Linden: Understated Threat

How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong. Eugene Linden, NYT Op-Ed. Nov. 8, 2019.

Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we’re facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios.

For decades, most scientists saw climate change as a distant prospect. We now know that thinking was wrong. This summer, for instance, a heat wave in Europe penetrated the Arctic, pushing temperatures into the 80s across much of the Far North and, according to the Belgian climate scientist Xavier Fettweis, melting some 40 billion tons of Greenland’s ice sheet.

Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch, bake the Arctic and produce Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin, the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist. But many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities.

Science is a process of discovery. It can move slowly as the pieces of a puzzle fall together and scientists refine their investigative tools. But in the case of climate, this deliberation has been accompanied by inertia born of bureaucratic caution and politics. A recent essay in Scientific American argued that scientists “tend to underestimate the severity of threats and the rapidity with which they might unfold” and said one of the reasons was “the perceived need for consensus.” This has had severe consequences, diluting what should have been a sense of urgency and vastly understating the looming costs of adaptation and dislocation as the planet continues to warm.

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group of thousands of scientists representing 195 countries, said in its first report that climate change would arrive at a stately pace, that the methane-laden Arctic permafrost was not in danger of thawing, and that the Antarctic ice sheets were stable.

Relying on the climate change panel’s assessment, economists estimated that the economic hit would be small, providing further ammunition against an aggressive approach to reducing emissions and to building resilience to climate change.

As we now know, all of those predictions turned out to be completely wrong. Which makes you wonder whether the projected risks of further warming, dire as they are, might still be understated. How bad will things get?

So far, the costs of underestimation have been enormous. New York City’s subway system did not flood in its first 108 years, but Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 storm surge caused nearly $5 billion in water damage, much of which is still not repaired. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey gave Houston and the surrounding region a $125 billion lesson about the costs of misjudging the potential for floods.

The climate change panel seems finally to have caught up with the gravity of the climate crisis. Last year, the organization detailed the extraordinary difficulty of limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), over the next 80 years, and the grim consequences that will result even if that goal is met.

More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became a mainstream issue.

The word “upended” does not do justice to the revolution in climate science wrought by the discovery of sudden climate change. The realization that the global climate can swing between warm and cold periods in a matter of decades or even less came as a profound shock to scientists who thought those shifts took hundreds if not thousands of years.

Scientists knew major volcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes could affect climate rapidly, but such occurrences were uncommon and unpredictable. Absent such rare events, changes in climate looked steady and smooth, a consequence of slow-moving geophysical factors like the earth’s orbital cycle in combination with the tilt of the planet’s axis, or shifts in the continental plates.

Then, in the 1960s, a few scientists began to focus on an unusual event that took place after the last ice age. Scattered evidence suggested that the post-ice age warming was interrupted by a sudden cooling that began around 12,000 years ago and ended abruptly 1,300 years later. The era was named the Younger Dryas for a plant that proliferated during that cold period.

At first, some scientists questioned the rapidity and global reach of the cooling. A report from the National Academies of Science in 1975 acknowledged the Younger Dryas but concluded that it would take centuries for the climate to change in a meaningful way. But not everyone agreed. The climate scientist Wallace Broecker at Columbia had offered a theory that changes in ocean circulation could bring about sudden climate shifts like the Younger Dryas.

And it was Dr. Broecker who, in 1975, the same year as that National Academies report playing down the Younger Dryas, published a paper, titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” in which he predicted that emissions of carbon dioxide would raise global temperatures significantly in the 21st century. This is now seen as prophetic, but at the time, Dr. Broecker was an outlier.

Then, in the early 1990s, scientists completed more precise studies of ice cores extracted from the Greenland ice sheet. Dust and oxygen isotopes encased in the cores provided a detailed climate record going back eons. It revealed that there had been 25 rapid climate change events like the Younger Dryas in the last glacial period.

The evidence in those ice cores would prove pivotal in turning the conventional wisdom. As the science historian Spencer Weart put it: “How abrupt was the discovery of abrupt climate change? Many climate experts would put their finger on one moment: the day they read the 1993 report of the analysis of Greenland ice cores. Before that, almost nobody confidently believed that the climate could change massively within a decade or two; after the report, almost nobody felt sure that it could not.”

In 2002, the National Academies acknowledged the reality of rapid climate change in a report, “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises,” which described the new consensus as a “paradigm shift.” This was a reversal of its 1975 report.

“Large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly, as shown by numerous paleoclimate records,” the report said, and added that “changes of up to 16 degrees Celsius and a factor of 2 in precipitation have occurred in some places in periods as short as decades to years.”

The National Academies report added that the implications of such potential rapid changes had not yet been considered by policymakers and economists. And even today, 17 years later, a substantial portion of the American public remains unaware or unconvinced it is happening.

Were the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica to melt, sea levels would rise by an estimated 225 feet worldwide. Few expect that to happen anytime soon. But those ice sheets now look a lot more fragile than they did to the climate change panel in 1995, when it said that little change was expected over the next hundred years.

In the years since, data has shown that both Greenland and Antarctica have been shedding ice far more rapidly than anticipated. Ice shelves, which are floating extensions of land ice, hold back glaciers from sliding into the sea and eventually melting. In the early 2000s, ice shelves began disintegrating in several parts of Antarctica, and scientists realized that process could greatly accelerate the demise of the vastly larger ice sheets themselves. And some major glaciers are dumping ice directly into the ocean.

By 2014, a number of scientists had concluded that an irreversible collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet had already begun, and computer modeling in 2016 indicated that its disintegration in concert with other melting could raise sea levels up to six feet by 2100, about twice the increase described as a possible worst-case scenario just three years earlier. At that pace, some of the world’s great coastal cities, including New York, London and Hong Kong, would become inundated.

Then this year, a review of 40 years of satellite images suggested that the East Antarctic ice sheet, which was thought to be relatively stable, may also be shedding vast amounts of ice.

As the seas rise, they are also warming at a pace unanticipated as recently as five years ago. This is very bad news. For one thing, a warmer ocean means more powerful storms, and die-offs of marine life, but it also suggests that the planet is more sensitive to increased carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought.
The melting of permafrost has also defied expectations. This is ground that has remained frozen for at least two consecutive years and covers around a quarter of the exposed land mass of the Northern Hemisphere. As recently as 1995, it was thought to be stable. But by 2005, the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated that up to 90 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s topmost layer of permafrost could thaw by 2100, releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

For all of the missed predictions, changes in the weather are confirming earlier expectations that a warming globe would be accompanied by an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather. And there are new findings unforeseen by early studies, such as the extremely rapid intensification of storms, as on Sept. 1, when Hurricane Dorian’s sustained winds intensified from 150 to 185 miles per hour in just nine hours, and last year when Hurricane Michael grew from tropical depression to major hurricane in just two days.

If the Trump administration has its way, even the revised worst-case scenarios may turn out to be too rosy. In late August, the administration announced a plan to roll back regulations intended to limit methane emissions resulting from oil and gas exploration, despite opposition from some of the largest companies subject to those regulations. More recently, its actions approached the surreal as the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into those auto companies that have agreed in principle to abide by higher gas mileage standards required by California. The administration also formally revoked a waiver allowing California to set stricter limits on tailpipe emissions than the federal government.

Even if scientists end up having lowballed their latest assessments of the consequences of the greenhouse gases we continue to emit into the atmosphere, their predictions are dire enough. But the Trump administration has made its posture toward climate change abundantly clear: Bring it on!

It’s already here. And it is going to get worse. A lot worse.

Climate Links: November 2019 #1

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency. William J Ripple et al, Bioscience. Nov. 5, 2019.

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.

Exactly 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations met at the First World Climate Conference (in Geneva 1979) and agreed that alarming trends for climate change made it urgently necessary to act. Since then, similar alarms have been made through the 1992 Rio Summit, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as scores of other global assemblies and scientists’ explicit warnings of insufficient progress (Ripple et al. 2017). Yet greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth's climate. An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis (IPCC 2018).

