Guest post: A big shout-out to the laws of physics
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on A classic post-truth policy.
The orange incarnation of infinite stupidity and evil certainly deserves all the hate and contempt in the known universe and beyond, but let’s not talk as if everyone else were suddenly performing admirably on the climate issue. The truth of the matter is that there are no good guys in this story (or, if they exist, they’re as marginalized and on the fringe as you can possibly get).
If actions speak louder than words there is practically a universal consensus across the industrialized parts of the world that we are definitely going to emit more – a lot more – carbon than even the most optimistic scientific assessments deem compatible with the goal of limiting global warming to 2 °C. We are still going to reach the target, however, and the way that is going to happen is that the laws of physics are going to grant us a special dispensation for the sake of the economy. Of course nobody is going to come out and say that, but that’s what the prevailing view amounts to in practice.
If the physics fails, there’s always God.
I heard Scott Pruitt today and he’s a jerk of course but the trajectory that I see happening — teasing out of the hope from his words — is that the denialists are going to give up… not explicitly but by implication
And the arguments is going to be, and it’s a very legitimate argument, that it’s not exactly clear what policies we should be adopting.
I mean specific policies… with land-use as a specific example… Even among environmentalists who agree that we should be “doing something big”, there is disagreement about what’s the wisest path or a mix of policies and how quickly to do them just within the area of land use etc. etc. it’s obviously an extremely complex problem and there’s probably a host of legitimate ways to approach it… And we’re going to have political arguments about how to proceed, and I think that’s just fine.… So that’s my word of optimism for the day.
And what I want to emphasize is that
even if everybody agreed that we should be “doing something big” to deal with climate change,
there would still be disagreement about exactly what to do.
So the discussion is not a matter only of persuading the denial lists, but seriously thinking about what to be doing… And of course those discussions are happening… I’m not trying to say theyre not but maybe we just put aside Trump et al and we focus on what we can do at the local level… And a lot of it involves land-use and transportation and does not require federal intervention.
Yes, we’re going to keep ignoring and undermining science we don’t like, all the while hoping that in the end, science will save us with some new technology or technologies that we do like. Shut up scientists, and do what you’re told!
We’re all going to have to do what we can: go vegetarian, ride bikes as much as possible, join tree planting organisations and donate to groups trying to educate on climate change and/or mitigate climate change, and encourage others to do the same.
I know that that is not enough on its own, that we need coordinated, top down global action, but that is not a reason to do nothing.
BB
I am very curious with your statement.
Can you please expand on why you think “top/down action” is necessary to save us?
And what sort of top-down action you hope for?
Thanks
Top-down action? What films are you watching? ;-)
Top-down action – worldwide, coordinated, governmentally enforced legisation that restricts our consumption of power and goods – is the only way we could even hope to slow our headlong tumble to the cliff edge.
Things legislation might cover: the closure of all fossil fuel power stations with investment (at least in the short term) in nuclear power – maybe one day we’ll be able to supply our needs with renewables, especially if we crack storing solar energy in huge batteries, but that day ain’t today. We need to reduce our population, maybe via tax breaks for childless people, or a one child policy like China had. Yes, the developed West is seeing a fall in birthrates but a) we have to ensure it continues and b) is extended to the developing world. And that means ensuring a reliable social safety net for the childless in those countries. We need to make cars less affordable – and improve public transport – and maybe tax second family cars (and second family homes) out of existence. There are things that will have to become rare luxuries. Meat, long distance travel, especially by aeroplane etc. Eating out needs to be restricted and taxed – same for take out food. All consumer goods need to become more expensive. All those screens and electronic toys we have in our houses? They need to go, or at the very least, the power to use them needs to be priced in a way that limits their use.
Farming needs to become increasingly intensive while the state invests heavily in research into how to mitigate the environmental effects of that. Of course, a plague or a huge war would help immensely. If we could cut our population back to 1930s levels – or earlier – then we can all carry on merrily eating and drinking and consuming power like there’s no tomorrow…
I could go on. Interestingly, this very subject was an assignement very early in my Environmental Science BSc. Now that degree doesn’t make me an expert – we all know an undergraduate degree means you have mastered a (very) broad overview of the (extreme) basics of a subject, but I did do quite a bit of research on the degree to which our Western lifestyles would have to change in order to drop our emissions. Well, think of the 1930s. That was a reasonably sustainable lifestyle. Even if it was extended to the developing world.
That’s what’s needed and the only way it could happen is by that global top-down enforcement. Look at us – we’re largely the educated, the aware, the ones that care and believe there’s an issue. Yet, we’re here, tapping away on our keyboards, most of us happily flying, taking foreign holidays, eating cheap dietary protein (and veggies, remember there’s huge environmental impacts incurred by growing soy), with phones by our side full of rare earth metals mined in Africa (largely) where wars are being fought for control of those mines. If we aren’t doing what is needed, how can we complain when others don’t?
