Like Lertzman, other mental health professionals have warned of the mental and emotional impact of climate change. Psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren coined the term “pre-traumatic stress disorder” to describe the pervasive dread felt by many scientists, advocates and journalists. In the years ahead, she said, the problem will only grow more widespread. 

... 

Climate depression is for real. Just ask a scientist. Madeleine Thomas, Grist. Oct. 28, 2014.

“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Parmesan is quoted saying in the National Wildlife Federation’s 2012 report, “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System is Not Adequately Prepared.” 

“It’s gotten to be so depressing that I’m not sure I’m going to go back to this particular site again,” she says, referring to an ocean reef she has studied since 2002, “because I just know I’m going to see more and more of it dead, and bleached, and covered with brown algae.” 

Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C. — and co-author of the National Wildlife Federation’s report — calls this emotional reaction “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” a term she coined to describe the mental anguish that results from preparing for the worst, before it actually happens. 

“It’s an intense preoccupation with thoughts we cannot get out of our minds,” Van Susteren says.

The psychological effects of global warming on the United States. And why the U.S. mental healthcare system is not adequately prepared. National Wildlife Federation. Feb. 2012.


A talking cure for climate-based depression? It worked for Renee Lertzman. Heather Smith, Grist. Feb. 18, 2016.


Climate change is wreaking havoc on our mental health, experts say. Tyler Hamilton, The Star. Feb. 28, 2016.


It’s Time to Talk About Ecological Grief. Michaela Cavanagh, UnDark. Jan. 10, 2019. 

As climate change marches forward, it will exact a mounting, tangible toll on our collective mental health and productivity.

What Mary Oliver can teach us about dealing with climate grief. Eric Holthaus, grist. Jan. 22, 2019.


Dancing with Ulysses. Albert Bates. Feb. 9, 2019.


Reports:

Beyond Storms and Droughts: The Psychological Impacts of Climate Change. American Psychological Association.

Psychology and global climate change. APA.

Hope, despair and transformation: Climate change and the promotion of mental health and wellbeing.  Jessica Fritze et al, International Journal of Mental Health Systems. June 2008.

Sites:

Active Hope. How to face the mess we're in without going crazy.

Psychologists for social responsibility. Program on climate change, sustainability and psychology.

Transformational resilience. The Resource Innovation Group.

Ecological Buddhism. A Buddhist response to global warming.


Videos:

Joanna Macy and the Great Turning.

Mental Health and Climate Change. TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin. via youtube. Dec. 4, 2018.

Burnout and Despair: Studying the Climate. The Agenda. Jan. 15, 2019.


Conferences:

ITRC Conference To Highlight How Building Build Human Resilience for Climate Change Can Increase Wellbeing & Cut Emissions!
Nov 3-4, 2016. Washington, DC.

Topic: Carbon Bubble / Stranded Assets

originally posted Apr. 2016; updated with new links Jan. 2020

Must read:
Global warming's terrible new math. Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone. July 19, 2012.
read the whole thing, but here are a few brief excerpts:

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers: 

The First Number: 2° Celsius
...
The Second Number: 565 Gigatons
...
The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons
...
So far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West. Even in rich countries, small reductions in emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers
...
what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.
...
There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the question "How high should the price of carbon be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground."
..
The three numbers I've described are daunting – they may define an essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can burn, and we know who's planning to burn more.

Carbon Asset Risk: From Rhetoric to Action. Ceres. October, 2015.

Carbon Asset Risk: Discussion Framework. World Resources Institute and UNEP.

The $2 trillion stranded assets danger zone: How fossil fuel firms risk destroying investor returns. Carbon Tracker Initiative. November 2015.


Explaining the need to limit cumulative emissions of CO2. TrillionthTonne.
little online calculator allows you to adjust a couple of factors and see projected results

Estimated cumulative emissions from fossil fuel use, cement production and land-use change since industrialization began are 599.67 billion tonnes of carbon.
Cumulative emissions matter, because the total amount of carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere is limited if we are to avoid dangerous climate change.

