"Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future."
March 24, 2021 5:07 AM Subscribe
The headline was itself a train wreck: six dully innocuous words piling up in front of a modifier more suitable to a 1950s horror comic than a sober, academic journal. But there it was: The 17 scientists who co-wrote the article, the experts who peer-reviewed it, and the journal’s editors did not consider the word “ghastly” too sensational, subjective, or value-laden to describe the future toward which our society is advancing with all the prudence and caution of a runaway locomotive. The article’s message was simple: Everything must change.
I've mentioned this before but my brother got to know a guy who is a climate scientist. He suffers from chronic depression and has effectively been isolated by his work. Years back when he was fresh out of grad school the local paper contacted him for an expert opinion on an article they were writing about climate change. The net result was his email inbox (his address was published on the faculty page for the university) was flooded with angry notes from the low-information types, some of which were actually threatening. But he said that he's given up talking about his work to basically everyone because he doesn't want to hear anyone's opinion on the subject anymore. Either they'll contradict the decades of climate research that points towards AGW with their opinion that man cannot affect to the climate or that "climate is always changing" or it's someone who accepts climate change yet still lives extravagantly.
He has the carbon footprint of a house cat. He lives without A/C and keeps his heater set in the 50s (when he has it on at all.) He won't attend a climate conference unless he can get there on Amtrak. He hasn't owned a car for years and won't go somewhere unless he can get there on foot or with his bicycle. He told my brother that he has trouble enjoying much of anything because he is more aware than most just how dire things are going to get. And it turns out that many climate researchers have similar problems.
posted by drstrangelove at 6:19 AM on March 24, 2021 [78 favorites]
He has the carbon footprint of a house cat. He lives without A/C and keeps his heater set in the 50s (when he has it on at all.) He won't attend a climate conference unless he can get there on Amtrak. He hasn't owned a car for years and won't go somewhere unless he can get there on foot or with his bicycle. He told my brother that he has trouble enjoying much of anything because he is more aware than most just how dire things are going to get. And it turns out that many climate researchers have similar problems.
posted by drstrangelove at 6:19 AM on March 24, 2021 [78 favorites]
"As innocuous as it may sound, “growth” should be understood to describe the frenzied ruination of nearly every ecosystem on the planet so that its richest human inhabitants can hold on to their privileges for another generation or two. Rejecting the idolatry of growth means tilting the organization of our societies toward other social goods—health, for instance, and the freedom to exist on a planet that is not on fire. This should not be unimaginable. There are infinite other ways to organize a society, and the fact that we are not widely and urgently discussing them is at this point nothing short of criminal. There are voluminous literatures on degrowth, on circular economies, on mutual aid, and, yes, on socialism, too. There is the 99.999 percent of human history during which we managed to not significantly alter the atmosphere or wipe out such an enormous portion of the species with whom we share the planet. There is the living experience of every indigenous community in the United States, and of others around the globe that have been forced to invent ways to resist and survive a system determined to erase them.
Everything must change. The energy system that is heating the atmosphere was poisoning Black and brown communities in America long before climate change emerged as an issue."
Thank you for posting this. I wanted to highlight the section above (emphasis mine). Here is a relevant scholarly article published in 2019.
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 6:24 AM on March 24, 2021 [27 favorites]
Everything must change. The energy system that is heating the atmosphere was poisoning Black and brown communities in America long before climate change emerged as an issue."
Thank you for posting this. I wanted to highlight the section above (emphasis mine). Here is a relevant scholarly article published in 2019.
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 6:24 AM on March 24, 2021 [27 favorites]
Shall we burn down all the cities and whittle our populations down to isolated hunter gatherer societies?
Would that solve the problem? If so, then it would be irresponsible to take this solution off the table prematurely.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:46 AM on March 24, 2021 [9 favorites]
Would that solve the problem? If so, then it would be irresponsible to take this solution off the table prematurely.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:46 AM on March 24, 2021 [9 favorites]
Here in Canada somewhere between 30-40% of the country will vote for this party in the next federal election, and they could very well win.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:48 AM on March 24, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:48 AM on March 24, 2021 [9 favorites]
So the survival of our terrestrial biosphere depends on the entire world giving up growth and fossil fuel use voluntarily, and putting new social and political structures in place that make the world focus on mutual support and survival rather than competition.
That seems unlikely.
I mean, maybe not impossible. It could happen. We've been wishing for world peace on birthday cakes for generations now, it's got to work sometime, right?
But I think we should put backup plans in place just in case.
We're the only sentient species in the known universe. Our biosphere is in grave danger, and our species is entirely dependent on it. But the technology we need to build our own biospheres is within our reach; we already keep people alive in the vacuum of space for years.
If we can't figure out how to fix a planetary biosphere, a problem of enormous scope and complexity unlike anything we've dealt with as a species before, then our survival as a species is going to depend on enough of us having somewhere to retreat to. We'll need biospheres that can withstand the hostile alien environment that our planet will become.
We have to start thinking about what to do if we lose this battle.
posted by MrVisible at 7:03 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
That seems unlikely.
I mean, maybe not impossible. It could happen. We've been wishing for world peace on birthday cakes for generations now, it's got to work sometime, right?
But I think we should put backup plans in place just in case.
We're the only sentient species in the known universe. Our biosphere is in grave danger, and our species is entirely dependent on it. But the technology we need to build our own biospheres is within our reach; we already keep people alive in the vacuum of space for years.
If we can't figure out how to fix a planetary biosphere, a problem of enormous scope and complexity unlike anything we've dealt with as a species before, then our survival as a species is going to depend on enough of us having somewhere to retreat to. We'll need biospheres that can withstand the hostile alien environment that our planet will become.
We have to start thinking about what to do if we lose this battle.
posted by MrVisible at 7:03 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
I've said this before, but when society is finally ready to take large-scale action on this issue it will be military action.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:07 AM on March 24, 2021 [20 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:07 AM on March 24, 2021 [20 favorites]
Shall we burn down all the cities and whittle our populations down to isolated hunter gatherer societies
Certain elements of the white supremacist movement are way ahead of you on this one; that's precisely the type of thing they want to do. Small tribes organized around Big Daddy and the murder of Outsiders, and in the background, the smoking ruins of cities once occupied by brown folks.
...that this would mean they can't get parts for the AR15 they're constantly fondling seems to have eluded them, but still they're very much on-board with the "burn all the cities" idea.
People should be much, much, much more worried about those guys I think.
posted by aramaic at 7:08 AM on March 24, 2021 [28 favorites]
Certain elements of the white supremacist movement are way ahead of you on this one; that's precisely the type of thing they want to do. Small tribes organized around Big Daddy and the murder of Outsiders, and in the background, the smoking ruins of cities once occupied by brown folks.
...that this would mean they can't get parts for the AR15 they're constantly fondling seems to have eluded them, but still they're very much on-board with the "burn all the cities" idea.
People should be much, much, much more worried about those guys I think.
posted by aramaic at 7:08 AM on March 24, 2021 [28 favorites]
"If all of humanity were to disappear, the remainder of life would spring back and flourish. The mass extinctions now under way would cease, the damaged ecosystems heal and expand outward. If all the ants somehow disappeared, the effect would be exactly the opposite, and catastrophic. Species extinction would increase even more over the present rate, and the land ecosystems would shrivel more rapidly as the considerable services provided by these insects were pulled away."
- E.O. Wilson & Bert Hölldobler in Journey To The Ants (the introductory version of their Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece: The Ants)
posted by fairmettle at 7:12 AM on March 24, 2021 [9 favorites]
There are many, many people who live in subsistence societies and who have not contributed to our current disaster. Don't think they should be written off to burn with the rest of us, myself.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:30 AM on March 24, 2021 [15 favorites]
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:30 AM on March 24, 2021 [15 favorites]
Also can't feeling like letting billionaires throw more and more resources at the long shot of life on Mars, rather than taking that money and putting into things we know work, is the sort of bad thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:32 AM on March 24, 2021 [32 favorites]
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:32 AM on March 24, 2021 [32 favorites]
We're the only sentient species in the known universe. Our biosphere is in grave danger, and our species is entirely dependent on it. But the technology we need to build our own biospheres is within our reach; we already keep people alive in the vacuum of space for years.
If we can't figure out how to fix a planetary biosphere, a problem of enormous scope and complexity unlike anything we've dealt with as a species before, then our survival as a species is going to depend on enough of us having somewhere to retreat to. We'll need biospheres that can withstand the hostile alien environment that our planet will become.