Most public discussions on climate change are based on global surface temperature only, an inadequate measure to capture the breadth of human activities and the real dangers stemming from a warming planet (Briggs et al. 2015). Policymakers and the public now urgently need access to a set of indicators that convey the effects of human activities on GHG emissions and the consequent impacts on climate, our environment, and society. Building on prior work (see supplemental file S2), we present a suite of graphical vital signs of climate change over the last 40 years for human activities that can affect GHG emissions and change the climate (figure 1), as well as actual climatic impacts (figure 2). We use only relevant data sets that are clear, understandable, systematically collected for at least the last 5 years, and updated at least annually.

How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong. Eugene Linden, NYT. Nov. 8, 2019.

Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we’re facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios.

The Carbon Bomb. Tom Evans, Sean Maxwell , Scientific American. Nov. 8, 2019.

A new report shows that deforestation released a shocking 626 percent more CO2 between 2000 and 2013 than previously thought

Scientists Study Sea Levels 125,000 Years Ago And It's a Terrifying Look at Our Future. Fiona Hibbert et al, ScienceAlerts. Nov. 6, 2019.

scientific article at:
Asynchronous Antarctic and Greenland ice-volume contributions to the last interglacial sea-level highstand. Nature.com.

It's Time for a World War against Climate Change

It’s too late for a carbon tax—it’s time for a world war against climate change. Adele Peters, Fast Company. Nov. 4, 2019.

“The reality is that we have zero years and we have to change all of our infrastructure.”

The world’s carbon budget—the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that humans can still pump into the atmosphere before we no longer have a chance of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius—is almost used up.

In a landmark report last year, the UN’s climate body, the IPCC, said that we need to essentially halve emissions by 2030 to have a 50% chance of staying under 1.5 degrees. That deadline is now only about 10 years away. But the actual situation is even more urgent because of the problem of “committed emissions,” all of the cars and power plants and furnaces and other things that already exist now and have years or decades left of use.

“The very concerning reality is that these things that exist today are already going to emit all of the carbon we have [left in the budget] in that 10- or 11-year period, by virtue of the fact that there’s already a billion cars in the world with internal combustion engines and people aren’t going to stop driving tomorrow,” says Saul Griffith, an inventor and serial entrepreneur who is advising current presidential candidates on climate policy and who recently spoke about the need to go beyond the Green New Deal at Verge, a conference focused on the clean economy. “They’re going to emit a lot. And the existing coal plants and existing natural gas plants will emit a lot. The consequence of that is this 10-year headline gives us a false sense of security. The reality is that we have zero years and we have to change all of our infrastructure.”

That means that it’s too late, he says, to rely on something like a carbon tax to incentivize a gradual shift to lower-carbon products. “If you’ve got a carbon tax and you slowly raise the carbon tax, then it slowly modifies our behavior, but to hit the climate target that the children want and the scientists want, it simply is not a fast enough acting mechanism,” he says.

There also isn’t time to wait for the usual rates of market adoption for new technology. “Because of committed emissions, we can’t wait for natural adoption curves, like if 2% of people buy a Tesla next year and 4% the year after that,” Griffith says. “At this point, basically, to hit any reasonable climate target, you need 100% adoption at everyone’s next purchase.”

He says that companies shouldn’t just be thinking about how to be more efficient, but how to completely substitute zero-carbon technologies for current practices; entire industries should commit to transformation. In the U.S., Griffith argues that we need to go even further than a Green New Deal, deploying an Apollo project-scale transformation of the agriculture industry to move to practices that sequester carbon and a Manhattan Project-like research effort to create a “material economy that absorbs carbon rather than emits it.” He suggests the idea of a “World War Zero” against climate change that has as much urgency as the last World War.

“If we were serious, and we treated this historical moment like we treated Hitler in 1939, industry would be figuring out how to scale up manufacture of the things that will win the war,” he says. “And so we wouldn’t be niggling about what year we will have a 100% electric cars by. It would be a large-scale discussion with the government about what it could take to transform the whole car-making business on the shortest timeline to one that’s zero carbon. We would be drawing up emergency plans at the national level on how to decarbonize the grid and how to install new transmission lines. This is what the Green New Deal is sort of meant to be, but the plans are still mostly under-ambitious. And they’re not focusing enough on the timelines required.” A carbon tax may still be a small part of the mix—Griffith says that we need all possible solutions. But it can’t tackle the urgency of the situation.

Businesses, cities, and states can’t accomplish the work without the national government. “You should write off the coral reefs if Trump gets reelected,” he says. “We need a new idea that operates outside of normal economic rules. And that’s only ever happened from national governments declaring emergencies. I could write you a script where the Republicans realize that it’s in the best interest of American manufacturing to lead the world. Trump could wake up and have an epiphany tomorrow that his grandchildren are in trouble. There’s no reason it has to be a Democratic policy. We won World War II with largely a Republican approach to solving emergencies. Whether we do it or not is independent of the ideologies of left or right. But if Trump is elected and we do business as usual, we’ll get half a degree of warming in his tenure.”

As Griffith has advised some current presidential campaigns on climate policy, he says that the candidates still haven’t gone far enough—or recognized the full potential for the necessary transformation to spur the creation of new jobs, new wealth, and a better standard of living. “They fall short on the urgency, they fall short on the metaphors, and honestly, I don’t think they think we can do it,” he says. “The presidential candidates, they haven’t yet absorbed that it’s possible. And if we do it, that our lives will improve. I think they’re all playing defense on it and not offense. In reality, we could have this amazing American century driven by throwing technology and jobs at solving climate change and new economic models, and the American suburbs could bloom like they’ve never done before.”

30 year anniversary: The Iron Lady on Climate Change, circa 1989

Speech to United Nations General Assembly (Global Environment). Margaret Thatcher. Nov. 8, 1989.


Mr President, it gives me great pleasure to return to the Podium of this assembly. When I last spoke here four years ago, on the 40th anniversary of the United Nations, the message that I and others like me gave was one of encouragement to the organisation to play the great role allotted to it.

Of all the challenges faced by the world community in those four years, one has grown clearer than any other in both urgency and importance—I refer to the threat to our global environment. I shall take the opportunity of addressing the general assembly to speak on that subject alone.

INTRODUCTION

During his historic voyage through the south seas on the Beagle, Charles Darwin landed one November morning in 1835 on the shore of Western Tahiti.

After breakfast he climbed a nearby hill to find advantage point to survey the surrounding Pacific. The sight seemed to him like “a framed engraving” , with blue sky, blue lagoon, and white breakers crashing against the encircling Coral Reef.

As he looked out from that hillside, he began to form his theory of the evolution of coral; 154 years after Darwin 's visit to Tahiti we have added little to what he discovered then.

What if Charles Darwin had been able, not just to climb a foothill, but to soar through the heavens in one of the orbiting space shuttles?

What would he have learned as he surveyed our planet from that altitude? From a moon's eye view of that strange and beautiful anomaly in our solar system that is the earth?

Of course, we have learned much detail about our environment as we have looked back at it from space, but nothing has made a more profound impact on us than these two facts.

First, as the British scientist Fred Hoyle wrote long before space travel was a reality, he said “once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside is available … a new idea as powerful as any other in history will be let loose” .

That powerful idea is the recognition of our shared inheritance on this planet. We know more clearly than ever before that we carry common burdens, face common problems, and must respond with common action.

And second, as we travel through space, as we pass one dead planet after another, we look back on our earth, a speck of life in an infinite void. It is life itself, incomparably precious, that distinguishes us from the other planets.

It is life itself—human life, the innumerable species of our planet—that we wantonly destroy. It is life itself that we must battle to preserve.

For over forty years, that has been the main task of this United Nations.

To bring peace where there was war.

Comfort where there was misery.

Life where there was death.

The struggle has not always been successful. There have been years of failure.

But recent events have brought the promise of a new dawn, of new hope. Relations between the Western nations and the Soviet Union and her allies, long frozen in suspicion and hostility, have begun to thaw.

In Europe, this year, freedom has been on the march.

In Southern Africa—Namibia and Angola—the United Nations has succeeded in holding out better prospects for an end to war and for the beginning of prosperity.

And in South East Asia, too, we can dare to hope for the restoration of peace after decades of fighting.

While the conventional, political dangers—the threat of global annihilation, the fact of regional war—appear to be receding, we have all recently become aware of another insidious danger.

It is as menacing in its way as those more accustomed perils with which international diplomacy has concerned itself for centuries.

It is the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself.