The limit depends on:
How much warming should we expect per tonne of carbon released into the atmosphere?
(choose between 5 estimates, from optimistic to cautious to pessimistic)
At what level do you want global temperatures to peak?
(choose between 2°C, 3°C or 4°C, which they [debatably] label as moderate warming, substantial warming and dangerous warming)

e.g.

If temperatures rise by 3°C per trillion tonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere, to avoid more than 2°C of warming we need to limit total cumulative emissions to below 666,666,666,666 tonnes of carbon.
Based on emission trends over the past 20 years, we expect the 666,666,666,666th tonne will be emitted on Tue, 07 Jul 2020
We would not release the 666,666,666,666th tonne if emissions were to start falling now at 13.28% per year

The carbon bubble reality check. David Hone. Climate Change Advisor For Shell. May 3, 2013.

The idea of the “carbon bubble” is based on a concept.. that there is a finite limit to the “atmospheric space” for CO2 while still ensuring that warming does not rise above 2 °C. That limit is [estimated to be] about one trillion tonnes of carbon. 

The issue of the bubble arises because the combined proven oil, gas and coal reserves currently on the books of fossil fuel companies (and governments in the case of NOCs) will produce far more than this amount of CO2 when consumed. This implies that in a world where the 2 °C limit is imposed and achieved, most of the future value generation of the companies involved will never be realized and therefore investors in them today are looking at a financial bubble that may well burst in front them.

Fossil Fuels’ Dirty Secret: Climate Action or Not, Things Look Bad. Jeremy Deaton, Nexus Media. July 3, 2018.

“There is no walking out from the energy transition.” 

Ten years ago Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes said he wasn’t worried about digital streaming. “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix,” he said. Blockbuster’s head of digital strategy echoed this sentiment, asserting the company was “strategically better positioned than almost anybody out there.” Not long after, Blockbuster went the way of the butter churn, while Netflix became a household fixture. Today, the movie streaming service is worth almost as much as Disney. 

To most people, that’s a funny story about the hubris of a technological dinosaur. Imagine, however, if Blockbuster had been a cornerstone of the U.S. economy, that millions of people had been employed in the manufacture and sales of Jurassic Park DVDs, that there were hundreds of cities dotting the South and Midwest where brick-and-mortar video rental was the only job in town. Then, the collapse of Blockbuster wouldn’t be so funny. It would be a catastrophe. 

This, experts warn, could be the future of fossil fuels. 

Wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles are getting cheaper and more abundant by the day, which is hurting demand for coal, oil and natural gas. As demand falls for conventional fuels, so will prices. Companies that laid claim to coal mines or oil wells, won’t be able to turn a profit by digging up that fuel. They will default on their loans, pushing banks to the brink of failure. Prices are likely to crash before 2035, costing the global economy as much as $4 trillion, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2 °C. Christophe McGlade & Paul Ekins. Nature volume 517, pages 187–190. Jan. 8, 2015.

Abstract 

Policy makers have generally agreed that the average global temperature rise caused by greenhouse gas emissions should not exceed 2 °C above the average global temperature of pre-industrial times1. It has been estimated that to have at least a 50 per cent chance of keeping warming below 2 °C throughout the twenty-first century, the cumulative carbon emissions between 2011 and 2050 need to be limited to around 1,100 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (Gt CO2)2,3. However, the greenhouse gas emissions contained in present estimates of global fossil fuel reserves are around three times higher than this2,4, and so the unabated use of all current fossil fuel reserves is incompatible with a warming limit of 2 °C. 

Here we use a single integrated assessment model that contains estimates of the quantities, locations and nature of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves and resources, and which is shown to be consistent with a wide variety of modelling approaches with different assumptions5, to explore the implications of this emissions limit for fossil fuel production in different regions. Our results suggest that, globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 per cent of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 in order to meet the target of 2 °C. We show that development of resources in the Arctic and any increase in unconventional oil production are incommensurate with efforts to limit average global warming to 2 °C. Our results show that policy makers’ instincts to exploit rapidly and completely their territorial fossil fuels are, in aggregate, inconsistent with their commitments to this temperature limit. Implementation of this policy commitment would also render unnecessary continued substantial expenditure on fossil fuel exploration, because any new discoveries could not lead to increased aggregate production.