We have to start thinking about what to do if we lose this battle.
It's dozens of orders of magnitude harder colonizing space with a tiny colony than to fix the ENTIRE earth. It's a dangerous, murderous idea because it distracts attention and resources from a difficult to an impossible problem in the timescales involved. I consider it genocidal to seriously propose it beyond fiction. It's NOT GONNA HAPPEN
Mars is the "easiest" thing to do. See the analysis below from an ex-member of this site about how it is suicidal.
—
It's like a friggen religion. "Mars will save us!"
If we can't save the only living planet we have ever seen, allowing it to die and moving to the dark, freezing cold, airless, arid, lifeless, poisonous deserts of Mars is not a good solution.
In the entire history of space - trillions of dollars!, over 50 years, only 553 humans have ever been in space. No one has ever been born in space. We've grown about 10,000 kilocalories of food, all lettuce. We have no manufacturing, no industry at all there, no permanent colony of any type.
—
The Earth is extremely hospitable to humans because we evolved here in response to its conditions.
Space travel is very very hard and very very very expensive. There isn't really anywhere you want to go and stay. Mining asteroids and solar power satellites seem very reasonable, but living on the dark, cold, arid, lifeless poisonous deserts of Mars sounds worse than the worst jail cell, and the cost of getting a self-sustaining colony would literally be on the order of a quadrillion dollars - yes, I have done the math though a lot of the estimation is very hard.
Don't forget the the lack of van allen belt shielding......
How about oxygen to breathe? Where do we get it from at scale?
Energy to keep us warm from the cold?
Where do we get things to repair even the simplest of objects? Where do they come from? Like all the systems we generate that the colony and people depend on?
How do you deal with health issues of people? Drugs? Alllergies? Infectious disease in a colony? Where do people go?
----
As an exercise, work out how much it would cost to set up manufacturing on Mars to make a laptop entirely from Martian materials, including the chips. A chip fab on Earth costs a billion dollars and requires the existence of an advanced chemical industry able to make very specific chemicals at an extremely high purity, and a world-wide network of raw material sourcing for the less common elements that are required to make a modern computer, which means mining and smelting and blast furnaces and power generation and distribution and hospitals and pharmaceutical factories and daycares and commuter busses and atmosphere plants, and a "leaks department" and space suit manufacturing and water mines and...
And we know some of these things are lacking. Everything we do to manufacture chips on Earth requires copious amount of water, which is wasted. Mars has some water. Does it even have as much as 0.1% as much as the Earth? We do not know.
There are a thousand problems like this, each as intractable as the last.
---
People are looking for any excuse to not save our planet from the catastrophe we are causing. Fantasies like Mars are at this point a shameful abrogation of our real duties to our planet and to our grandchildren, 99.99% of whom will for the next thousand years live and die on Earth even in the most optimistic of space travel projections.
posted by lalochezia at 7:37 AM on March 24, 2021 [77 favorites]
Agree, lesbiassparrow. Reading the scientific paper linked in the article highlights how dangerous the world looks in the next few decades, especially in impoverished parts of the globe.
My guess? China completes massive reductions in emissions, transitions to a very green economy (enough to brag about) and then aggressively blames the West for decades of climate malfeasance and their increasingly obvious and tangential consequences. It’s not impossible (though I believe unlikely, given technological constraints) that they may develop a technology that truly sequesters carbon, putting them in the forefront in the same way the space race and 90’s internet revolution did for the US.
Frankly, the US deserves to be castigated for our lack of climate focus. It’s disgusting, and when I think about it, gives me the same repeating refrain in my head that I had the morning after Trump was elected: We are the bad guys
posted by glaucon at 7:39 AM on March 24, 2021 [7 favorites]
My guess? China completes massive reductions in emissions, transitions to a very green economy (enough to brag about) and then aggressively blames the West for decades of climate malfeasance and their increasingly obvious and tangential consequences. It’s not impossible (though I believe unlikely, given technological constraints) that they may develop a technology that truly sequesters carbon, putting them in the forefront in the same way the space race and 90’s internet revolution did for the US.
Frankly, the US deserves to be castigated for our lack of climate focus. It’s disgusting, and when I think about it, gives me the same repeating refrain in my head that I had the morning after Trump was elected: We are the bad guys
posted by glaucon at 7:39 AM on March 24, 2021 [7 favorites]
Shall we burn down all the cities and whittle our populations down to isolated hunter gatherer societies?
Don't really see why we would do that since the carbon footprint of people living in dense urban areas is dramatically lower than that of people living in detached houses 30 miles from their workplace. What needs to be burned down are all the endless sprawling tracts of detached 2000 sq ft homes.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 7:44 AM on March 24, 2021 [19 favorites]
Don't really see why we would do that since the carbon footprint of people living in dense urban areas is dramatically lower than that of people living in detached houses 30 miles from their workplace. What needs to be burned down are all the endless sprawling tracts of detached 2000 sq ft homes.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 7:44 AM on March 24, 2021 [19 favorites]
Living on Mars will not be better.
posted by amtho at 7:46 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by amtho at 7:46 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Please note, lalochezia, that I never mentioned Mars. I think we're going to need biospheres to survive here on Earth. Gestating and raising healthy children in the environment as we're expecting it to be is going to be, I'm afraid, impossible.
It's a dangerous, murderous idea because it distracts attention and resources from a difficult to an impossible problem in the timescales involved.
If your plans depend on everyone on the planet collaborating, then we should talk about backup plans.
posted by MrVisible at 7:47 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
It's a dangerous, murderous idea because it distracts attention and resources from a difficult to an impossible problem in the timescales involved.
If your plans depend on everyone on the planet collaborating, then we should talk about backup plans.
posted by MrVisible at 7:47 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
Fantasies like Mars
...are a great way to test out and fund the development of armored underground Survival Bases that will protect our Pure White Children against the godless hordes of desperadoes left on the surface.
No, really, I genuinely think that's part of the "plan" (there is no plan). People will fund the Space Shiny, and in due course it gets used down here.
There are no saviors, except in literature. The Great Man Theory of history is, and has always been, moronic. China won't save the world. Musk won't save the world. The Fourth Regional Subcommittee on Impact Redevelopment Projections won't save the world.
The world can't be saved because too many people, all around the world, don't want to be bothered.
posted by aramaic at 7:50 AM on March 24, 2021 [14 favorites]
...are a great way to test out and fund the development of armored underground Survival Bases that will protect our Pure White Children against the godless hordes of desperadoes left on the surface.
No, really, I genuinely think that's part of the "plan" (there is no plan). People will fund the Space Shiny, and in due course it gets used down here.
There are no saviors, except in literature. The Great Man Theory of history is, and has always been, moronic. China won't save the world. Musk won't save the world. The Fourth Regional Subcommittee on Impact Redevelopment Projections won't save the world.
The world can't be saved because too many people, all around the world, don't want to be bothered.
posted by aramaic at 7:50 AM on March 24, 2021 [14 favorites]
Just gotta love “solutions” that start off with “well, first all we need is the genocide of 7 billion people…”
posted by sideshow at 7:52 AM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by sideshow at 7:52 AM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]
Living on Mars will not be better.
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact it’s cold as hell.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:58 AM on March 24, 2021 [22 favorites]
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact it’s cold as hell.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:58 AM on March 24, 2021 [22 favorites]
noted doomsayer Paul R. Ehrlich.
I noticed that. Blast from the past. A recent interview, for the curious
posted by BWA at 8:05 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
I noticed that. Blast from the past. A recent interview, for the curious
posted by BWA at 8:05 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
Frankly, each of us should be thinking about a backup plan, individually. Not so much a backup plan for "what happens when the entire earth is an unsurvivable wasteland" but "what happens in the next twenty to thirty years as things worsen both environmentally and politically". And "what happens to your kids" if you have them.
If you live in the west, there's going to be more fires. If you live on the coast there's going to be more floods. Wherever you live, whatever the catastrophic weather events are, they're going to happen more often.
If you live in a rich country, that country will, more and more, tighten its border controls. As weather events ruin cities and create economic instability, the country and the region will tighten internal controls. This is already happening. The internet makes it possible on a level that was inconceivable thirty years ago. Those drones and robot dogs and so on? They're going to be used to keep the peace.