Of course major changes in the earth's climate and the environment have taken place in earlier centuries when the world's population was a fraction of its present size.

The causes are to be found in nature itself—changes in the earth's orbit: changes in the amount of radiation given off by the sun: the consequential effects on the plankton in the ocean: and in volcanic processes.

All these we can observe and some we may be able to predict. But we do not have the power to prevent or control them.

What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.

We can find examples in the past. Indeed we may well conclude that it was the silting up of the River Euphrates which drove man out of the Garden of Eden.

We also have the example of the tragedy of Easter Island, where people arrived by boat to find a primeval forest. In time the population increased to over 9,000 souls and the demand placed upon the environment resulted in its eventual destruction as people cut down the trees. This in turn led to warfare over the scarce remaining resources and the population crashed to a few hundred people without even enough wood to make boats to escape.

The difference now is in the scale of the damage we are doing.

VAST INCREASE IN CARBON DIOXIDE

We are seeing a vast increase in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere. The annual increase is three billion tonnes: and half the carbon emitted since the Industrial Revolution still remains in the atmosphere.

At the same time as this is happening, we are seeing the destruction on a vast scale of tropical forests which are uniquely able to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Every year an area of forest equal to the whole surface of the United Kingdom is destroyed. At present rates of clearance we shall, by the year 2000, have removed 65 per cent of forests in the humid tropical zones. 

The consequences of this become clearer when one remembers that tropical forests fix more than ten times as much carbon as do forests in the temperate zones.

We now know, too, that great damage is being done to the Ozone Layer by the production of halons and chlorofluorocarbons. But at least we have recognised that reducing and eventually stopping the emission of CFCs is one positive thing we can do about the menacing accumulation of greenhouse gases.

It is of course true that none of us would be here but for the greenhouse effect. It gives us the moist atmosphere which sustains life on earth. We need the greenhouse effect—but only in the right proportions.

More than anything, our environment is threatened by the sheer numbers of people and the plants and animals which go with them. When I was born the world's population was some 2 billion people. My grandson will grow up in a world of more than 6 billion people.

Put in its bluntest form: the main threat to our environment is more and more people, and their activities: 

• The land they cultivate ever more intensively; 
• The forests they cut down and burn; 
• The mountain sides they lay bare; 
• The fossil fuels they burn; 
• The rivers and the seas they pollute.

The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.

That prospect is a new factor in human affairs. It is comparable in its implications to the discovery of how to split the atom. Indeed, its results could be even more far-reaching.

THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

We are constantly learning more about these changes affecting our environment, and scientists from the Polar Institute in Cambridge and The British Antarctic Survey have been at the leading edge of research in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, warning us of the greater dangers that lie ahead. 

Let me quote from a letter I received only two weeks ago, from a British scientist on board a ship in the Antarctic Ocean: he wrote, “In the Polar Regions today, we are seeing what may be early signs of man-induced climatic change. Data coming in from Halley Bay and from instruments aboard the ship on which I am sailing show that we are entering a Spring Ozone depletion which is as deep as, if not deeper, than the depletion in the worst year to date. It completely reverses the recovery observed in 1988. The lowest recording aboard this ship is only 150 Dobson units for Ozone total content during September, compared with 300 for the same season in a normal year.” That of course is a very severe depletion.

He also reports on a significant thinning of the sea ice, and he writes that, in the Antarctic, “Our data confirm that the first-year ice, which forms the bulk of sea ice cover, is remarkably thin and so is probably unable to sustain significant atmospheric warming without melting. Sea ice, separates the ocean from the atmosphere over an area of more than 30 million square kilometres. It reflects most of the solar radiation falling on it, helping to cool the earth's surface. If this area were reduced, the warming of earth would be accelerated due to the extra absorption of radiation by the ocean.”

“The lesson of these Polar processes,” he goes on, “is that an environmental or climatic change produced by man may take on a self-sustaining or ‘runaway’ quality … and may be irreversible.” That is from the scientists who are doing work on the ship that is presently considering these matters.

These are sobering indications of what may happen and they led my correspondent to put forward the interesting idea of a World Polar Watch, amongst other initiatives, which will observe the world's climate system and allow us to understand how it works.

We also have new scientific evidence from an entirely different area, the Tropical Forests. Through their capacity to evaporate vast volumes of water vapour, and of gases and particles which assist the formation of clouds, the forests serve to keep their regions cool and moist by weaving a sunshade of white reflecting clouds and by bringing the rain that sustains them.

A recent study by our British Meteorological Office on the Amazon rainforest shows that large-scale deforestation may reduce rainfall and thus affect the climate directly. Past experience shows us that without trees there is no rain, and without rain there are no trees.

THE SCOPE FOR INTERNATIONAL ACTION

Mr President, the evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the International Community, do about it?

In some areas, the action required is primarily for individual nations or groups of nations to take.

I am thinking for example of action to deal with pollution of rivers—and many of us now see the fish back in rivers from which they had disappeared.

I am thinking of action to improve agricultural methods—good husbandry which ploughs back nourishment into the soil rather than the cut-and-burn which has damaged and degraded so much land in some parts of the world.

And I am thinking of the use of nuclear power which—despite the attitude of so-called greens—is the most environmentally safe form of energy.

But the problem of global climate change is one that affects us all and action will only be effective if it is taken at the international level.

It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. Whole areas of our planet could be subject to drought and starvation if the pattern of rains and monsoons were to change as a result of the destruction of forests and the accumulation of greenhouse gases.

We have to look forward not backward and we shall only succeed in dealing with the problems through a vast international, co-operative effort.

Before we act, we need the best possible scientific assessment: otherwise we risk making matters worse. We must use science to cast a light ahead, so that we can move step by step in the right direction.

The United Kingdom has agreed to take on the task of co-ordinating such an assessment within the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, an assessment which will be available to everyone by the time of the Second World Climate Conference next year.

But that will take us only so far. The report will not be able to tell us where the hurricanes will be striking; who will be flooded; or how often and how severe the droughts will be. Yet we will need to know these things if we are to adapt to future climate change, and that means we must expand our capacity to model and predict climate change. We can test our skills and methods by seeing whether they would have successfully predicted past climate change for which historical records exist.

Britain has some of the leading experts in this field and I am pleased to be able to tell you that the United Kingdom will be establishing a new centre for the prediction of climate change, which will lead the effort to improve our prophetic capacity.

It will also provide the advanced computing facilities that scientists need. And it will be open to experts from all over the world, especially from the developing countries, who can come to the United Kingdom and contribute to this vital work.

But as well as the science, we need to get the economics right. That means first we must have continued economic growth in order to generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment. But it must be growth which does not plunder the planet today and leave our children to deal with the consequences tomorrow.

And second, we must resist the simplistic tendency to blame modern multinational industry for the damage which is being done to the environment. Far from being the villains, it is on them that we rely to do the research and find the solutions.

It is industry which will develop safe alternative chemicals for refrigerators and air-conditioning. It is industry which will devise bio-degradable plastics. It is industry which will find the means to treat pollutants and make nuclear waste safe—and many companies as you know already have massive research programmes.

The multinationals have to take the long view. There will be no profit or satisfaction for anyone if pollution continues to destroy our planet.

As people's consciousness of environmental needs rises, they are turning increasingly to ozone-friendly and other environmentally safe products. The market itself acts as a corrective the new products sell and those which caused environmental damage are disappearing from the shelves.

And by making these new products widely available, industry will make it possible for developing countries to avoid many of the mistakes which we older industrialised countries have made.

We should always remember that free markets are a means to an end. They would defeat their object if by their output they did more damage to the quality of life through pollution than the well-being they achieve by the production of goods and services.

On the basis then of sound science and sound economics, we need to build a strong framework for international action.

It is not new institutions that we need. Rather we need to strengthen and improve those which already exist: in particular the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme.

The United Kingdom has recently more than doubled its contribution to UNEP and we urge others, who have not done so and who can afford it, to do the same.

And the central organs of the United Nations, like this General Assembly, must also be seized of a problem which reaches into virtually all aspects of their work and will do so still more in the future.

CONVENTION ON GLOBAL CLIMATE

The most pressing task which faces us at the international level is to negotiate a framework convention on climate change—a sort of good conduct guide for all nations.