Billions In Worthless Assets Plague The Oil & Gas Industry. Nick Cunningham, OilPrice.com. Jan. 8, 2020.

Investors, pension funds and companies need to get ahead of the financial risk from climate change, as many fossil fuel assets risk becoming worthless.

“We can’t have a financial sector that ignores an issue, and then all of a sudden has to deal with it,” Mark Carney, the outgoing Governor of the Bank of England, said in a recent interview with BBC. Carney is referring to the fact that current plans by fossil fuel companies, and investors who own assets in those companies, are to continue on a path that puts the world on a trajectory of 3.7-3.8 degrees of warming, “far above the 1.5 degrees that governments say they want and that people are demanding.”

Government action to limit emissions, however, would obviously disrupt that trajectory. As a result, the valuation of so many assets will remain at a certain level, until all of a sudden there is a massive repricing of companies and entire sectors. “How many of those assets that exist today are actually going to be stranded?”

Carney has lamented that the predicament amounts to a “tragedy of the horizon,” which refers to the fact that the problem of climate change is a long-term one, which makes it difficult to convince investors and companies to act. The problem is, once the real-world climate problem becomes impossible to ignore, there will be draconian policies put in place. And, in financial terms, once it becomes impossible to ignore, a sharp loss in value becomes impossible to avoid.

Topic: Green New Deal

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


The Green New Deal: A Fight for Our Lives. Naomi Klein, New York Review of Books. Sept. 17, 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. 

... 

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 Hope of the Green New Deal. Roger Blanchard, Resilience. Sept. 25, 2019.

One individual who is more realistic about what needs to be done – but will not be done – to reduce CO2 emissions is the prominent climate scientist Kevin Anderson. Approximately 6 years ago he stated that the world had to reduce CO2 emissions by 10%/year starting immediately to prevent a worst-case scenario in terms of warming. He was very likely right about that, but at the time I stated the world would not do what he said needed to be done.  As it has turned out, CO2 emissions have increased since then not decreased.

Kevin is now stating that we have to fundamentally change the way we live.  Specifically we need to get away from a materialist lifestyle.  The problem is that in the U.S., and much of the world now, we have a hedonic lifestyle which most Americans worship.  Thus, we have lots of magical thinking when it comes to addressing the global warming issue and we prefer to kick the can down the road and test the worst-case scenario.

To be clear, those who deny the conclusions of climate science are partaking in magical thinking because the science is overwhelming.  As well, those who believe that renewables will largely or wholly replace fossil fuels are partaking in magical thinking because it’s based upon nothing more than naïve optimism.  The fundamental problem we face is that there are too many people consuming too much fossil fuels and producing too much CO2.  Either we will correct the problem or nature will correct the problem.

A Serious Green New Deal Would Take Up One-Third of the Economy—Are We Ready for That? Yves Smith, nakedcapitalism. Feb. 2, 2019.

I have to confess to being not keen about various Green New Deal proposals. They feed the idea that we can largely preserve our lifestyles and still make a big enough reduction in greenhouse gas output soon enough to ward off catastrophic outcomes. 

There are in my mind, three fallacies here:

1. The fastest and most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas output is radical conservation. The urgency of the challenge means this approach needs to be top of the list. Every year more of status quo or not much different is more greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere. No one is proposing that we even take measures of the sort imposed in the oil crisis, like lowering speed limits and requiring businesses to set their thermostats to 67 in the winter and 77 in the summer. If we were serious, we’d have to be willing to bankrupt the airlines by forcing 90% reductions in flight levels and outlaw private jets.