If you live in a place with a great deal of inequality. there's going to be more violence. This is going to make life more dangerous for everyone. Some people will arm themselves, which will mostly make things more dangerous. There will probably be more policing in some ways and places and radically less policing in others.
As things get worse, there will be more and more conspiracy theories and cults. What political power will these have? How will they be mobilized by the state? Again, this is already happening but it's going to intensify.
Every form of insecurity is going to get worse for everyone except the very wealthy. Power outages, internet outages, shortages.
So, I mean, we all need some immediate plans for that, if only so that we're not caught absolutely flat-footed. This isn't about going to Mars or moving to the back woods - it's about trying to have some flex built into how we live so that we can survive as much as possible of what's coming.
The pat answer is "organize", and of course organizing is fine, but people should also, to the extent possible, have detailed personal plans.
posted by Frowner at 8:08 AM on March 24, 2021 [47 favorites]
If you live in the west, there's going to be more fires. If you live on the coast there's going to be more floods. Wherever you live, whatever the catastrophic weather events are, they're going to happen more often.
If you live in a rich country, that country will, more and more, tighten its border controls. As weather events ruin cities and create economic instability, the country and the region will tighten internal controls. This is already happening. The internet makes it possible on a level that was inconceivable thirty years ago. Those drones and robot dogs and so on? They're going to be used to keep the peace.
If you live in a place with a great deal of inequality. there's going to be more violence. This is going to make life more dangerous for everyone. Some people will arm themselves, which will mostly make things more dangerous. There will probably be more policing in some ways and places and radically less policing in others.
As things get worse, there will be more and more conspiracy theories and cults. What political power will these have? How will they be mobilized by the state? Again, this is already happening but it's going to intensify.
Every form of insecurity is going to get worse for everyone except the very wealthy. Power outages, internet outages, shortages.
So, I mean, we all need some immediate plans for that, if only so that we're not caught absolutely flat-footed. This isn't about going to Mars or moving to the back woods - it's about trying to have some flex built into how we live so that we can survive as much as possible of what's coming.
The pat answer is "organize", and of course organizing is fine, but people should also, to the extent possible, have detailed personal plans.
posted by Frowner at 8:08 AM on March 24, 2021 [47 favorites]
The pandemic has shown that there is zero chance that the rich nations of the world will do anything at the scale and pace necessary to avert disaster, barring some technological innovation that makes it trivial to do without affecting people's lifestyles much. We might undertake some kind of climate geoengineering project before it's too late. More likely we will undertake it only after climate change is plainly undeniable and a direct threat to the present generation (e.g. once substantial parts of the rich world become literally, lethally uninhabitable by humans).
Given that, the single best thing anyone can do for the biosphere is to not have children, especially people living in resource-intense cultures such as the US. Not only does this dramatically reduce one's resource footprint, it also means fewer people who will suffer in the future should everything fall apart. On a political level, this means supporting policies that make it easy for everyone to make that choice, particularly political, economic, and reproductive empowerment for women and girls, especially those who are intersectionally disadvantaged.
This is not the kind of "oh if we all just recycled more" thinking that puts the onus on individuals when the problem is systemic. Of course there are systemic aspects to this problem (e.g. access to reproductive healthcare, economic equality for women), but the decision of whether to have a child should always ultimately be an individual one, and so this is an area where individual choices are key.
And just to reiterate and be 100% clear: this is especially important for people living in resource-intense cultures. I am emphatically against the idea that the poor population of the world needs to be reduced so that the rich can continue to live the status quo. Even apart from the moral odiousness of that idea, the rich consume almost all the world's resources, so that idea doesn't even make internal sense. The richer you are (on a global scale), the more important it is for your unsustainable resource consumption to end with you.
posted by jedicus at 8:15 AM on March 24, 2021 [16 favorites]
Given that, the single best thing anyone can do for the biosphere is to not have children, especially people living in resource-intense cultures such as the US. Not only does this dramatically reduce one's resource footprint, it also means fewer people who will suffer in the future should everything fall apart. On a political level, this means supporting policies that make it easy for everyone to make that choice, particularly political, economic, and reproductive empowerment for women and girls, especially those who are intersectionally disadvantaged.
This is not the kind of "oh if we all just recycled more" thinking that puts the onus on individuals when the problem is systemic. Of course there are systemic aspects to this problem (e.g. access to reproductive healthcare, economic equality for women), but the decision of whether to have a child should always ultimately be an individual one, and so this is an area where individual choices are key.
And just to reiterate and be 100% clear: this is especially important for people living in resource-intense cultures. I am emphatically against the idea that the poor population of the world needs to be reduced so that the rich can continue to live the status quo. Even apart from the moral odiousness of that idea, the rich consume almost all the world's resources, so that idea doesn't even make internal sense. The richer you are (on a global scale), the more important it is for your unsustainable resource consumption to end with you.
posted by jedicus at 8:15 AM on March 24, 2021 [16 favorites]
If we can't save the only living planet we have ever seen, allowing it to die and moving to the dark, freezing cold, airless, arid, lifeless, poisonous deserts of Mars is not a good solution.
Yeah, Mars is the second most habitable planet available to us*, and that is, uh, not a good thing, because Mars is not habitable at all. Pretty much any "solution" which involves going to Mars (whether it involves terraforming Mars, or building enclosed living environments there), would be made simpler, cheaper, and more technologically attainable by doing the exact same thing here on Earth. No matter how badly we fuck up the atmospheric balance here, fixing Earth's ecosystem is going to be easier than finding a way to build an Earthlike atmosphere or ecology on Mars. And as for the enclosed shelters thing: well, if we're going to hermetically seal an environment, it'd be a lot easier to build and install them where we already have raw materials, industry and labor, than by taking the products of that industry and labor and shooting 'em across millions of miles of space.
Earth's what we've got. We'd have to fuck it up really badly before anywhere else in the solar system is even a remotely attractive option. We can't look to escape, because we are not escaping this by just moving somewhere else.
*Probably, anyways. There are arguments Mars wouldn't be our second choice. Venus presents challenges which appear more severe but which come from a completely distinct class of problems. Terraforming is basically a nonexistent technology, and the question of whether rehabilitating Venus's hostility or establishing the bare necessities of life on Mars would be easier is not one we really have the data to answer fully.
posted by jackbishop at 8:19 AM on March 24, 2021 [13 favorites]
Yeah, Mars is the second most habitable planet available to us*, and that is, uh, not a good thing, because Mars is not habitable at all. Pretty much any "solution" which involves going to Mars (whether it involves terraforming Mars, or building enclosed living environments there), would be made simpler, cheaper, and more technologically attainable by doing the exact same thing here on Earth. No matter how badly we fuck up the atmospheric balance here, fixing Earth's ecosystem is going to be easier than finding a way to build an Earthlike atmosphere or ecology on Mars. And as for the enclosed shelters thing: well, if we're going to hermetically seal an environment, it'd be a lot easier to build and install them where we already have raw materials, industry and labor, than by taking the products of that industry and labor and shooting 'em across millions of miles of space.
Earth's what we've got. We'd have to fuck it up really badly before anywhere else in the solar system is even a remotely attractive option. We can't look to escape, because we are not escaping this by just moving somewhere else.
*Probably, anyways. There are arguments Mars wouldn't be our second choice. Venus presents challenges which appear more severe but which come from a completely distinct class of problems. Terraforming is basically a nonexistent technology, and the question of whether rehabilitating Venus's hostility or establishing the bare necessities of life on Mars would be easier is not one we really have the data to answer fully.
posted by jackbishop at 8:19 AM on March 24, 2021 [13 favorites]
Space fantasy is great because it turns complex political and ecological problems into engineering ones.
posted by benzenedream at 8:25 AM on March 24, 2021 [30 favorites]
posted by benzenedream at 8:25 AM on March 24, 2021 [30 favorites]
all but one of the IPCC’s scenarios that envision us successfully limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius rely on the use of technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere after the fact. (The one exception involves converting an area more than half the size of the United States to forest.Tell your local representatives to bring back the forests.
posted by aniola at 8:28 AM on March 24, 2021 [9 favorites]
And plant a tree.
posted by aniola at 8:29 AM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by aniola at 8:29 AM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
We're the only sentient species in the known universe.
Well, no. But we are the only ones who can TRY to fix climate change caused by human activity.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:31 AM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]
Well, no. But we are the only ones who can TRY to fix climate change caused by human activity.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:31 AM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]
I think we're going to need biospheres to survive here on Earth.