Fortunately we have a model in the action already taken to protect the ozone layer. The Vienna Convention in 1985 and the Montreal Protocol in 1987 established landmarks in international law. They aim to prevent rather than just cure a global environmental problem.

I believe we should aim to have a convention on global climate change ready by the time the World Conference on Environment and Development meets in 1992. That will be among the most important conferences the United Nations has ever held. I hope that we shall all accept a responsibility to meet this timetable.

The 1992 Conference is indeed already being discussed among many countries in many places. And I draw particular attention to the very valuable discussion which members of the Commonwealth had under the Mahathir bin Mohamad Prime Minister of Malaysia's chairmanship at our recent Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kuala Lumpur. 

But a framework is not enough. It will need to be filled out with specific undertakings, or protocols in diplomatic language, on the different aspects of climate change.

These protocols must be binding and there must be effective regimes to supervise and monitor their application. Otherwise those nations which accept and abide by environmental agreements, thus adding to their industrial costs, will lose out competitively to those who do not.

The negotiation of some of these protocols will undoubtedly be difficult. And no issue will be more contentious than the need to control emissions of carbon dioxide, the major contributor—apart from water vapour—to the greenhouse effect.

We can't just do nothing. But the measures we take must be based on sound scientific analysis of the effect of the different gases and the ways in which these can be reduced. In the past there has been a tendency to solve one problem at the expense of making others worse.

The United Kingdom therefore proposes that we prolong the role of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change after it submits its report next year, so that it can provide an authoritative scientific base for the negotiation of this and other protocols.

We can then agree to targets to reduce the greenhouse gases, and how much individual countries should contribute to their achievement. We think it important that this should be done in a way which enables all our economies to continue to grow and develop.

The challenge for our negotiators on matters like this is as great as for any disarmament treaty. The Inter-governmental Panel's work must remain on target, and we must not allow ourselves to be diverted into fruitless and divisive argument. Time is too short for that.

Before leaving the area where international action is needed, I would make a plea for a further global convention, one to conserve the infinite variety of species—of plant and animal life—which inhabit our planet.

The tropical forests contain a half of the species in the world, so their disappearance is doubly damaging, and it is astonishing but true that our civilisation, whose imagination has reached the boundaries of the universe, does not know, to within a factor of ten, how many species the earth supports.

What we do know is that we are losing them at a reckless rate—between three and fifty each day on some estimates—species which could perhaps be helping us to advance the frontiers of medical science. We should act together to conserve this precious heritage.

BRITAIN'S CONTRIBUTION

Every nation will need to make its contribution to the world effort, so I want to tell you how Britain intends to contribute, either by improving our own national performance in protecting the environment, or through the help that we give to others, and I shall tell you under four headings.

First, we shall be introducing over the coming months a comprehensive system of pollution control to deal with all kinds of industrial pollution whether to air, water or land.

We are encouraging British industry to develop new technologies to clean up the environment and minimise the amount of waste it produces—and we aim to recycle 50 per cent of our household waste by the end of the century.

Secondly, we will be drawing up over the coming year our own environmental agenda for the decade ahead. That will cover energy, transport, agriculture, industry—everything which affects the environment.

With regard to energy, we already have a £2 billion programme of improvements to reduce acid rain emissions from our power stations. We shall be looking more closely at the role of non-fossil fuel sources, including nuclear, in generating energy. And our latest legislation requires companies which supply electricity positively to promote energy efficiency.

On transport, we shall look for ways to strengthen controls over vehicle emissions and to develop the lean-burn engine, which offers a far better long-term solution than the three-way catalyst, in terms of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect.

We have already reduced the tax on lead-free petrol to encourage its use. That is an example of using market-based incentives to promote good environmental practice and we shall see whether there are other areas where this same principle can be applied.

With regard to agriculture, we recognise that farmers not only produce food—which they do with great efficiency—they need to conserve the beauty of the priceless heritage of our countryside. So we are therefore encouraging them to reduce the intensity of their methods and to conserve wild-life habitats.

We are planting new woods and forests—indeed there has been a 50 per cent increase in tree planting in Britain in the last ten years.

We also aim to reduce chemical inputs to the soil and we are bringing forward measures to deal with the complex problem of nitrates in water. All that is part of our own ten-year programme coming up to the end of the century.

Third, we are increasing our investment in research into global environmental problems. I have already mentioned the climate change centre that we are establishing.

In addition we are supporting our own scientists', and in particular the British Antarctic Survey's crucial contribution to the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, as well as the voyages of our aptly-named research ship, the ‘Charles Darwin’.

We have also provided more money for the Climate and Environment Satellite Monitoring Programmes of the European Space Agency.

Fourth, we help poorer countries to cope with their environmental problems through our Aid Programme.

We shall give special help to manage and preserve the tropical forests. We are already assisting in twenty countries and have recently signed agreements with India and Brazil.

And as a new pledge, I can announce today that we aim to commit a further £100 million bilaterally to tropical forestry activities over the next three years, mostly within the framework of the Tropical Forestry Action Plan. That is what we are doing in Britain under those four headings. All of those things.

CONCLUSION

Mr President, the environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. 

We should work through this great organisation and its agencies to secure world-wide agreements on ways to cope with the effects of climate change, the thinning of the Ozone Layer, and the loss of precious species.

We need a realistic programme of action and an equally realistic timetable.

Each country has to contribute, and those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.

The work ahead will be long and exacting. We should embark on it hopeful of success, not fearful of failure.

I began with Charles Darwin and his work on the theory of evolution and the origin of species. Darwin 's voyages were among the high-points of scientific discovery. They were undertaken at a time when men and women felt growing confidence that we could not only understand the natural world but we could master it, too.

Today, we have learned rather more humility and respect for the balance of nature. But another of the beliefs of Darwin 's era should help to see us through—the belief in reason and the scientific method.

Reason is humanity's special gift. It allows us to understand the structure of the nucleus. It enables us to explore the heavens. It helps us to conquer disease. Now we must use our reason to find a way in which we can live with nature, and not dominate nature.

At the end of a book which has helped many young people to shape their own sense of stewardship for our planet, its American author quotes one of our greatest English poems, Milton 's “Paradise Lost”.

When Adam in that poem asks about the movements of the heavens, Raphael the Archangel refuses to answer. “Let it speak” , he says,

“The Maker's high magnificence, who builtSo spacious, and his line stretcht out so far,That Man may know he dwells not in his own; An edifice too large for him to fill,Lodg'd in a small partition, and the restOrdain'd for uses to his Lord best known.”

We need our reason to teach us today that we are not, that we must not try to be, the lords of all we survey.

We are not the lords, we are the Lord's creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged today with preserving life itself—preserving life with all its mystery and all its wonder.

May we all be equal to that task.

Thank you Mr President.

Ian Welsh on Alberta

Alberta’s Alienation From Canada. Ian Welsh. Nov. 5, 2019.

So, for those of you who don’t know, Alberta is sort of Canada’s Texas: it has a lot of oil, and a lot of farms.

Alberta is also the heart of the Conservative Party of Canada. Virtually all of their seats go to the Conservatives every federal election.

Many Albertans feel isolated and disrespected by Ottawa (our capital) and the East. Back in the 70s, Pierre Trudeau (our current Prime Minister’s father) made them sell oil to Canadians for less than market price and even nationalized a little bit of the market.

Since they also have a lot of money, they net give to the other provinces, what are called transfer payments.

They feel like they put in more than they get back.

There’s a lot of truth to this, of course. This isn’t Red State BS in the United States, where they get more from the Feds than they put in and whine about it.

That said, Alberta has been sitting on black gold and fucked it up.

Fucked it up.

They decided that low taxes were more important than investment. They hardly taxed the oil companies pumping the oil, even the foreign ones, even during boom times when there is no question they would pay.

So they didn’t get as much money as they should.

But then they also didn’t spend what money they had smart, on creating a post-oil future economy.

In Canada we have poor provinces. The poorest are the Maritime provinces: the ones up against the Atlantic.

Here’s a funny story: they used to be rich. A long time ago.

See, England needed lots of masts. You need good trees for masts, and the English cut them all down at home and other Europeans had either done the same or wouldn’t chop down enough of them.

Good masts were incredibly valuable. In addition, the Maritimes had the richest fisheries in the world. There are eyewitness accounts from the early days that you could literally dip a bucket into the Ocean and come up with fish.