2. Building green infrastructure has an energy cost, and those costs are seldom incorporated (like the greenhouse gas cost of mining and delivering materials for production of various inputs). They are also not factoring in that some of the materials that are important in current “green” technologies don’t exist in sufficient quantity to satisfy anticipated needs (Jack Lifton has written extensively about lithium). And some materials are costly in environmental terms. See, for example: 

Critical minerals scarcity could threaten renewable energy future. Stanford

We may face a huge shortage of essential raw materials stiffling green energy if governments don’t step up their game ZME Science

 3. While Green New Deal approaches would be valuable in conjunction with radical conservation, they aren’t sufficient on their own, if nothing else because they will take too long to be implemented when time is of the essence. And they have a tendency to perpetuate the idea that there will be no or little sacrifice needed in cutting carbon output levels.

People accepted rationing and other forms of sacrifice at times of war. I’d take the Green New Deal people a lot more seriously if they firmly opposed US military activity as a source of greenhouse gases and also opposed non-essential, energy costly technology planned obsolescence schemes like 5G.

let's declare war on climate change:  “What You Need To Know About The $22 Trillion National Debt”: The Alternative SHORT Interview. Eric Tymoigne. Feb. 17, 2019.


Jobs, the Environment, and a Planet in Crisis. Unions vs. Environmentalists or Unions and Environmentalists?  Aviva Chomsky, via TomDispatch. Aug. 6, 2019.

When it comes to heat, extreme weather, wildfires, and melting glaciers, the planet is now in what the media increasingly refers to as “record” territory, as climate change’s momentum outpaces predictions. In such a situation, in a country whose president and administration seem hell-bent on doing everything they conceivably can to make matters worse, the Green New Deal (GND) seems to offer at least a modest opening to a path forward.

You know, the resolution introduced this February in the House of Representatives by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Edward Markey (D-MA). Unsurprisingly, the proposal has been roundly attacked by the right. But it’s stirred up some controversy on the left as well. You might imagine that labor unions and environmental organizations would be wholeheartedly for a massive federal investment in good jobs and a just transition away from fossil fuels. But does organized labor actually support or oppose the Green New Deal? What about environmental organizations? If you’re not even sure how to answer such questions, you’re not alone.

That 14-page resolution calls for “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.” Its purpose: to reduce U.S. carbon emissions to net zero within a decade, while guaranteeing significant numbers of new jobs and social welfare to American workers. Read it and you’ll find that it actually attempts to overcome historical divisions between the American labor and environmental movements by linking a call for good jobs and worker protection to obvious and much-needed environmental goals.

In the process, the GND proposal goes impressively far beyond the modest goals of the Paris Climate Accords and other international agreements. It supports specific, enforceable targets for bringing climate change under control, while drawing clear connections between social, labor, and environmental rights. Acknowledging in blunt terms the urgency of making systemic change on a rapidly warming planet, it calls for the kind of national mobilization Americans haven’t experienced since the end of the Second World War. Described that way, it sounds like something both the labor and environmental movements would naturally support without a second thought. There is, however, both a history of mistrust and real disagreement over issues, which both movements are now grappling with. And the media is doing its part by exaggerating labor’s opposition to the proposal, while ignoring what environmental organizations have to say.

One Green New Deal controversy focuses on the future role of fossil fuels in that plan. A number of environmental organizations believe that such energy sources have no place in our future, that they need to stay in the ground, period. They cite climate science and the urgent need to move rapidly and drastically to eliminate carbon emissions as the basis for such a conclusion. As it happens, the Green New Deal avoids directly challenging the fossil-fuel industry. In fact, it doesn’t even use the term “fossil fuels.”

From another perspective, some unions hope that new technologies like carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) will make those fuels more efficient and far cleaner. If the addition of carbon to the atmosphere could be reduced significantly or offset in some fashion, while humanity still burned natural gas, oil, or even coal, they say, jobs in those sectors could be preserved. And the unions have other concerns as well. They tend, for instance, to look skeptically on the GND’s promises of a “just transition” for displaced fossil-fuel workers like coal miners, given the devastation that has fallen on workers and their communities when industries have shut down in the past. They also fear that, without accompanying trade protections, polluting industries will simply export their emissions rather than reduce them.