I really don't think this is possible due to the amount of carbon dioxide we produce as a byproduct of our cellular metabolism, at scale. This earth is already (was already?) the perfect biosphere for us humans because our large quantities of waste products dissipate in the plentiful gaseous oxygenated environment. See the Biosphere 2 project that failed due to the inability of the system to manage to CO2 output of the various creatures (mostly humans) living in the encapsulated environment.
On top of that, most of us could barely hang with a half-assed quarantine in our own homes where we could still plausibly go to Wal-Mart whenever we wanted, just masked. Can you imagine the amount of BUT MUH FREEDUM!!!! that would come as a result of people being forced to live in encapsulated environments? Nah, we ain't doing biospheres.
posted by erattacorrige at 8:35 AM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
I really don't think this is possible due to the amount of carbon dioxide we produce as a byproduct of our cellular metabolism, at scale. This earth is already (was already?) the perfect biosphere for us humans because our large quantities of waste products dissipate in the plentiful gaseous oxygenated environment. See the Biosphere 2 project that failed due to the inability of the system to manage to CO2 output of the various creatures (mostly humans) living in the encapsulated environment.
On top of that, most of us could barely hang with a half-assed quarantine in our own homes where we could still plausibly go to Wal-Mart whenever we wanted, just masked. Can you imagine the amount of BUT MUH FREEDUM!!!! that would come as a result of people being forced to live in encapsulated environments? Nah, we ain't doing biospheres.
posted by erattacorrige at 8:35 AM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
Mod note: Couple comments deleted. We've had a great many climate disaster threads; if we're going to have another let's avoid some of the known failure modes. Please don't put words in other people's mouths and don't hector people for not focusing on what you want, just speak for yourself in your own words focusing on what you think's important (and once you've made that point once, leave it at that). Please don't suggest genocide or magical population reduction (because no matter how you intend that, for many people it lands as being in line with racist/xenophobic ideas). Please don't accuse either parents or non-parents of being callous about the future etc. As always be mindful of the Community Guidelines. Thanks.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:35 AM on March 24, 2021 [12 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:35 AM on March 24, 2021 [12 favorites]
Frankly, each of us should be thinking about a backup plan, individually.
Frankly, this isn't something we can deal with, individually. And I have no idea how we as a culture or a species can recapture the sense of community necessary to deal with it in time. My remaining hope is that society fracturing leads to that sense of local support before it leads to barbarism and horror.
posted by Reyturner at 8:37 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
Frankly, this isn't something we can deal with, individually. And I have no idea how we as a culture or a species can recapture the sense of community necessary to deal with it in time. My remaining hope is that society fracturing leads to that sense of local support before it leads to barbarism and horror.
posted by Reyturner at 8:37 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
A backup plan for your own life is indeed something we can all plan for individually.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:39 AM on March 24, 2021
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:39 AM on March 24, 2021
I guess we can stockpile guns and canned goods so we can be the last ones to die alone.
posted by Reyturner at 8:40 AM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by Reyturner at 8:40 AM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]
I can tell you didn't read the rest of that comment you responded to.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:41 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:41 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Of you mean the list of climate disasters and social collapse? How are you planning on dealing with that, individually?
posted by Reyturner at 8:44 AM on March 24, 2021
posted by Reyturner at 8:44 AM on March 24, 2021
I knew someone near Sacramento who built a whole extra wing to his house to help support regional climate refugees when they get flooded out due to rising water levels.
We need people working on individual plans AND collective plans. Let's move on.
posted by aniola at 8:45 AM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
We need people working on individual plans AND collective plans. Let's move on.
posted by aniola at 8:45 AM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
There are many, many people who live in subsistence societies and who have not contributed to our current disaster. Don't think they should be written off to burn with the rest of us, myself.
Unfortunately of course they will be.
People are keen on a just-world theory of climate change where the effects will somehow end up punishing the people who individually or collectively have caused the most emissions. That clearly isn't going to happen. It would be helpful it if did because it would lead to more aggressive reductions where they're really needed - the countries which do the most emitting. You will note how much better we have been at reducing clearly visible and locally damaging air pollution than globally problematic and time-lagged CO2 emissions.
We do now have most of the package of technologies to substantially decarbonise our global system and at a price which will be politically acceptable1.
That being said, this does not mean that we're going to avoid the effects of quite a lot of climate change. We've got 1.2C that's already happened and on current change trajectories we're looking at 2.3C - 2.6C by the end of the century. That's due to emissions not actually reaching a low enough level fast enough, even if they do reach net zero near 2050. Given that 2C is already a bad scenario, the most likely scenario is that we do reach a position in the early 2050s where we are doing no or very little net emitting while simultaneously still having to deal with quite a lot of bad climate change.
On the linked ERL paper on decoupling, I think time will tell. This is a literature review of econometric evidence. In other words it's looking at whether, empirically, there has been decoupling. Not whether there could be. It does seem to show that empirically, decoupling has not happened yet on a large scale. They note: . Exceptions include a group of 18 countries that have reduced CO2 emissions in the last decade (Le Quere et al 2019)
That's this paper which you can find linked from the first author's website.
That paper does show strong evidence for absolute decoupling of GDP and emissions. Work done since then (this covers only to 2015) specifically for the UK shows further decoupling on a consumer and not just a territorial basis. In other words, this is not just due to production of energy intensive materials moving elsewhere.
The pandemic has shown that there is zero chance that the rich nations of the world will do anything at the scale and pace necessary to avert disaster, barring some technological innovation that makes it trivial to do without affecting people's lifestyles much. We might undertake some kind of climate geoengineering project before it's too late. More likely we will undertake it only after climate change is plainly undeniable and a direct threat to the present generation (e.g. once substantial parts of the rich world become literally, lethally uninhabitable by humans).
Seriously, yes. Just look at how the EU and UK are behaving over vaccines. They're furiously manoeuvring over access to vaccines and from the rhetoric you'd think that these were two blocs with no vaccines at all.
Actually the EU is the third most vaccinated major country or trade-bloc in the world already and will be absolutely overflowing with vaccines through the summer. And these are two entities that do an immense amount of trade, have very close links, and customarily have a high amount of travel between them. Meanwhile, very few vaccines are reaching Africa. If this is how they behave over a few weeks delay to a vaccination programme for a virus that - although I am very keen not to get it - is only fatal for very few infected people, how will they and other rich countries behave once the entire world is in a semi-permanent emergency state? Badly is how. See also how the same people have behaved over North African refugees (and that is not entirely unrelated to climate as well). We have not collectively built the institutions and affections required across international borders in the good times to do the moral thing in the bad. Prepare for some very ugly decades.
(1) Logically, any price is acceptable to protect the future of humanity but we have no more invented the political technology to get people to act as if that's true than we have invented the technology of free energy storage so constraints imposed by our current financial and social system, however dumb I might think that system is, do matter. I personally think that if we can't convince large proportions of the global population that we can get to zero net emissions without them compromising what they see as their quality of life, then we're going to struggle to implement the necessary
posted by atrazine at 8:47 AM on March 24, 2021 [8 favorites]
Unfortunately of course they will be.
People are keen on a just-world theory of climate change where the effects will somehow end up punishing the people who individually or collectively have caused the most emissions. That clearly isn't going to happen. It would be helpful it if did because it would lead to more aggressive reductions where they're really needed - the countries which do the most emitting. You will note how much better we have been at reducing clearly visible and locally damaging air pollution than globally problematic and time-lagged CO2 emissions.
We do now have most of the package of technologies to substantially decarbonise our global system and at a price which will be politically acceptable1.
That being said, this does not mean that we're going to avoid the effects of quite a lot of climate change. We've got 1.2C that's already happened and on current change trajectories we're looking at 2.3C - 2.6C by the end of the century. That's due to emissions not actually reaching a low enough level fast enough, even if they do reach net zero near 2050. Given that 2C is already a bad scenario, the most likely scenario is that we do reach a position in the early 2050s where we are doing no or very little net emitting while simultaneously still having to deal with quite a lot of bad climate change.
On the linked ERL paper on decoupling, I think time will tell. This is a literature review of econometric evidence. In other words it's looking at whether, empirically, there has been decoupling. Not whether there could be. It does seem to show that empirically, decoupling has not happened yet on a large scale. They note: . Exceptions include a group of 18 countries that have reduced CO2 emissions in the last decade (Le Quere et al 2019)
That's this paper which you can find linked from the first author's website.