So the Maritimes were prosperous.

Then the world moved to steam engines.

And then the Maritimes, quite deliberately and before the worst of climate change, fished the Grand Banks cods to collapse.

And now, they are poor as hell, and always getting those transfer payments.

And this is Alberta’s future.

The funny thing is that Alberta is also a big agricultural province, but, of course, since oil makes more money, they’ve gone ahead and polluted like hell, destroying vast swathes of land.

So, to summarize: did not invest enough in industries to take over when oil (a non-renewable resource) became less valuable. Did do what they could to fuck up their sustainable resource industry: farming.

Most of this is not the rest of Canada’s fault. Yeah, they would have had more money if Ottawa had given them a complete free hand, but they had plenty of money and wasted in on low taxes and tax cuts and didn’t bother to be good environmental stewards.

These decisions were made in Alberta, by Albertans, not in Ottawa.

Resource economies are always, at best, cyclical. They are always in danger of being destroyed by substitution (as is happening with hydrocarbons.) A smart jurisdiction uses that wealth to buy a future not reliant on resources.

There are lessons here for a lot of countries and regions. Canada as a whole has fucked up its economic balance over the last 20 years (a different article.) Russia is way too reliant on resources. Various US states are going to take it on the chin when hydrocarbon prices collapse, and they too have been short sighted, greedy and stupid: doing things like polluting their groundwater with fracking.

In the future water is going to be far more valuable than oil. So is good agricultural land.

And these places have gone out of their way to destroy both.

The problem with Ottawa isn’t so much that they interfered in Alberta, but that they interfered in Alberta in the wrong ways.

As for Albertan voters who always vote Conservative: you’re fools. Because they know you will always vote for them, they do nothing for you. When the Conservatives were in power for almost a decade, they sucked up to Ontario and Quebec, because they knew they needed their votes.

You? You got nothing, exactly because they know they don’t need to give you anything.

There are those in the US who might think on this lesson as well.

Toward a General Theory of Societal Collapse: A Biophysical Examination of Tainter’s Model of the Diminishing Returns of Complexity

Toward a General Theory of Societal Collapse: A Biophysical Examination of Tainter’s Model of the Diminishing Returns of Complexity. Jan 1. 2019. Bardi et al. via springer. or free PDF.

Abstract.

The collapse of large social systems, often referred to as “civilizations” or “empires,” is a well-known historical phenomenon, but its origins are the object of an unresolved debate. In this paper, we present a simple biophysical model which we link to the concept that societies collapse because of the “diminishing returns of complexity” proposed by Joseph Tainter. Our model is based on the description of a socio-economic system as a trophic chain of energy stocks which dissipate the energy potential of the available resources. The model produces various trajectories of decline, in some cases rapid enough that they can be defined as “collapses.” At the same time, we observe that the exploitation of the resource stock (“production”) has a strongly nonlinear relationship with the complexity of the system, assumed to be proportional to the size of the stock termed “bureaucracy.” These results provide support for Tainter’s hypothesis.

1. Introduction

The collapse of large social systems, also called “civilizations” or “empires,” is a well-known and highly studied subject. In many cases, the historical record does not provide quantitative data on these events, but in some cases it is possible to quantify the collapse phenomenon in terms, for instance, of the extent of the areas controlled by the central government as reported by Tageepera or of the output of the economic system as reported by Sverdrup and McCollen et al. In these studies, we can observe how collapses are often rapid in comparison to the build-up of the social and economic structures of a civilization. This behaviour is consistent with Diamond’s definition of collapse as, “a drastic decrease in human population size and or political / economic / social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”

Nevertheless, despite the number of studies in this area, there is little agreement on the causes of societal collapses and, in particular, on the possibility of a common mechanism causing them. Edward Gibbon was probably the first to attempt an interpretation of the fall of a large empire, the Roman one, attributing it mainly to the decline of the traditional values. Later authors explained the fall of Rome in widely different ways and Demandt (1984) lists about 210 different theories on this subject, probably an incomplete list. The same variety of interpretations affects the studies of the collapse of other societies in history, as described, for instance, by Tainter in 2008.

No consensus appears to exist in this field but, overall, we can divide the interpretations of collapses into two main subsets: theories based on several independent causes (concauses) and theories based on a single cause that generates a cascade of different effects. An example of the first approach – several independent concauses – is the study by E. H. Cline on the collapse of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean Civilization. According to Cline, multiple negative effects occurred at the same time, including climate change, earthquakes, foreign invasions, and more. An extreme example of the multiplication of causes is the study Bury published in 1923 who argued that the collapse of the Roman Empire resulted from several contingent events all occurring at about the same time. Tainter comments stating that Bury considers that “The collapse was just bad luck”.

There are several examples of the second approach, single cause followed by a cascade of related events. One is Douglas Reynolds’ interpretation of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reynolds attributes it to mineral depletion and, specifically, to the cascade of negative effects generated by the growing costs of oil production which affected the whole Soviet economic system. Another single factor model of civilization collapse factor has been proposed by Joseph Tainter in his study “The Collapse of Complex Societies” and in later papers. Tainter identifies “diminishing returns,” a well-known concept in economics, as the general factor in the decline and fall of civilizations. The idea is that, as societies become larger, more complex control structures are needed to maintain the cohesion of society and solve the problems that appear along their path. These structures can be described in terms of governments, the nobility, armies, bureaucracy, and the like. According to Tainter, as these structures become larger, they become less efficient, to the point that the economic returns they provide are smaller than their cost. At this point, society becomes unable to cope with the challenges it faces and must decline, or even collapse. The contrast between single/multiple causes in the interpretation of the fall of societies highlights a general methodological problem. Not only data are often scarce on these historical phenomena, but their interpretation is often based on the author’s personal judgment of the relative importance of the events he studies. It goes without saying that the collapse of civilizations is not amenable to experimental studies but, even taking this point into account, one may ask how proposing a specific interpretation of the fall of – say – the Roman Empire can be justified. Here, we have several problems, including the fact that the very concept of “causation” is hard to approach in a quantitative manner.

Nevertheless, we can choose to rely on the basic scientific concept that the preferable interpretation of an event is not only one that’s compatible with the available data, but also which is of general validity – that is, can explain more than a single event of the same class. In this sense, Tainter’s interpretation of “diminishing returns of complexity” provides a general framework to interpret a large number of cases and it is, therefore, an interesting idea in view of understanding the general phenomenon of societal collapse. In the present study, we looked at Tainter’s ideas using the modern concept of “System Science.”

By using the modelling method known as “system dynamics” we developed a simple biophysical model describing the evolution of a society. The model includes the effects of overshoot and of diminishing returns in the exploitation of natural resources. It is not supposed to describe specific social systems but to provide a “mind-sized” model the main factors that cause collapse. We find that the complexity of the system assumed to be proportional to the size of a stock such as “bureaucracy” follows a trajectory that makes the model compatible with the one proposed by Tainter. That is, the system shows a hysteresis that makes its trajectory non-reversible: reducing the costs of bureaucracy doesn’t return society to the previous conditions of prosperity. ...

Global Warming, Market Opportunity

Global Warming, Market Opportunity. Troy Vettese, Boston Review. Oct. 8, 2019.

On the lure of climate entrepreneurism


In 2001 the economist George Reisman gave the annual Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture entitled “Environmentalism in the Light of Mises and Menger” at Auburn University in Alabama. A protégé of Mises—a leading Austrian School economist—he provided a telling early indication of how neoliberals understood atmospheric politics.

Speaking with a forked tongue, Reisman discussed hypothetical responses to climate change in the same breath that he denied that there was proof for ozone depletion and global warming. He began with the proposition that both were best seen as “equivalent” to “acts of nature” because they were “not being caused by the actions of individual human beings,” but rather by “the combined effect of the actions of several billion people”—in other words, by industrial capitalism. In this formulation he crystallizes a central feature of the neoliberal imagination, the conceit that the market is less a social institution than a force of nature.