Being more of a statement of purpose than an elaborated plan, the Green New Deal is short on both detail and answers when it comes to such issues. The actual roadmap to achieving its goals, the proposal states, “must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses.” Both unions and environmental organizations are already mobilizing to make sure their voices are part of the process.

The right wing was quick to mockingly publicize the Green New Deal not just as thoroughly unrealistic but as utterly un-American. ...

yup, because what's truly American is all that's wrong with our unsustainable civilization.

Is There An Upper Limit On Human Self-Deceptive Bullshit? Dave Cohen, Deline of the Empire. Feb. 7, 2019.

So, even a non-binding resolution expressing humanity's positive but delusional hopes and fantasies is unlikely to make it through the U.S. Congress.

Topic: Geoengineering

first posted April 2017; updated June 2019


A Disappointing New Problem With Geo-Engineering. Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic. Aug. 8, 2018.

Dimming the sky won’t save the world’s harvests. 

Geoengineering is no closer to working. Tim Radford, Climate News Network. Oct 30, 2018.

Scientists have established a strategic error in one version of the climate change debate: they still say geoengineering is no guarantee of a cooler world. 

There is no practical technology available to cool the Earth, they say – except the obvious one of ceasing to stoke the fires with fossil fuels. 

One new study looks at all the tested and yet-to-be-explored mechanisms for either lowering global temperatures by reducing sunlight, or by harnessing new and old ways to capture the extra carbon dioxide released by two centuries of industrial growth. 

And, the authors report, the sure way to reduce the dangers of global warming and keep the planetary temperature increase to 2°C or lower by 2100, is to switch to wind and solar energy sources and drastically cut fossil fuel emissions. 

A second, separate study looks closely at an often-proposed form of geoengineering – the injection of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to intercept sunlight and shade the planet – and delivers a cautious verdict.

“None of the proposed technologies can realistically be implemented on a global scale in the next few decades”

For Geoengineers, a Scientific Existential Crisis. Dave Levitan, UnDark. Jan. 16, 2019.

Technofixes for the climate crisis are no one’s first choice. What is it like to study something you wish would disappear?

A Best-Case Scenario for Putting Carbon Back Underground. Holly Jean Buck. Science for the People. Special Issue, Summer 2018.

If we buy into thinking of carbon removal technologies as substitutes for reducing carbon output, then industrial interests have already won: they have set the narrative and the framing, where carbon capture exists so that they can continue to emit. But we should demand more from these technologies. Industrial carbon capture technologies could instead be used as an extension of decarbonization—mitigation to get us to zero, and carbon removal going a step further to take emissions negative and address some of the climate impacts already being felt. It won’t be easy. But climate science suggests it’s a challenge the Left must take up. 

Climate change has already warmed the planet over 1°C relative to pre-industrial levels. Paradoxically, cleaning up the air pollution that’s currently masking some of the global warming in the pipeline would raise temperatures another 0.5 – 1.1 degrees.1 This means that if we waved a magic wand and suddenly (1) stopped using fossil fuels, and (2) cleaned up air pollution, we would already be breaching 1.5°C, the amount of warming that most climate advocates have argued for. The carbon budget is not an exact science, but it seems we are hovering at the point where 1.5°C of warming is locked in by what has already been emitted. Put differently, the most recent scientific evidence suggests we have zero to five years before every additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted would need to be compensated by a ton of negative emissions to stay below 1.5°C.2 

In fact, the scenarios used in the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report rely on massive amounts of negative emissions to curb warming to 1.5°C, primarily via a method known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This led a team of modelers to try and see what it would take to achieve 1.5° without BECCS. Even a scenario where renewables, electrification, and energy efficiency were aggressively pursued—as well as replacing 80 percent of meat and eggs with cultivated meat, flying less, and eliminating tumble dryers—could not eliminate the need for carbon removal. This scenario still required about 400 billion tons (Gt) of carbon dioxide removed via reforestation

Can we build power plants that actually take carbon dioxide out of the air? Brad Plumer, vox. Mar. 11, 2015.