That paper does show strong evidence for absolute decoupling of GDP and emissions. Work done since then (this covers only to 2015) specifically for the UK shows further decoupling on a consumer and not just a territorial basis. In other words, this is not just due to production of energy intensive materials moving elsewhere.
The pandemic has shown that there is zero chance that the rich nations of the world will do anything at the scale and pace necessary to avert disaster, barring some technological innovation that makes it trivial to do without affecting people's lifestyles much. We might undertake some kind of climate geoengineering project before it's too late. More likely we will undertake it only after climate change is plainly undeniable and a direct threat to the present generation (e.g. once substantial parts of the rich world become literally, lethally uninhabitable by humans).
Seriously, yes. Just look at how the EU and UK are behaving over vaccines. They're furiously manoeuvring over access to vaccines and from the rhetoric you'd think that these were two blocs with no vaccines at all.
Actually the EU is the third most vaccinated major country or trade-bloc in the world already and will be absolutely overflowing with vaccines through the summer. And these are two entities that do an immense amount of trade, have very close links, and customarily have a high amount of travel between them. Meanwhile, very few vaccines are reaching Africa. If this is how they behave over a few weeks delay to a vaccination programme for a virus that - although I am very keen not to get it - is only fatal for very few infected people, how will they and other rich countries behave once the entire world is in a semi-permanent emergency state? Badly is how. See also how the same people have behaved over North African refugees (and that is not entirely unrelated to climate as well). We have not collectively built the institutions and affections required across international borders in the good times to do the moral thing in the bad. Prepare for some very ugly decades.
(1) Logically, any price is acceptable to protect the future of humanity but we have no more invented the political technology to get people to act as if that's true than we have invented the technology of free energy storage so constraints imposed by our current financial and social system, however dumb I might think that system is, do matter. I personally think that if we can't convince large proportions of the global population that we can get to zero net emissions without them compromising what they see as their quality of life, then we're going to struggle to implement the necessary
posted by atrazine at 8:47 AM on March 24, 2021 [8 favorites]
How are you planning on dealing with that, individually?
posted by Reyturner
Working on it. It's a good idea to think about it. It's going to get dire. We all need to be prepared.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:00 AM on March 24, 2021
posted by Reyturner
Working on it. It's a good idea to think about it. It's going to get dire. We all need to be prepared.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:00 AM on March 24, 2021
It's already here, folks.
posted by aniola at 9:03 AM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by aniola at 9:03 AM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
Not for me? I am living comfortably. That is what will change.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:04 AM on March 24, 2021
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:04 AM on March 24, 2021
Ideally today.
posted by aniola at 9:08 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by aniola at 9:08 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
I mean, ideally people who are living comfortably will start changing their habits today.
posted by aniola at 9:09 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by aniola at 9:09 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
People are keen on a just-world theory of climate change where the effects will somehow end up punishing the people who individually or collectively have caused the most emissions. That clearly isn't going to happen. It would be helpful it if did because it would lead to more aggressive reductions where they're really needed - the countries which do the most emitting. You will note how much better we have been at reducing clearly visible and locally damaging air pollution than globally problematic and time-lagged CO2 emissions.
This just seems like a slightly nicer way to say billions will suffer, but we should not care because we can do nothing. I am not magically imagining a better world than we have, I am saying maybe we as a society or individuals shouldn't be so quick to shrug our shoulders at the death and suffering of many people as a just a thing that will happen and then move on.
As for biospheres (mentioned elsewhere), unless you populate them with people used to dealing with scarce resources, you'll be back to ecological disaster and over exploitation quickly. Can you imagine how many resources Elon Musk and other technocrats are going to need alone? I am not sure we can build enough to supply them, let alone anyone lower in the chain.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:09 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
This just seems like a slightly nicer way to say billions will suffer, but we should not care because we can do nothing. I am not magically imagining a better world than we have, I am saying maybe we as a society or individuals shouldn't be so quick to shrug our shoulders at the death and suffering of many people as a just a thing that will happen and then move on.
As for biospheres (mentioned elsewhere), unless you populate them with people used to dealing with scarce resources, you'll be back to ecological disaster and over exploitation quickly. Can you imagine how many resources Elon Musk and other technocrats are going to need alone? I am not sure we can build enough to supply them, let alone anyone lower in the chain.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:09 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
Uh that's really mean to say. I should be subject to devastating climate effects today?
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:09 AM on March 24, 2021
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:09 AM on March 24, 2021
No, you should start changing your habits today to help prevent people you may never meet from experiencing the devastating effects of climate change. <3
posted by aniola at 9:10 AM on March 24, 2021
posted by aniola at 9:10 AM on March 24, 2021
Ok hey....please don't comment on my habits when that wasn't at all the point or focus of my comment. My point is we all have to be ready for devastating effects, as talked about by another poster. You're acting like I'm a terrible polluter by daring to speak up in a thread, which is insane. I didn't come here for a lecture about something I am well aware of. Climate change is NO ONE individual's fault.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:13 AM on March 24, 2021
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:13 AM on March 24, 2021
I just finished reading The Ministry for the Future, and I recommend it highly. Not because it's a good book -- the writing's fun but uneven, and it's far too long. But it starts out with a hard-eyed look at the sort of events across the mid-21st century that could actually lead to governments taking real action on climate change.
By the end, though, I was convinced the author was Pollyanna in rose-tinted glasses. It's impossible to write about governments taking difficult action on climate change without proposing a reevaluation of the concept of "self-interest" so radical that, from where we sit now, it looks like a happy fantasy for children.
I recommend the book because it helped me start to think about what the next few decades might actually look like.
posted by gurple at 9:13 AM on March 24, 2021 [12 favorites]
By the end, though, I was convinced the author was Pollyanna in rose-tinted glasses. It's impossible to write about governments taking difficult action on climate change without proposing a reevaluation of the concept of "self-interest" so radical that, from where we sit now, it looks like a happy fantasy for children.
I recommend the book because it helped me start to think about what the next few decades might actually look like.
posted by gurple at 9:13 AM on March 24, 2021 [12 favorites]
Thanks, gurple, that's going on my library list!
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:15 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:15 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Of you mean the list of climate disasters and social collapse? How are you planning on dealing with that, individually?
See people always talk like climate collapse is going to happen in one blow at some unspecified point and the boiling seas will be at our doors and therefore there's no point in doing anything indvidually.
What I'm expecting:
Possible issues with things like potable water. Not a bad idea to have a life straw and indeed basic mylar blanket-type survival kit. More power outages - if I ever have, eg, medical equipment that needs continuous power or a medication that needs refrigerated storage, can I get a gas generator? Internet outages - how am I going to do basic stuff around town if the internet is down for a week? Do I have all the phone numbers and addresses I need? Shortages - what's most essential and possible to store - short term supplies of water, and so on, but also things like bike repair supplies, long-lasting medical supplies, etc. Does it make sense to have a bunch of cash money in case cash machines and credit cards are down for a week? If so, how much?
Safety issues, both crime-related and from the cops. There's been a lot more crime in my part of the city this year - it will probably go back down as the pandemic gets under control, but it's obvious that as society deteriorates, things will get worse again. What can I do to make my home safer in terms of, eg, window locks and lights? This summer my neighbors and I collaborated to keep watch overnight for a while when there were a lot of neo-nazis in town. Is that kind of thing going to be necessary on a rolling basis in the future? Better know my neighbors, then. What are the safest ways to get around town? What can I do as a gender-non-conforming person to boost my safety from cops and randos?
Tornado safety here - we've had some good years, but there will probably be more tornadoes in future. What should I have on hand? How can I protect essential documents, family heirlooms, etc? How does increased frequency play into this? Does it make sense to keep, like, a "tornado trunk" of special stuff in the basement during tornado season rather than having, eg, old family photos and small heirlooms upstairs? I couldn't grab them if there were a tornado bearing down.
Children. Kids are going to see things get a lot worse just as their parents are getting older and frailer. I don't know what to do about that, but I think about it a lot when I consider my friends' children and the children in my family. What can I do to avoid being a burden on them?
Politics. What happens when the blacklists really start to hit? In another ten or fifteen years, if things really go to shit at the border and a lot more goes wrong internally, there's going to be a lot more political crackdowns - not just high-profile people but regular people who are peripherally involved. How willing am I to endure that? If I'm continuing to be politically active, how can I keep my identity as safe as possible and minimize the risks I run? If I'm doing something intrinsically risky, what do I need to think about? I've had friends and acquaintances go through long trials related to their activism. I know people who've gotten seriously hurt during demonstrations.