It’s what’s needed but (this was the conclusion of my assignment – and my opinion has only become more certain since then) it won’t happen. No politician will try to do any of the things that are necessary because he/she will be out of office in a heartbeat. Every vested interest from the corporate to the purely individual resists the necessary changes because no one wants to give up what they have.
And that is why my conclusion is that we are fucked. Sorry and all that, but it’s already too late to prevent the worst of the changes and the investment in technologies that might (might) mitigate them just isn’t there. We are fucked and the best I can say is that most of us reading this won’t see the worst of it.
Will the human race survive? Maybe. I don’t see that as a foregone conclusion though. Most of us no longer have the survival skills to allow us raise our own animals and crops. There’s a real skills gap there. It could be a lethal one. We don’t know how to look after ourselves – not to mention the huge numbers of us who will die through simple things like losing an infrastructure that supplies insulin. Or even, for godsake, spectacles. I have the kind of short sight that means, without lenses, I am largely dependent on other people for care. I couldn’t grow crops, I’d probably kill myself falling over a tree root! Then there’s all the things we don’t think of as lethal. Like wisdom teeth impacting. Like death in childbirth (would have got me twice over). Like tetanus, or all the things we vaccinate against. Like infant diarrhoeal conditions. Or asthma. And that’s just off the top of my head.
I have two children (20 and 22). I don’t like to consider what their later lives will be like.
Thank you, Steamshovelmama, for taking the time to respond.
And yes based on your POV we are fucked. Would you vote for the top down action as you outline?
I certainly wouldn’t, even for a nano second. Based on the politics and mentality I see around me, such as at Evergreen College in Olympia, which is on my mind today, I am not looking for more government but for less because I see too many irresponsible and narrowminded people to trust them.
But more importantly I don’t agree with your POV; and a great many scientists and technologists believe that it is quite possible to support our population and perhaps more without destroying the earth and in fact with good style. And so far as I know their POV is not based on a dictatorship, (which is exactly what you describe). How can we have both… Use of ineffective technology and in a democratic manner? I have no idea time will tell.
As to your suggested dictatorship, yeah it might work but I’ll take a risk on a more democratic course.
I’m no expert, but I think the more mainstream view (among people who take the problem seriously and have some clue what they’re talking about) is that we need to put a price on carbon emissions to reflect their true cost to society (the same way no company is allowed to dump its garbage into the street for free). A carbon tax seems to be the the most straightforward solution, but there are other candidates. James Hansen argues for a fee and dividend model where people pay a fee each time they emit carbon. Then once every year the fees from last year are to be returned in their entirety to the public (not one penny stays with the government) such that the less carbon you produced the more you get. That way most private citizens actually come out ahead. The system is transparent, easy to understand, and should generate the desired incentive/competition to be among the low emitters. Hansen is critical of cap and trade schemes, but others are more positive and argue that they did play an important role in coming to grips with the ozone hole problem (I am in no position to agree or disagree on that latter point). Anyway the fossil fuel industry must not be allowed to influence the regulations in any way, and the price on carbon needs to keep rising from year to year to provide a continued incentive to cut emissions even further.
Bill McKibben also argues for more local production of everything from food to energy. Some parts of his argument I find persuasive, others less so (he is way into organic farming). One obvious advantage is cutting emissions from long distance transportation. I also think he makes a pretty compelling case that small, self-sustained communities will be best equipped to handle the onslaught we know is coming even if we somehow managed to limit global warming to 2 °C (after all 2 °C is already way too high, maybe fatally). I also share his assessment that anything that’s “too big to fail” is too big period. I.e. no single part of our economy or infrastructure should be alowed to grow so big that if it fails, it pulls everything else down with it.
Re. bottom-up vs. top-down McKibben also points out that bottom-up used to be the standard approach among environmentalists, i.e. we should all individually change our light-bulbs, buy more fuel-efficient cars etc. We still need to do that of course, but with climate change both the magnitude of the problem and the time-frame involved (The decade we’re in now – the decade of Trump – has been described as the last decade in which humanity still has a realistic chance of preventing climate change from reaching catastrophic proportions) requires us – and this should sound familiar to feminists – to not just change individual behaviors, but change systems. We also need some top-down enforcement mechanism to get us out of the logic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma/Tragedy of the Commons where nobody is willing to pay the price of giving up fossil fuels because they are afraid of being left with the sucker’s reward (i.e. paying all the price while the defectors who stick with fossil fuels reap all the benefits, and the world gets fucked anyway).