Why has carbon capture and storage not taken off yet? Michael McDonald, via naked capitalism. Nov 4, 2015.

To meet the Paris climate goals, do we need to engineer the climate? Simon Nicholson and Michael Thompson, The Conversation. Feb 23, 2016.

It's time to start talking about "negative" carbon dioxide emissions. David Roberts, vox. Aug. 18, 2017.

We have to bury gigatons of carbon to slow climate change. We’re not even close to ready.

A geophysiologist's thoughts on geoengineering. James Lovelock, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Nov. 13, 2008.

Abstract

The Earth is now recognized as a self-regulating system that includes a reactive biosphere; the system maintains a long-term steady-state climate and surface chemical composition favourable for life. We are perturbing the steady state by changing the land surface from mainly forests to farm land and by adding greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants to the air. We appear to have exceeded the natural capacity to counter our perturbation and consequently the system is changing to a new and as yet unknown but probably adverse state. I suggest here that we regard the Earth as a physiological system and consider amelioration techniques, geoengineering, as comparable to nineteenth century medicine.

... 

Whatever we do is likely to lead to death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and disasters small. To continue business as usual will probably kill most of us during the century. Is there any reason to believe that fully implementing Bali, with sustainable development and the full use of renewable energy, would kill less? We have to consider seriously that, as with nineteenth century medicine, the best option is often kind words and pain killers but otherwise do nothing and let Nature take its course. 

... 

Had we heeded Malthus’s warning and kept the human population to less than one billion, we would not now be facing a torrid future. Whether or not we go for Bali or use geoengineering, the planet is likely, massively and cruelly, to cull us, in the same merciless way that we have eliminated so many species by changing their environment into one where survival is difficult.

Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option. Fred Pearce, Yale 360. May 29, 2019.

Human intervention with the climate system has long been viewed as an ill-advised and risky step to slow global warming. But with carbon emissions soaring, initiatives to study and develop geoengineering technologies are gaining traction as a potential last resort.

Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look.

“Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.”

King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.”

Technologies earmarked for the Cambridge center’s attention include a range of efforts to restrict solar radiation from reaching the lower atmosphere, including spraying aerosols of sulphate particles into the stratosphere, and refreezing rapidly warming parts of the polar regions by deploying tall ships to pump salt particles from the ocean into polar clouds to make them brighter.

U.S. scientists are on the case, too. The National Academies last October launched a study into sunlight reflectiontechnologies, including their feasibility, impacts and risks, and governance requirements. Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said: “We are running out of time to mitigate catastrophic climate change. Some of these interventions … may need to be considered in future.”

The study’s prospective authors held their first meeting in Washington, D.C., at the end of April. Speakers included David Keith, a Harvard University physicist who has developed his own patented technology for using chemistry to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere, and Kelly Wanser of the Marine Cloud Brightening Project, which is studying the efficacy of seeding clouds with sea salt and other materials to reflect more sunlight back into space. The project is preparing for future field trials.

China too has an active government-funded research program. It insists it has no current plans for deployment, but is looking, among other things, at how solar shading might slow the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Geoengineering the climate to halt global warming has been discussed almost as long as the threat of warming itself. American researchers back in the 1960s suggested floating billions of white objects such as golf balls on the oceans to reflect sunlight. In 1977, Cesare Marchetti of the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis discussed ways of catching all of Europe’s CO2 emissions and injecting them into sinking Atlantic Ocean currents.

In 1982, Soviet scientist Mikhail Budyko proposed filling the stratosphere with sulphate particles to reflect sunlight back into space. The first experiments to test the idea of fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate the growth of CO2-absorbing algae were carried out by British researchers in 1995. Two years later, Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, proposed putting giant mirrors into space.