Family - my brother can't work. My father is retired. If things go bad, I'm the one who's working and relatively healthy. What happens if it's ten years from now and health care is a disaster and my dad doesn't have any money and my brother is at risk of homelessness? How do I care for them? How do I house them? How do I get them here if there's another pandemic or a political crisis and travel is risky or impossible?
On another level: Do I need a car? I had a car briefly in the early 2000s and got rid of it for public transit and bike commuting. Right now public transit is unsafe due to the pandemic. What if there's another pandemic? What if I need to bring my family here, given that they can't drive? What if I have to do things that require long trips? I'd hate to get a car in the middle of the climate crisis, but I'm seriously worried about, eg, needing to transport ill family members when public transit is unsafe or unavailable. If I do need a car, how do I afford one?
And that's just the start.
There are all kinds of personal, individual questions that are not solvable over the medium term through organizing. Believe me, planning for climate disaster is as much an individual thing as a collective one.
posted by Frowner at 9:28 AM on March 24, 2021 [54 favorites]
See people always talk like climate collapse is going to happen in one blow at some unspecified point and the boiling seas will be at our doors and therefore there's no point in doing anything indvidually.
What I'm expecting:
Possible issues with things like potable water. Not a bad idea to have a life straw and indeed basic mylar blanket-type survival kit. More power outages - if I ever have, eg, medical equipment that needs continuous power or a medication that needs refrigerated storage, can I get a gas generator? Internet outages - how am I going to do basic stuff around town if the internet is down for a week? Do I have all the phone numbers and addresses I need? Shortages - what's most essential and possible to store - short term supplies of water, and so on, but also things like bike repair supplies, long-lasting medical supplies, etc. Does it make sense to have a bunch of cash money in case cash machines and credit cards are down for a week? If so, how much?
Safety issues, both crime-related and from the cops. There's been a lot more crime in my part of the city this year - it will probably go back down as the pandemic gets under control, but it's obvious that as society deteriorates, things will get worse again. What can I do to make my home safer in terms of, eg, window locks and lights? This summer my neighbors and I collaborated to keep watch overnight for a while when there were a lot of neo-nazis in town. Is that kind of thing going to be necessary on a rolling basis in the future? Better know my neighbors, then. What are the safest ways to get around town? What can I do as a gender-non-conforming person to boost my safety from cops and randos?
Tornado safety here - we've had some good years, but there will probably be more tornadoes in future. What should I have on hand? How can I protect essential documents, family heirlooms, etc? How does increased frequency play into this? Does it make sense to keep, like, a "tornado trunk" of special stuff in the basement during tornado season rather than having, eg, old family photos and small heirlooms upstairs? I couldn't grab them if there were a tornado bearing down.
Children. Kids are going to see things get a lot worse just as their parents are getting older and frailer. I don't know what to do about that, but I think about it a lot when I consider my friends' children and the children in my family. What can I do to avoid being a burden on them?
Politics. What happens when the blacklists really start to hit? In another ten or fifteen years, if things really go to shit at the border and a lot more goes wrong internally, there's going to be a lot more political crackdowns - not just high-profile people but regular people who are peripherally involved. How willing am I to endure that? If I'm continuing to be politically active, how can I keep my identity as safe as possible and minimize the risks I run? If I'm doing something intrinsically risky, what do I need to think about? I've had friends and acquaintances go through long trials related to their activism. I know people who've gotten seriously hurt during demonstrations.
Family - my brother can't work. My father is retired. If things go bad, I'm the one who's working and relatively healthy. What happens if it's ten years from now and health care is a disaster and my dad doesn't have any money and my brother is at risk of homelessness? How do I care for them? How do I house them? How do I get them here if there's another pandemic or a political crisis and travel is risky or impossible?
On another level: Do I need a car? I had a car briefly in the early 2000s and got rid of it for public transit and bike commuting. Right now public transit is unsafe due to the pandemic. What if there's another pandemic? What if I need to bring my family here, given that they can't drive? What if I have to do things that require long trips? I'd hate to get a car in the middle of the climate crisis, but I'm seriously worried about, eg, needing to transport ill family members when public transit is unsafe or unavailable. If I do need a car, how do I afford one?
And that's just the start.
There are all kinds of personal, individual questions that are not solvable over the medium term through organizing. Believe me, planning for climate disaster is as much an individual thing as a collective one.
posted by Frowner at 9:28 AM on March 24, 2021 [54 favorites]
Frankly, each of us should be thinking about a backup plan, individually.
What do I do? I don't mean, like, stop eating beef. I mean - how do I prepare my family for what's coming? I'm forty and I have a 10 year old and a three year old. We have a house in the West. Fire is a concern. We have land on the East Coast in a low-population area (although I bet preppers will start snatching up land there) - the kids and their future children would likely be safest there.
posted by kitcat at 9:28 AM on March 24, 2021
What do I do? I don't mean, like, stop eating beef. I mean - how do I prepare my family for what's coming? I'm forty and I have a 10 year old and a three year old. We have a house in the West. Fire is a concern. We have land on the East Coast in a low-population area (although I bet preppers will start snatching up land there) - the kids and their future children would likely be safest there.
posted by kitcat at 9:28 AM on March 24, 2021
The other thing is that ten or fifteen years is no time at all in politics. Even if, by magic, we achieve substantial, radical change, it's going to take more than ten or fifteen years. So saying "don't think individually about things that are on the five-to-fifteen-year horizon because only big solutions will work" seems like weak sauce to me.
posted by Frowner at 9:30 AM on March 24, 2021
posted by Frowner at 9:30 AM on March 24, 2021
Frowner, I love your lists, all good stuff I am going to think about.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:32 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:32 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
the paper's longest section is on the deleterious effects of population growth
It's Ehrlich redux.
I'm rifling through these pieces and trying to get at a message, and all I come up with is "we need more will"
Which is code for "steel yourselves for more climate injustice".
Not only are they doomsayers, they're still at their same decades-old blame-shifting game. Fuck that, sorry.
posted by progosk at 9:43 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
It's Ehrlich redux.
I'm rifling through these pieces and trying to get at a message, and all I come up with is "we need more will"
Which is code for "steel yourselves for more climate injustice".
Not only are they doomsayers, they're still at their same decades-old blame-shifting game. Fuck that, sorry.
posted by progosk at 9:43 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
He told my brother that he has trouble enjoying much of anything because he is more aware than most just how dire things are going to get. And it turns out that many climate researchers have similar problems.
There are other climate scientists who are similarly suffering from this kind of existential coming-to-terms with the facts, but still manage to speak out (and thus help spread understanding and awareness), e.g. Joëlle Gergis, Michael Mann, Peter Kalmus, and others.
posted by progosk at 9:52 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
There are other climate scientists who are similarly suffering from this kind of existential coming-to-terms with the facts, but still manage to speak out (and thus help spread understanding and awareness), e.g. Joëlle Gergis, Michael Mann, Peter Kalmus, and others.
posted by progosk at 9:52 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
tiny frying pan - I was trying to head off the individual vs collective action argument (which really bothers me) and didn't say things good and/or got sidetracked. I didn't mean to make it about you and I apologize.
The article's message is simple. Everything must change. That means we all need to do better both individually and collectively.
posted by aniola at 9:56 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
The article's message is simple. Everything must change. That means we all need to do better both individually and collectively.
posted by aniola at 9:56 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
No hard feelings.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:59 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:59 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
Climate change is NO ONE individual's fault.
Agreed. But we are ALL responsible for making it better. :D
posted by aniola at 10:01 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Agreed. But we are ALL responsible for making it better. :D
posted by aniola at 10:01 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
So, we are relying on humans to make massive changes very quickly?
It's been nice knowing you, folks.
posted by freakazoid at 10:04 AM on March 24, 2021
It's been nice knowing you, folks.
posted by freakazoid at 10:04 AM on March 24, 2021
At differing levels. Because individual action on its own is not going to do it, too big a problem. I do not have the level of responsibility of a government or corporations.
And I'm tired of governments and corporations implying that *I* can make changes big enough to help. Even if we all individually did. It wouldn't be nearly enough.
posted by tiny frying pan at 10:04 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
And I'm tired of governments and corporations implying that *I* can make changes big enough to help. Even if we all individually did. It wouldn't be nearly enough.
posted by tiny frying pan at 10:04 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Climate change is NO ONE individual's fault.