So, are we screwed? Yeah, have to agree with Steamshovelmama there. As an engineer in renewable energy, I’m not too pessimistic about the feasibility of generating sufficient energy to keep civilization going in the absence of fossil fuels (although I’ll be the first to admit that we’re not going to replace fossil fuel with something that works exactly the same way, only without the carbon emissions). I am, however, pretty much infinitely pessimistic about humanity’s inclination to do the right thing.
I am not an optimist about human behavior, except in the very long run, if there is a long one: boundless stupidity, naïveté and un-critical thinking.
But what else is there besides some degree of optimism? I don’t see any choice in any other framework except attempting to solve the problems or at least mitigating them.
Oh, I’m definitely not saying we should give up even if we can’t be very optimistic about our chances of success. To paraphrase Barbara Ehrenreich that doesn’t take optimism or positive thinking, that takes determination and courage. A former leader of the Norwegian Central Bank once said that nothing is more depressing than unjustified optimism, and I couldn’t agree more. We are in this mess, at least in part, because of the human inclination to think that it probably won’t be that bad, so nothing to worry about. At least the pessimists tend to accept that we have a problem, although they might be more inclined to fall in the opposite trap of defeatism.
Evergreen College has nothing to do with global warming or what we do about it.
Ophelia
I guess we will have to agree to disagree on whether Evergreen is significant and it’s impact on the Democratic Party which at this time is the only party of any progressive thinking, progressive in the big sense.
Unless this furor it is managed well, Evergreen will we can the Democratic Party in Washington state and that will mean weakened efforts toward a sustainable economy.
Obviously there are many differences of opinion.
You mean, if you put together a long chain of “if…then”s you can construct an argument that Evergreen has something to do with global warming – but that’s not what you did @8, which is what I was disagreeing with.
@ David Sucher #8
I’m afraid your “great many” scientists are a vanishingly small proportion of the climate scientists actually working in the field of climate change. Plus, by the time the scientific information hits the public – as books, magazine articles, documentaries etc. it is at least three years out of date – more likely five. In a field like climatology right now, that’s long enough to be completely superceded.
The other thing to bear in mind is that every improvement in data collection which leads to improved modelling suggests that we are consistently being overly-conservative. Five years ago the IPCC worst case scenario of a 6 degree rise in mean global temperature was considered alarmist. Today it’s considered to be a) very conservative and b) much closer to being the median figure than originally estimated.
One reinterpretation of the data last year (Friedrich et al (2016) Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming Science Advances 2(11) – not a completely unproblematic journal, but the paper itself has been generally supported by climate scientists around the world) suggested that the actual predicted temperature rise range in 2100 could be from 4.78C to 7.36C. And if that is the case then, in the words of Professor Michael Mann (the “hockey stick” graph from Mauna Loa), it is “game over” (for stabilising climate at levels that will not cause major disruption to human society, ie below a rise of 2C).
The idea that we can combat this while keeping our nice, wealthy, comfortable lifestyles is, frankly, laughable.
Would I vote for the actions I identified? I like to think I would but, realistically, I’m no nobler than any other member of the human race. I’m sitting here, tapping on my keyboard, with an electric light on and a fan going. I have one two fridges and two freezers serving my four person household (those are Eurpean fridges and freezers, I hasten to add. The ones that fit below a worktop, not the US ones you could park a car in!) I have 70 items requiring an electric plug in my house.
You suggest a dictatorship. Well, duh. One thing a democracy isn’t so good at is doing very unpopular things and doing things very quickly. That’s why no army is a democracy and you don’t hold elections during wartime. When you need to move quickly and decisively a democracy will always lose to a dictatorship. A global dictatorship in this case – or at least a loose global federation of dictators. My whole point is that the things that need to be done won’t be because our political systems are not arranged in such a way that the actions needed (unpopular) can be taken at the time needed (yesterday). In fact, given this is a world problem and the “Tragedy of the Commons” applies at a nation-state level as well as an individual one, I don’t think we can do what is needed.
However, if we do try to do anything, small governement won’t help. Firstly, we know from a couple of hundred years of observation that scarce resources require greater input to manage. That means more managers. The only way for a scarce national resource to be managed is for the government to set and enforce behaviour that conserves the resource.
At this point someone usually jumps up and down and starts arguing that Eleanor Ostrom – who won the Nobel prize for work in this area – said government intervention wasn’t always necessary and local communities often developed ways of managing their finite resource. The problem with that is that the communities Ostrom was referring to had developed those managerial strategies over many, many generations and they are expressed as religious, social and cultural taboos and norms. Those are just as binding (if not more so) on most people as a law is in the developed world. People still have to restrict their behaviour in ways they do not want, it’s just that the punishment is social or religious: shunning, excommunication or the equivalent, even banishment – and let’s not forget the likely swift and highly physical revenge of the rest of the (for example) fisherman against one of their community who has endangered them all by overfishing the lake.