Still, many climate scientists until recently regarded such proposals as fringe, if not heretical, arguing that they undermine the case for urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A group of scientists writing in Nature as recently as April last year, called solar geoengineering “outlandish and unsettling … redolent of science fiction.”
But the mood is shifting. There is broad, international scientific agreement that the window of opportunity to avoid breaching the Paris climate target of staying “well below” 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), is narrowing sharply. A pause in the rise in CO2 emissions that brought hope in 2015 and 2016 has ended; the increase has resumed at a time when we should be making progress toward a goal of halving emissions by 2030, says Johan Rockstrom, science director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere — the planetary thermostat — are now at 415 parts per million (ppm) and rising by almost 3 ppm each year, reaching levels that have not been seen in 3 million years.“We have two years left to bend the curve” downward, says Rockstrom.

Some experts contend we may be approaching a moment when nothing other than geoengineering can meet the international community’s promise — made when signing the U.N. Climate Change Convention at the Earth Summit in 1992 — to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Myles Allen of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute says: “Every year we are not even trying to reduce emissions is another 40 billion tons of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere that we are blithely committing future generations to scrub out again.”

Possible geoengineering schemes and schedules are now being discussed. Take this plan published last fall by Gernot Wagner, executive director of Harvard University’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program:

In 15 years’ time, as the impacts of warming worsen, planes loaded with sulphate particles start taking off from airfields around the world. They fly to 65,000 feet, well above existing air lanes, and spray their loads into the stratosphere: 4,000 flights in the first year, 8,000 in the second, 12,000 in the third, and so on until, after another 15 years, fleets of purpose-built, high-altitude tankers are making 60,000 flights annually.

The thickening shroud of particles would fight climate change by mimicking the output of volcanic eruptions that deflect solar radiation streaming into the atmosphere. Famously, the eruption of sulphate particles from Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 caused a global cooling of up to 0.6 degrees C for the following two years. The planned 15-year human-made “eruption” would shave 0.3 degrees C off warming, halving the likely increase during that time.

The sulphate spraying would, Wagner and a coauthor said, be “remarkably inexpensive,” at not much above $2 billion a year over the first 15 years of deployment. Much cheaper than actually cutting emissions. So mission accomplished? Not quite. In fact, arguably not at all.

For one thing, most of the sulphate particles, like those from Pinatubo, would not stay aloft for more than a couple of years. Planes would have to keep flying and spraying ever-larger quantities essentially forever, or the world would resume warming with redoubled force.

For another, while the sulphate shroud might keep down global temperatures, the suppression of solar radiation could well create massive changes in weather systems and rainfall patterns, which are mostly driven by solar energy. The Asian monsoon, on which 2 billion people depend for their food crops, might shut down. The accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have many other effects, such as acidifying the oceans.

“The fact that researchers at one of the world’s top universities are costing the deployment of such a radical scheme shows how urgent the climate change problem has become,”says Peter Cox of the University of Exeter in England. It also underlines concerns about who would be in charge of such endeavors.

Steve Rayner of the Oxford Geoengineering Program at Oxford University says “the technology’s potential to promote conflict … is likely to be substantial.” A decade ago, he helped draw up the Oxford Principles, which call for “public participation on geoengineering decision-making” and its regulation “as a public good.” But when push comes to shove, how would that work? Which world leaders would we trust with our climate?

Critics say even researching such technologies creates a moral hazard, because by suggesting an easy fix for global warming, it encourages delay in ending our addiction to fossil fuels. The stratospheric sulphate plan “may well encourage weaker action on emissions reduction,” says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London.

Geoengineering is defined by the Oxford Geoengineering Program as “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change.” There are two main types. One is shading the earth from solar radiation, of which the shroud of sulphates in the stratosphere is emerging as the quickest, most effective, and least costly. The other is to remove more CO2 or other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than nature currently achieves — so-called negative emissions.