Reisman then rules out a state response to the crisis, appealing to Mises’s “enormous spirit of individualism,” according to which “only individuals think and only individuals act.” Since no one individual or firm is solely responsible for degrading the environment, he reasons, no individual should be “punished” by “government controls.” The “appropriate response,” instead, is for individuals to “deal with nature to their own maximum individual advantage”—while respecting private property, of course—even though vast swathes of the Earth might become “uninhabitable.” Catastrophe on such a scale would be “too great a problem for government bureaucrats to handle. . . . But it would certainly not be too great a problem for tens and hundreds of millions of free, thinking individuals living under capitalism to solve.”

Over the last two decades the neoliberal framework has evolved far beyond this sketch. As the heterodox economist Philip Mirowski explains in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013), neoliberal efforts to defeat the movement to confront climate change now form a robust set of interlocking policies. The first line of defense is denial, and a great deal of money has been spent on that front. The total sums are difficult to calculate given how the operation is shrouded in secrecy, but between 2003 and 2010 conservative foundations certainly directed more than half a billion dollars to organizations dedicated to climate denial. Since the Paris agreement of 2015, Big Oil alone has spent a billion dollars fighting climate change legislation.

Then there are the flawed cap-and-trade programs that have done very little to restrict emissions (consider the EU’s feckless Emissions Trading System). And in the end, all these policies appear to be no more than stopgaps meant to buy time until the permanent solution, geoengineering. In Mirowski’s estimation, this set of technologies, especially solar radiation management, is “the final neoliberal fallback” because it “derives from the core neoliberal doctrine that entrepreneurs, unleashed to exploit acts of creative destruction, will eventually innovate market solutions to address dire economic problems.” In the face of this concerted neoliberal strategy of delay and deflection, the environmental movement has thus far failed to implement a cohesive framework for action, offering instead only a patchwork of reactive, piecemeal policies, such as blocking certain fossil fuel infrastructure or championing cap-and-trade (as in the unsuccessful 2009 Waxman-Markey bill).

It is not as if there has been a drought of environmentally minded scholarship. Indeed, the last decade has seen a deluge of new works in this genre. Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011) makes a creative and influential argument that links labor history to different energy regimes. In a more Marxist and historical vein, Andreas Malm examines the first energy transition from water-power to coal during the 1830s in Fossil Capital (2016) to argue that capitalists have long used fossil fuels as weapons in the history of class struggle. While renewable energy sources restrict production temporally and geographically, fossil fuels offer no such constraint leaving capital free to pack up and leave should workers grow unruly. To see the nefarious origins and contemporary implications of geoengineering, one can turn to Clive Hamilton’s Earthmasters (2013) or the report by the Heinrich Böll Foundation (a close affiliate of the German Green Party), The Big Bad Fix: The Case Against Geoengineering (2017).

This scholarship has achieved real results, enriching our understanding of the way previous energy transitions were predicated on the dynamics of class struggle and the materiality of the energy systems themselves. We now have a better idea of the history of geoengineering and what it will likely mean for the future. Yet these works represent only the start of intellectual work in these areas. Environmental history lacks an overarching, consensus narrative for the last two centuries, and the environmental movement still does not have a plan for what to do when things get rough. 

Two recent books—Simon Pirani’s Burning Up and Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering—hint, though, that the movement is at last starting to offer strategic thinking commensurate with the crisis at hand. They reveal how the environmental movement must thoroughly understand neoliberalism to avoid underestimating it as an adversary—or, worse, falling for its charms.

As a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, Pirani might sound like yet another energy analyst, but what sets him apart is his approach, for there aren’t many dyed-in-the-wool Marxists in this line of work. A former member of the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party, Pirani has traded on his close acquaintance with Russia to have a second career studying its methane industry. He has also worked as a journalist and penned books on the Russian revolution and contemporary politics during the Putin era. Burning Up represents the convergence of his parallel professions: it is a history of fossil fuels couched in a Marxist armature. To explain his aim for the book, he quotes the economic historian Adam Tooze, who in 2016 called for “a history that shows how consumption and production became tied together in an expanding feedback loop of ever greater economic and material scope.” Pirani hopes “this book is a step on that path,” but he is too modest. He has written an ambitious history of fossil fuels.

Burning Up is a dense technical treatise of a sprawling subject, but one can tease out a few overarching themes. Most prominent is the contrast between planned and market-based energy systems. Planning offers certain efficiencies, and nowhere is this clearer than cogeneration, which Pirani analyzes in great detail. Rather than letting “waste” heat from industrial production simply dissipate, for example, cogeneration systems pipe it to neighboring buildings.

This technique increases energy efficiency dramatically to 58 percent, compared to the 37 percent achieved by conventional electrical production. In some cases cogenerations systems can even reach 80 percent efficiency. In 1975 cogeneration accounted for 42 percent of urban heating in the Soviet Union and slightly less in Scandinavia, but only 4 percent in the United States. U.S. electricity firms saw cogeneration as a threat to their bottom line, so they refused to give factories access to the grid. After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, cogeneration networks were left to rot as privatization separated electrical and heating markets.

The efficiency of cogeneration is so impressive that one can find praise for it even in the pages of the neoliberal periodical, the Journal of Political Economy. In Marshall Goldman's essay “Externalities and the Race for Economic Growth in the USSR” (1972), which otherwise excoriated the Soviets for their environmental record, he acknowledged that cogeneration infrastructure was an exceptional success of “planned policy for conservation” that had no counterpart in the United States.

In a similar ode to the virtues of planning, Pirani demonstrates that only the state has proven able to achieve electrification in the countryside. The Soviet Union and especially China have exemplary records in this regard and quickly achieved high rates of penetration despite the countries’ low per capita wealth. The unique success of the Chinese state is apparent in comparison to India, as the two started out with electrical industries of similar scope when they achieved independence in the late 1940s. Now, however, only one million Chinese citizens are without power, compared to 237 million Indians (and that number is likely an underestimate), after the privatization schemes of the 1990s did little to help the poor.

In both rich and poor countries, the private sector has had a poor record in rural electrification because most households are simply too poor and dispersed to be worth any firm’s bother. Entrepreneurs such as Samuel Insull of Chicago, the public utilities magnate, preferred urban clients as the foundation of their private electrical empires. Despite the great wealth of the United States, only 10 percent of rural households were hooked up to the grid during the 1920s. It was only when Insull’s tangle of holding companies collapsed during the Great Depression—forcing him to flee the country in disgrace—that the state finally stepped in. The Rural Electrification Agency during the so-called Second New Deal in the latter half of the 1930s supported small co-operatives and behemoths such as the Tennessee Valley Authority to complete the task that the private sector had barely begun.

The exception to the urban/rural divide could be found in countries dedicated to extractive industries. South Africa’s mining firms created their own ambitious electrical infrastructure to dig deeper mines and sift through uprooted mountains for flecks of gold. By 1920 South African mining firms were able to generate as much electricity as London, Birmingham, and Sheffield combined, but this did not alter capitalism’s poor record of providing electricity to the poor; the homes of the miners remained unconnected to this state-of-the-art network. As Pirani observes, “the Orlando power station [in Soweto], commissioned in 1943, supplied the mines but not the township around it: pylons from it, dwarfing un-electrifed shacks beneath, became symbolic.”

Where planning can ensure equal access to energy systems, private firms not only serve only those who can pay, but also encourage profitable profligate consumption. A century ago, Pirani notes, “air conditioning manufacturers battled furiously with engineers, and New York state regulators, who argued that schools would serve their pupils’ health better with fresh air from open windows than conditioned air.” The car industry was perhaps the worst example in terms of promoting waste for private gain. Pirani quotes a lobbyist from 1939 who identified city-dwellers who “refuse to own cars” as “the greatest untapped field of potential customers” and declared that “cities must be remade” and that road builders should “dream of gashing our way ruthlessly through built-up sections of over-crowded cities.”

The car companies’ conspiracy against public transportation is now well known, thanks especially to Barry Commoner’s description of it in The Poverty of Power (1976), but Pirani recounts in excruciating detail how firms bought out streetcar companies, ripped up tracks, and demanded contracts with local transit companies to prohibit the purchase of electric vehicles. The result has been a new breed of cities of an unprecedented scale. Comparing Atlanta to Barcelona, two cities of similar populations, Pirani discovers that “the greatest distance between two points in Atlanta’s city area is 137 km, compared to 37 km in Barcelona; the proportion of trips made on foot is 20 percent in Barcelona; in Atlanta it is too small to be recorded.”