Don't think anyone was saying that. There are, however, extremely clear historic responsibilities that lie with certain subsets of individuals.
People are keen on a just-world theory of climate change
Not sure what that actually means, but it sure sounds like it's meant to poo-poo the idea of climate justice. If you're saying that that's wishful thinking, then your "realist recipe" is equivalent to massive, deliberate cruelty. To each their own, I guess.
we are ALL responsible for making it better. :D
Again: some are actually hugely more responsible than others.
posted by progosk at 10:07 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Don't think anyone was saying that. There are, however, extremely clear historic responsibilities that lie with certain subsets of individuals.
People are keen on a just-world theory of climate change
Not sure what that actually means, but it sure sounds like it's meant to poo-poo the idea of climate justice. If you're saying that that's wishful thinking, then your "realist recipe" is equivalent to massive, deliberate cruelty. To each their own, I guess.
we are ALL responsible for making it better. :D
Again: some are actually hugely more responsible than others.
posted by progosk at 10:07 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Today is my 34th birthday. It is difficult to bear the idea of living the rest of my life in the world they describe.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 10:17 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by OverlappingElvis at 10:17 AM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
This just seems like a slightly nicer way to say billions will suffer, but we should not care because we can do nothing. I am not magically imagining a better world than we have, I am saying maybe we as a society or individuals shouldn't be so quick to shrug our shoulders at the death and suffering of many people as a just a thing that will happen and then move on.
It is also remarkably telling just how little some people care when the billions who are already suffering the effects of climate change are poor, Black and Brown, and far away from the very comfortable lives of Westerners who are far more interested in propping up straw men about burning down all cities than reckoning with what is happening and what needs to change.
But sure, maybe this decade we will find a way to have endless growth on a limited planet.
posted by Ouverture at 10:22 AM on March 24, 2021 [7 favorites]
It is also remarkably telling just how little some people care when the billions who are already suffering the effects of climate change are poor, Black and Brown, and far away from the very comfortable lives of Westerners who are far more interested in propping up straw men about burning down all cities than reckoning with what is happening and what needs to change.
But sure, maybe this decade we will find a way to have endless growth on a limited planet.
posted by Ouverture at 10:22 AM on March 24, 2021 [7 favorites]
I am just leaving this as a footnote to any fellow Canadian who may feel compelled to post anything remotely (nationally) self-congratulatory..
I love this country, and there are amazing individuals living here, and surely some things to feel good about.. But the fact that "the other" major political party is still explicitly denying the fact of this crisis while the rest of us (mostly) make sounds about how dire things are.. It's truly disgusting. We are all implicated in what is coming.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:37 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
I love this country, and there are amazing individuals living here, and surely some things to feel good about.. But the fact that "the other" major political party is still explicitly denying the fact of this crisis while the rest of us (mostly) make sounds about how dire things are.. It's truly disgusting. We are all implicated in what is coming.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:37 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
This just seems like a slightly nicer way to say billions will suffer, but we should not care because we can do nothing. I am not magically imagining a better world than we have, I am saying maybe we as a society or individuals shouldn't be so quick to shrug our shoulders at the death and suffering of many people as a just a thing that will happen and then move on.
Not at all. We should care, and we can do something. I just don't think there's any evidence that people will suffer in proportion to their contribution to climate change causing emissions.
At differing levels. Because individual action on its own is not going to do it, too big a problem. I do not have the level of responsibility of a government or corporations.
And I'm tired of governments and corporations implying that *I* can make changes big enough to help. Even if we all individually did. It wouldn't be nearly enough.
Corporations and governments are not people and therefore can neither have ultimate responsibility for emissions due to consumption (since they cannot consume) nor can they have any moral accountability.
The individual changes people can make all relate to the use of the remarkable technology of democratically accountable state power. The most important individual thing that someone can do is directed political activity because the mobilisation of the state's power to co-ordinate and coerce is much more powerful than changes to consumption behaviour.
If we want buildings to be efficient, we have to collectively require that for new buildings and pay for retrofits, we cannot blame individuals for having poorly insulated properties.
posted by atrazine at 10:59 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
Not at all. We should care, and we can do something. I just don't think there's any evidence that people will suffer in proportion to their contribution to climate change causing emissions.
At differing levels. Because individual action on its own is not going to do it, too big a problem. I do not have the level of responsibility of a government or corporations.
And I'm tired of governments and corporations implying that *I* can make changes big enough to help. Even if we all individually did. It wouldn't be nearly enough.
Corporations and governments are not people and therefore can neither have ultimate responsibility for emissions due to consumption (since they cannot consume) nor can they have any moral accountability.
The individual changes people can make all relate to the use of the remarkable technology of democratically accountable state power. The most important individual thing that someone can do is directed political activity because the mobilisation of the state's power to co-ordinate and coerce is much more powerful than changes to consumption behaviour.
If we want buildings to be efficient, we have to collectively require that for new buildings and pay for retrofits, we cannot blame individuals for having poorly insulated properties.
posted by atrazine at 10:59 AM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
This will also lead to war over resources.
Ignoring climate change will lead to unprecedented, societally disruptive heat extremes in the Middle East
And the Earth’s ability to help us may have been overestimated.
It seems we will continue to see acceleration, ie Faster Than Expected consequences. Absent a deus ex machina technology.
It’s important to be kept in the loop, and take care of yourself and yours. This is a very frightening topic - to me, anyways. I’m past the days of playing Cassandra with my parents and unfortunately have to let them live in their Faux News bubble while subtly encouraging any signs of movement I see on this and other issues.
posted by glaucon at 11:01 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Ignoring climate change will lead to unprecedented, societally disruptive heat extremes in the Middle East
And the Earth’s ability to help us may have been overestimated.
It seems we will continue to see acceleration, ie Faster Than Expected consequences. Absent a deus ex machina technology.
It’s important to be kept in the loop, and take care of yourself and yours. This is a very frightening topic - to me, anyways. I’m past the days of playing Cassandra with my parents and unfortunately have to let them live in their Faux News bubble while subtly encouraging any signs of movement I see on this and other issues.
posted by glaucon at 11:01 AM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Just look at how the EU and UK are behaving over vaccines...Meanwhile, very few vaccines are reaching Africa.
And it's going to get worse -- La Stampa just started a freakout about a police raid discovering "secret vaccine stockpiles" that AstraZeneca is supposedly withholding from Europeans.
...but, of course, it's actually a batch of vaccine awaiting QA clearance to be shipped to the Covax program.
Cops, raiding facilities bundling vaccines for shipment to poorer nations. That's the level we've sunk to already. What's going to happen when things really start going wrong?
posted by aramaic at 11:07 AM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
And it's going to get worse -- La Stampa just started a freakout about a police raid discovering "secret vaccine stockpiles" that AstraZeneca is supposedly withholding from Europeans.
...but, of course, it's actually a batch of vaccine awaiting QA clearance to be shipped to the Covax program.
Cops, raiding facilities bundling vaccines for shipment to poorer nations. That's the level we've sunk to already. What's going to happen when things really start going wrong?
posted by aramaic at 11:07 AM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
This is fairly shitty, but what I think needs to happen and what I think will most likely happen are the same thing.
I believe there's going to be a conflict and it is going to suck and it is going to kill a lot of people. Good people, innocent people, maybe also some bad people, but probably not the rich people.
My actual fervent hope is that it happens sooner rather than later because I don't think it can be avoided and the sooner it happens, the sooner all the good that comes from such a conflict can occur. Hopefully while it still makes a difference.
I know, I know. War is bad. Killing, suffering, untold levels of horrible-ness. I'm not underestimating it or denying it one single bit. You name a bad thing, I think it's possible. I think it will probably happen. We haven't had a good fight in decades and we do like to fight. We just need a reason, and there are a lot of reasons right now.
I personally believe it is inevitable. I also don't believe I'll be spared or somehow it won't affect me or mine. I'm not delusional or even moderately optimistic. I genuinely fear for my kid's future... I wish there was something I could do. It's just clear to me that the people who need to make changes aren't going to. Full stop.
The end result of bad things happening and us refusing to do anything about them is eventually the situation becomes untenable and something gets done. Our go-to solution every time is to fight about it. Now if I was being Polly-Anna-ish about things, I would hope that we would fight until someone with the will and the means to actually affect draconian changes came to power and we probably would all live under a dictatorship for a while, but in that time we would actually fix things.