Right now the oceans absorb a lot of CO2. One way of helping them take more is likely to be on the Cambridge unit’s agenda. It involves seeding the oceans with iron to stimulate growth of marine algae. The resulting algal blooms would, the theory goes, soak up CO2 from the water and cause more to be absorbed from the atmosphere. Concerns range from the effects that such blooms of algae could have on the marine food web to uncertainty about whether such local absorption would actually increase the ocean’s total uptake of carbon.

A second, more measurable idea involves removing carbon from the atmosphere, either by the massive deployment of devices to extract CO2 from the ambient air — known as direct air capture — or by more natural methods. One of those would be to turn large areas of land over to carbon-absorbing crops, probably trees. The harvested biomass could then be used as fuel in power stations, and the emissions from burning them reabsorbed by new crops. The net emissions could be zero.

If biomass burning were combined with technology to capture and bury the carbon emissions from the power plants — delivering a technological combo known as Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) — emissions could be negative. In theory, the more you burned, the more CO2 you would suck from the air.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) enthusiastically adopted BECCS in its fifth assessment, published in 2014. It said most scenarios for keeping warming below 2 degrees C would require “the availability and widespread deployment of BECCS and afforestation in the second half of the century.”

It could happen. Biomass burning is increasingly popular in power stations. And carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a proven technology, though not yet adopted at scale. That could soon change, following the announcement this month that industrial emitters in the European ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Ghent plan to join forces to pump 10 million tons of CO2 a year into adjacent offshore gas fields.

But critics say the problems with BECCS are manifold. The land requirement would be huge. And the forests created to provide the fuel would be monocultures of fast-growing tree species like eucalyptus and acacia. If the land were taken from farmers, then who would feed the world? And if it were taken from existing natural forest areas, the carbon benefits of BECCS would largely disappear, says Simon Lewis of University College London. That’s because plantation forests typically hold only 5 percent as much carbon as mature natural forests.

Maybe there is a simpler solution. Maybe the most promising answer lies in going back to nature — in restoring natural forests. A broad coalition of environmentalists — from those who embrace corporate environmentalism, such as The Nature Conservancy (TNC), to the British anti-capitalist columnist George Monbiot — have recently endorsed this “natural” climate solution.

Their touchstone is a 2017 paper by Bronson Griscom of TNC and 24 others, which concluded that a third of the measures required between now and 2030 to keep the world on track to stabilize climate could be achieved cost-effectively by boosting natural ecosystems. They could take an extra 11 billion tons more CO2 out of the air each year. This could be done mostly by reforestation, but also by better soil management, the protection of carbon-rich wetlands such as peatlands, and growing more trees on farmland.

Proponents see this not as a substitute for emissions reductions, but as a “biological bridge … to a zero-emissions economy.” The plan fits the Oxford definition of geoengineering, though they avoid using the term.

The scientific case for this route is compelling. Most of it could be achieved on existing damaged and degraded forests. The World Resources Institute estimates that globally there are 7.7 million square miles of forests degraded by logging or shifting cultivation that could be restored. That is an area twice the size of Canada.

Some planting, especially of nitrogen-fixing species in poor soils, could help speed up the restoration, says Robin Chazdon, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut and author of an influential book called Second Growth. But mostly, given the chance, forests will regrow naturally.

In fact, natural regrowth is usually better than planting, since “allowing nature to choose which species predominate during natural regeneration allows for local adaptation and higher functional diversity,” she says. A study published in March by 87 researchers, including Chazdon, concluded that “secondary forests recover remarkably fast” with 80 percent of their species typically back in 20 years and 100 percent in 50 years.

It looks like it could be a win-win, delivering a climate payoff on the scale of geoengineering without any of the downsides. Tim Lenton of Exeter University, a proponent of research into geoengineering, says it could be an ideal solution. “I am against introducing new forces such as sulphate aerosol injection in the stratosphere,” he says. “But I am in favor of emulating and enhancing natural feedback loops and cycles, such as regenerating degraded forests.”

It would, he says, strengthen the biosphere’s natural forces of self-regulation that British scientist James Lovelock has termed “Gaia.” Lenton has a new term for what is required. Not geoengineering, but “Gaia-engineering.”