Although the examples of cogeneration, rural electrification, and pedestrian-friendly city planning seem to hint at a stark dichotomy between the state and the market, in some industries there has been a close embrace. This is most manifest in the case of the car industry, especially in the United States. In addition to the eye-watering sums of direct state subsidies to fossil fuel firms, ranging from tax breaks to free government research, another “gigantic stimulation” has been “road transport subsidies, usually in the form of government support for building roads and parking spaces in preference to the transport infrastructure.”

It is not just that such infrastructure is rarely included in the tally of fossil fuel subsidies; this problem is so under-researched that the full scale of such corporate welfare is unknown. The Eastern Bloc again was an exception, with its well-developed public transportation systems and low car density, but they have embarked on the U.S. route since the 1990s. More than any other commodity, cars prove Pirani’s assertion that when individuals consume fossil fuels, “they do so in the context of social and economic systems over which they may have little control,” and that “production and consumption in the global economy have a symbiotic relationship, determined ultimately by relations of wealth and power in the economy.”

In addition to the imperative of pursuing and trapping customers, energy systems are distorted by capital’s drive to reduce labor costs. De-skilling workers and mechanizing production can lead to an extraordinary waste of resources. A recent study from the University of Cambridge found that steel and aluminum producers used sheet metal when less energy-intensive materials would have sufficed (e.g., bars, beams, or wire) because of an effort to reduce labor inputs. Astonishingly, “the researchers concluded the total potential energy savings from ‘practically achievable design changes’ to the most energy-hungry technological system—building design, vehicles and industrial systems—amounted to 73 percent of global primary energy use.” Such practices extend to the fossil fuel industry itself. Coal mining, for instance, has largely shifted from subterranean manual labor to mechanized strip-mining operations, leading to astonishing productivity gains (“in the USA, from 1 tonne per work shift in 1900 to 3.5 tonnes per labor hour in 2003”). The waste in this case is the extreme damage to local environments, from decapitated mountains to mountains of slag.

One of the greatest strengths of Burning Up is its global perspective. Certain dates in the history of climate change science may be familiar to U.S. readers, such as 1958, when Charles Keeling began measuring CO2 particulates from the Mauna Loa Observatory, or 1988, when James Hansen testified in Congress during a heat wave. Pirani, however, stresses the importance of other milestones, including the extraction of 400,000-year-old ice cores from the Soviet’s Vostok base in Antarctica in the 1990s, as well as the meeting in the Austrian town of Villach in 1985, when the UN Environmental Program, the World Meteorological Organization, and the International Council of Scientific Unions warned the world of the threat of global warming. Throughout Burning Up, Pirani conscientiously extends his comparative history of fossil fuels to nations of the Global South such as Nigeria, South Africa, India, and Brazil.

One can quibble with a few points of his interpretation. Although the Soviet Union provides insights into the virtues of planning an energy-system, it would have been helpful if Pirani had delved deeper into the flaws of that model too. He could have drawn on the work of Robert Allen, the polymathic economic historian, who argued that Soviet energy use per unit of GDP was double the OECD rate because of wastefulness in heavy industry. Also, Pirani attributes the economic crisis of the 1970s to powerful unions who squeezed profit rates, but this cannot explain why the high rates of economic growth of the Trente Glorieuse never returned to rich countries even after labor movements had been crushed. Robert Brenner argues in The Economics of Global Turbulence (1998) that the roots of the “Long Downturn” lie instead in the over-capitalization of the manufacturing sector due to the entrance of new competitors such as West Germany and Japan in the 1960s and China in the 2000s. Furthermore, it is odd for Pirani to endorse the ecological economics of Herman Daly. It makes little sense for a Marxist to argue—as Daly does—that economic growth is an “ideology,” as if profit is a matter of opinion rather than a structural necessity for capitalist social reproduction. Moreover, Daly espouses a strange blend of Malthusian and neoliberal solutions, such as a cap-and-trade program for the right to have children. Pirani, who makes his distaste for neoliberalism and Malthusianism evident enough, should look for inspiration elsewhere.

Overall, though, Burning Up is to be heartily recommended as both rich in detail and capacious in scope. The environmental movement has been in need of a book like this for some time.

For her part, Holly Jean Buck reduces the problem of climate change to a matter of watts per square meter. The sun’s rays on average warm the earth about 180 W/m2, but over the last three centuries carbon pollution has increased this by 2.29 W/m2. Solar geoengineering, Buck says, is just “an effort to change this math.” In fact, existing aerosol pollution already masks the full extent of global warming by perhaps as much as a degree centigrade—things could be much worse than we think! Solar radiation management (SRM)—technologies for reflecting sunlight back into space before it warms the planet—would turn this accident into policy. SRM is not the only way to geoengineer the planet, though, and After Geoengineering guides the reader through the latest research on an array of options to tinker with the global thermostat.

Like Pirani, Buck has an atypical resume for an energy specialist, having been a creative writing teacher, a “geospatial technician,” and a foreign affairs analyst before writing her dissertation on environmental technologies at Cornell University. One can discern the imprint of all these experiences in the book, especially in the way it intersperses slivers of science fiction set in exotic locales between technical chapters on the latest developments in geoengineering. The purpose of these sections is to allow the reader to imagine what a geoengineered future might look like.

Moreover, Buck attempts to articulate a vision of geoengineering consistent with other progressive aims. As she explains, there is an “abyss” between optimists who lack “historical awareness of how technology has developed in and through contexts that are often exploitative, unequal and even violent” and pessimists who have a “deep understanding of colonialism, imperialism, and the historical evolution of capitalism” but reject technical solutions to climate change. Precariously, she tries to straddle the abyss, to reconcile geoengineering with justice. While sympathetic to groups such as Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion, she criticizes the “cognitive gap between the demand for [carbon] drawdown and the scale of industrial acuity required to accomplish it,” and thus After Geoengineering is meant to present a more hard-nosed account than what one usually finds in the Green New Deal corpus.

When debates over geoengineering took off in the 1990s, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies were discussed in the same breath as the more audacious intervention of SRM. In the following decade the two were prized apart to escape SRM’s bad press, and a major PR effort was undertaken by fossil fuel firms and states alike to tout CCS’s benefits. Tellingly, a major shift occurred when the United States and Saudi Arabia prompted the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to produce a special report on the technology in 2005. Governments and firms promised to spend billions on CCS research and infrastructure, but little of it has materialized. CCS was simply uncompetitive without a high carbon price (i.e., $200 per tonne) as an equalizer. The coup de grace for “clean coal” came when cheap fracked methane flooded markets near the end of the noughties. For a while MIT’s Institute for the Study of CCS compiled a list of “Cancelled and Inactive Projects,” but the institute itself closed down in 2016. After Geoengineering signals a return to the status quo ante by coupling CCS with SRM. One wonders whether it is with the intent to make SRM seem innocuous by associating it with the less ambitious CCS.

At times, the sheer strangeness of geoengineering makes it hard to distinguish the real from the sci-fi in After Geoengineering. Buck giddily surveys one real-world efficiency-optimizing solution after another. One project funded by the U.S. military aims to grow seaweed—to be used as food and livestock feed (seaweed-fed cows belch less methane), or burned as bioenergy—with automated submarine elevators that bring kelp up to the surface during the day for sunlight and then plunge them to the nutrient-rich ocean depths at night. “Drone submarines,” Buck explains, “would tow these kelp farms to new waters, communicating with harvesters by satellite, which would save labor costs.” If seaweed bioenergy were paired with CCS to become a BECCS project—Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage, the new darling of the IPCC—it could also reduce atmospheric carbon (by trapping it in kelp biomass).

Just as a lot of kelp will have to be burnt to make a dint in the stores of atmospheric carbon, the sheer scale of so-called “enhanced weathering”—another project Buck considers—is simply Olympian. Weathering, a part of the carbon cycle, is a natural form of carbon sequestration. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere interacts with water to form carbonic acid, which then falls with to the earth in rain, dissolving exposed rock. The process releases compounds that flow to the oceans, where they are converted into carbon-containing rocks such as limestone buried at the bottom of the sea. Scientists have devised a way to enhance this natural process a thousandfold: rocks are dug up, crushed (to increase the surface area exposed to rain), and then dispersed on cropland or forests, or dumped into the sea.