In the developed world we don’t have those socio-cultural taboos to keep our consumption in line, nor are the resources we are exploiting popularly understood as finite. they certainly don’t lend themselves to easily defined boundaries (this is our lake, these are our fish, they have to feed all 150 of our community). Maybe we could develop them – but we can’t do that in the time we have, so the only way to be sure our finite resources are used appropriately and fairly – so that all get a share (almost certainly less than they want though) and the resource is not depleted, is via a pretty autocratic form of government.
@Bjarte Foshaug #9
The problem with organic methods of farming is that they simply can’t feed the number of human beings on the planet now. If there were considerably less of us then I think there would be a very good argument for shifting to organic production but, assuming our aim is to keep as many people as possible alive, we actually need more techniques for intensive farming.
I am unsure about how helpful making everything local will be. I mean, there are some practices which you learn about and then just sit there staring because they are so patently ridiculous viewed from any angle other than the profit one. My favourite is Scottish scampi. Scampi is caught off the coast of Scotland, frozen then shipped 12 000 miles to be shelled in Thailand, before being returned the UK for sale to supermarkets. That’s a 24 000 mile round trip just because, even with the price of shipping, it works out cheaper. Thai workers are paid about 25p an hour while UK workers have a minimum wage of £6.70 an hour. Stopping profit driven insanity like that would be an excellent idea.
As for small self-sufficient local communities? They can only be partially self-supporting, otherwise you run into two problems. Firstly, you don’t have a large enough range of skills to support everyone – where’s your insulin coming from? Or your antibiotics? How do we ensure there’s a plumber, a glazier, a enough doctors, a hospital, enough teachers etc etc in each community? Secondly, if a self-sufficient community runs into trouble – the harvest fails, for instance, then everyone dies. There’ll be no point looking for help from neighbouring communities because a self-sufficient small community will not have enough of a surplus to bail out a failing one. Also, if a community fails, neighbouring ones are unlikely to be able to absorb refugees from the failed community. So, in many ways, exactly the same problems remain, just on a smaller, more local scale. Though, as you say, a small community with the right make up of skills, located near to fertile land (and, let’s face it, some areas are better for farming than others), has the most chance of surviving – assuming they address the survival skills gap in a timely manner, and don’t have many people who require some sort of medical maintenance.
So what you mean is a partially self-supporting community that remains embedded in an overarching state controlled infrastructure. You need the state to build roads, organise hospitals and schools, and provide relief for failed communities. The state needs to be involved in the research, manufacture and supply of drugs etc. That could work – especially if a portion of a harvest was “tithed” to the government to be stockpile. We’re now into Joseph in Egypt territory! The thing is, while some problems would be helped by this – the transport of food, primarily, you still need power for the things you’re leaving in the state’s hands, which means the state is now burning fossil fuels on your behalf.
So, again, I think the local-supply thing would be a good way to go, if there were fewer of us. This is arguable, but my own feeling is that we can do nothing significant unless/until there is a significant reduction in the human race. It’s horrible to say, and I’m not happy about saying it, but we need to drop our numbers and make sure they don’t increase again before any of the problems have a chance of being dealt with.
Steamshovelmama, I don’t think there is much real disagreement between us. The part about organic farming was one of the things I placed in the “less so” category. You are of course right that not everything can be done on the local level, so yes “partially self-supporting”, or perhaps “largely self-supporting”, is the right phrase. I still think the argument about cutting down on long distance transportation is a pretty strong one, though. Your scampi example illustrates the point beautifully.
Apart from that, I think what McKibben’s is saying is that the kind of small, local farms he has in mind are less likely to experience things like catastrophic crop-failures. Mind you, there are more factors playing into his argument than just size. There is an overarching theme of spreading the risk, having many legs to stand on, not putting all our eggs in one basket etc. In short, not allowing ourselves to become too dependent on one particular resource or producer (the “too big to fail = too big” argument again). The general idea seems to be that by having many small units instead of a few big ones we make it – not impossible, but certainly less likely that all of them should fail at the same time.
I agree that we need to find some non-violent way of reducing our numbers. Empowering women (which we should be doing anyway) seems the most promising way to go. In the mean time it would be kind of nice if the top 1 % of the worlds population didn’t lay claim to more resources than the bottom 50 %. I also think the idea of perpetual economic growth is inherently unsustainable at this point, which is why I’m currently reading up on things like degrowth, steady state economies etc. What if increased productivity meant we got to work less rather than produce more? Sounds great to me…