To make any significant impact, though, such enhanced weathering would need to become a massive industry in its own right. Mountains kilometers tall, Buck acknowledges, would have to be dug up, crushed, scattered, and disposed of every year. She laments that there are few “obvious champions” for the technology, but it does quite closely fit the expertise of the mining industry. The De Beers Group, which still digs up mountains, has shown considerable interest in the idea; it could get some carbon credits for all that rock it exposes.

Surprisingly, Buck is less open-minded about large-scale afforestation and reforestation. Planting new trees or letting old forests recover is safe, low-tech, and could be implemented immediately. In the long-run it could sequester gigatonnes of carbon. It would require a lot of land, though, some of which would inevitably include large swathes of pasture (because that is the greatest single category of land-use). It would thus pit activists and planners against the livestock industry and, if successfully implemented, require billions of people to reduce how much meat and dairy they eat.

Though it figures in some of the emissions mitigation pathways studied in the IPCC's recent report Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, Buck paints a mostly negative picture, pointing to some studies that suggest boreal forests, in particular, may do more harm than good. She also characterizes the scheme as a “social project” because it requires “defanging” the powerful meat and dairy industry and “cultural and behavioral change” to get people to eat less meat. Rather than reflecting on the advantages of rewilding and reversing the damage done by deforestation—as made brutally clear by the recent fires in the Amazon rainforest—she accepts the hypothesis that “earth’s lands are full and used,” and saves her enthusiasm for other solutions.

But given that the meat and dairy industry take up just over a quarter of the earth’s land surface—some four billion hectares—while contributing only a puny percentage of GDP, any truly committed effort to combat climate change must take it seriously. Changing eating habits is vastly easier than rebuilding cities and transportation infrastructure, let alone finding a sustainable way to make cement or smelt steel. Yet, Buck simply can’t imagine a meatless society, for even in her science fiction the characters eat chicken and tuna. She seems to have forgotten that the crew members of Star Trek are vegans.

As for geoengineering, Buck contends that environmentalists who reject it out of hand are indulging in an “aesthetic luxury” (and eating meat is…?). She does go to great lengths to stress how concern for climate workers, ecosystems, and global justice must be priorities for any geoengineering effort. But she also applauds a meeting in Beijing in 2017, a sort of geoengineering Bandung Conference, where Chinese scientists invited colleagues from the Global South to work on an algorithm that could be used to operate a SRM program. She fails to anticipate that to many readers, perhaps the only thing more terrifying than SRM is SRM operated by AI—a true Skynet.

In Buck’s vision, “solar geoengineering would be done by states or not at all,” but this seems to be wishful thinking. One can easily imagine a corporation or a billionaire acting as a climate change vigilante. SRM is cheap, after all. For only a few hundred million dollars a year a company such as ExxonMobil could protect its billions in assets. (Geoengineers have discussed among themselves the so-called “Greenfinger,” a James Bond–esque villain who goes rogue.) And once SRM starts, we are stuck with it. As Buck notes, “most stratospheric aerosol scenarios last 200 years . . . and there’s probably no deployment scenario that’s less than a hundred years.” Even with workers’ rights and an international team of coders, geoengineering would mark a defeat for the environmental movement.

Despite engaging these critiques, Buck remains wedded to the idea, perhaps because of her fascination with the entrepreneurial scene surrounding it. “The socially conscious entrepreneur will play a vital role in the near term,” she declares. She is keen on Nori, a blockchain marketplace based on buying and trading of sequestered carbon—or as it describes itself, “a scalable incentive system to measure and verify soil carbon.” Buck hopes that such voluntary markets would eventually lead to compulsory ones. Perhaps. But despite her enthusiasm, it is hard to see how Nori would succeed where government cap-and-trade programs failed, for at least the latter had a cap.

Another valiant entrepreneur in Buck’s story is Russ George, who headed the carbon-trading start-up Planktos in the 2000s and organized the first geoengineering experiment in 2012 when he dumped iron filings into the ocean to actuate a bloom of phytoplankton. This was meant to feed the salmon in British Columbian waters and sequester carbon. Alas, it did not work and George’s offices were raided by the Canadian government in 2013 because of the illegality of the experiment. George’s client, the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, fired him and complained that he had lied about his qualifications (an episode omitted from After Geoengineering). Nonetheless, Buck praises George as one of the entrepreneurs who are “rolling up their sleeves and playing around and doing.”

In the end, it is this allure of action and results that leads Buck to the market for environmental salvation. For her, entrepreneurs are “visionary” and “disruptive,” leading the way out of the current impasse in climatic politics. They are the ones getting things done—in her vision, the only ones who could. She warns progressives that entrepreneurs are the “wrong focus of critique.” Buck does warn that “zombified neoliberal capitalism” could fail to implement the needed technologies and that “workers and voters” might need to take matters upon themselves. But the entrepreneur earns more of her esteem than the scientist, who in her telling is a mere bureaucrat in a “big institutional laboratory.” Paraphrasing one of her interview subjects, Buck uncritically conveys the argument that “we are closing out an era that focused on scientific monitoring and scientific discovery. . . . now, we’re in an era of solution building, where entrepreneurs are needed to take a shot, to fail, to try things.” This encapsulates the neoliberalization of science as Mirowski lampoons it in his study Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (2011):

Hierarchies are a temporary stopgap, the efficiency experts warn, but can never usurp the greatest information processor known to humanity: the Market. . . . If you really believe that academic kingpins in their ivy cocoons can efficiently run the scientific enterprise, then think again. The final destination of market reform is to let commercial considerations modularize, standardize, and spin off almost every aspect of the process of scientific research, and consequently erase all boundaries between professional and wage labor. No human being, and especially no scientist, can comprehend the dispersed complexity of knowledge better than the market itself.

At the horizon of climate catastrophe, the science-market dichotomy is collapsing from both ends; entrepreneurs not only have tried to replace scientists, but scientists have become entrepreneurs. David Keith, a prominent climate physicist at Harvard University, also runs the startup Carbon Engineering. As Mirowski noted in Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste, it was not the environmental movement that prevented a planned geoengineering experiment in 2012, led by a consortium of UK universities. The SPICE project—Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering—was cancelled after it was revealed that two scientists had patented the technology beforehand without telling their collaborators. Global warming is a dire emergency, but it is also an opportunity to make a killing.

This brings us back to Reisman—his dark future of Mad Max capitalists blazing the trail forward in a heating world. (Incidentally, one of his latest books has the winning and all-caps title: MARXISM/SOCIALISM, A SOCIOPATHIC PHILOSOPHY CONCEIVED IN GROSS ERROR AND IGNORANCE, CULMINATING IN ECONOMIC CHAOS, ENSLAVEMENT, TERROR, AND MASS MURDER: A CONTRIBUTION TO ITS DEATH.) In this picture the entrepreneurs are our Kulturträger, carrying with them our hopes for civilization’s survival.

As both Burning Up and After Geoengineering make clear, we need a history of fossil fuels and a clear program to deal with the climate crisis. But we also need to understand neoliberal environmental thought so that we may inoculate ourselves against its enduring power. Like Pirani, whose account of economic growth holds out the promise of central planning as a solution, Buck believes that capitalists can be convinced to act responsibly. “Investors aren’t aware that carbon budgets exist, or what they mean for high-emission companies,” she writes, optimistically—as if all we must do is inform them. “We need to create comprehensible accounts of the risks to investors,” she concludes. But capitalists know very well what their interests are. That is why they are winning.

Although Pirani is not as impressed by the whiz-bang of geoengineering as Buck is, he displays remarkably little interest in understanding the enemy. He dismisses neoliberal philosophy as little more than warmed-up arguments from Adam Smith and relies on David Harvey’s argument that neoliberalism is just crass class warfare.

But neoliberals are much more sophisticated than that, in part because theirs is less an economic theory than a totalizing epistemology. For all their trenchant analyses, critics of neoliberalism have enjoyed little success in dismantling the popular appeal of its central axiom—that market will always collect and process more information than any other institution, especially the state. Yet there is now very little time to devise a popular new metaphysics of political economy, let alone an effective response to global warming. As we scramble to preempt the death of the Great Barrier Reef or the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the geoengineers and the entrepreneurs will be there, waiting for us to beg for their help.