Sadly, I believe it much more likely that what will happen is that we'll keep killing people until we kill enough of everyone and disrupt enough industry to give the Earth a bit of room to recover and the resources we have will be enough-ish. From there, that generation would hopefully build with sustainability in mind and the next big crisis will be something different in nature.
I think there's an equal chance we'll go too far and wipe ourselves out, but Holy Fuck that's too dark for a Wednesday.
posted by BeReasonable at 11:31 AM on March 24, 2021 [8 favorites]
I believe there's going to be a conflict and it is going to suck and it is going to kill a lot of people. Good people, innocent people, maybe also some bad people, but probably not the rich people.
My actual fervent hope is that it happens sooner rather than later because I don't think it can be avoided and the sooner it happens, the sooner all the good that comes from such a conflict can occur. Hopefully while it still makes a difference.
I know, I know. War is bad. Killing, suffering, untold levels of horrible-ness. I'm not underestimating it or denying it one single bit. You name a bad thing, I think it's possible. I think it will probably happen. We haven't had a good fight in decades and we do like to fight. We just need a reason, and there are a lot of reasons right now.
I personally believe it is inevitable. I also don't believe I'll be spared or somehow it won't affect me or mine. I'm not delusional or even moderately optimistic. I genuinely fear for my kid's future... I wish there was something I could do. It's just clear to me that the people who need to make changes aren't going to. Full stop.
The end result of bad things happening and us refusing to do anything about them is eventually the situation becomes untenable and something gets done. Our go-to solution every time is to fight about it. Now if I was being Polly-Anna-ish about things, I would hope that we would fight until someone with the will and the means to actually affect draconian changes came to power and we probably would all live under a dictatorship for a while, but in that time we would actually fix things.
Sadly, I believe it much more likely that what will happen is that we'll keep killing people until we kill enough of everyone and disrupt enough industry to give the Earth a bit of room to recover and the resources we have will be enough-ish. From there, that generation would hopefully build with sustainability in mind and the next big crisis will be something different in nature.
I think there's an equal chance we'll go too far and wipe ourselves out, but Holy Fuck that's too dark for a Wednesday.
posted by BeReasonable at 11:31 AM on March 24, 2021 [8 favorites]
No matter how badly we fuck up the atmospheric balance here, fixing Earth's ecosystem is going to be easier than finding a way to build an Earthlike atmosphere or ecology on Mars.
Indeed, even in a runaway climate change scenario where the Earth's surface becomes inhospitable to mammalian life, keeping 10 000 people alive in cramped domes would be far easier on Earth than on Mars.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:55 AM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
Indeed, even in a runaway climate change scenario where the Earth's surface becomes inhospitable to mammalian life, keeping 10 000 people alive in cramped domes would be far easier on Earth than on Mars.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:55 AM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
For those climate scientists and others who are feeling hopelessness and grief, the Deep Adaptation movement (earlier) is working on ways to process those emotions.
posted by PhineasGage at 12:04 PM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by PhineasGage at 12:04 PM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
Who knew that in the future Mars would become an aspired-to exclusive address by the rich?*
*not sarcasm; it was not something I saw coming when I dreamt of the future when young
posted by Kitteh at 12:05 PM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
*not sarcasm; it was not something I saw coming when I dreamt of the future when young
posted by Kitteh at 12:05 PM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
erattacorrige Biosphere 2's failure had three secondary causes; a very high carbon soil coupled with diminished light from wrong glass led to excess atmos CO2, and lack of concrete sealing which led to concrete absorbing O2, instead of CO2. The primary failure was not thinking hard enough about systems IMO.
Complicated problems involving plants / biology as a solution are not solvable if only engineers are involved.
Here (NZ) govt is pushing very fast and hard to decarbonize everything, BUT this has only been going two years. In the background the military is being reset [pdf link to NZDF strategy to 2025 - climate appears on most pages] to handle more regional long (and short) emergencies, and to maintain 'stability'.
We're only a small player, but it is undeniable we had the forethought, and capability, to seek to eradicate Covid, as a result were;' more or less normal - apart from no foreign tourism - but that was destroying us.
Yes, if you can plant a tree, if only for your own microclimate, advocate/vote/protest and learn how to survive - these things are a meaningful life in and of itself.
No, I never had kids, made that decision when I was 15 as I could see where this was going even as a boy. But life still has meaning Earth is sacred.
posted by unearthed at 12:05 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
Complicated problems involving plants / biology as a solution are not solvable if only engineers are involved.
Here (NZ) govt is pushing very fast and hard to decarbonize everything, BUT this has only been going two years. In the background the military is being reset [pdf link to NZDF strategy to 2025 - climate appears on most pages] to handle more regional long (and short) emergencies, and to maintain 'stability'.
We're only a small player, but it is undeniable we had the forethought, and capability, to seek to eradicate Covid, as a result were;' more or less normal - apart from no foreign tourism - but that was destroying us.
Yes, if you can plant a tree, if only for your own microclimate, advocate/vote/protest and learn how to survive - these things are a meaningful life in and of itself.
No, I never had kids, made that decision when I was 15 as I could see where this was going even as a boy. But life still has meaning Earth is sacred.
posted by unearthed at 12:05 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
Who knew that in the future Mars would become an aspired-to exclusive address by the rich?*
*not sarcasm; it was not something I saw coming when I dreamt of the future when young
Reminds me of the movie "Elysium. The only unrealistic aspect of which film was that the wealthy lived in an enclosed, utopian enclave established on an orbiting satellite. In reality, it will be in an enclosed, utopian enclave established in some remote part of the Earth most protected from extreme weather and rising sea levels.
Indeed, even in a runaway climate change scenario where the Earth's surface becomes inhospitable to mammalian life, keeping 10 000 people alive in cramped domes would be far easier on Earth than on Mars.
Exactly.
posted by darkstar at 12:40 PM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
*not sarcasm; it was not something I saw coming when I dreamt of the future when young
Reminds me of the movie "Elysium. The only unrealistic aspect of which film was that the wealthy lived in an enclosed, utopian enclave established on an orbiting satellite. In reality, it will be in an enclosed, utopian enclave established in some remote part of the Earth most protected from extreme weather and rising sea levels.
Indeed, even in a runaway climate change scenario where the Earth's surface becomes inhospitable to mammalian life, keeping 10 000 people alive in cramped domes would be far easier on Earth than on Mars.
Exactly.
posted by darkstar at 12:40 PM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
A few months ago, I finished reading The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. He concludes his chapter entitled "Ethics at the End of the World," in which he reviews several philosophers' works dealing with how to make moral sense of the upcoming climate catastrophe, with these two paragraphs which have stuck with me ever since:
All these works portend a turn toward the apocalyptic, whether literal, cultural, political, or ethical. But another turn is possible, too, even probable, and perhaps the more tragic for its conspicuous plausibility: that the preponderance of our reflexes in the face of human strife run in the opposite direction, toward acclimatization.
This is the yowling torque muffled by the bland-seeming phrase "climate apathy," which may otherwise feel merely descriptive: that through appeals to nativism, or by the logic of budget realities, or in perverse contortions of "deservedness," by drawing our circles of empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when convenient, we will find ways to engineer new indifference. Gazing out at the future from the promontory of the present, with the planet having warmed one degree, the world of two degrees seems nightmarish--and the worlds of three degrees, and four, and five yet more grotesque. But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely."
As I was reading these words, 4,000 people per day were dying of COVID-19 in the US, and it was the busiest day for US airports since last March.
posted by notswedish at 12:46 PM on March 24, 2021 [16 favorites]
All these works portend a turn toward the apocalyptic, whether literal, cultural, political, or ethical. But another turn is possible, too, even probable, and perhaps the more tragic for its conspicuous plausibility: that the preponderance of our reflexes in the face of human strife run in the opposite direction, toward acclimatization.
This is the yowling torque muffled by the bland-seeming phrase "climate apathy," which may otherwise feel merely descriptive: that through appeals to nativism, or by the logic of budget realities, or in perverse contortions of "deservedness," by drawing our circles of empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when convenient, we will find ways to engineer new indifference. Gazing out at the future from the promontory of the present, with the planet having warmed one degree, the world of two degrees seems nightmarish--and the worlds of three degrees, and four, and five yet more grotesque. But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely."
As I was reading these words, 4,000 people per day were dying of COVID-19 in the US, and it was the busiest day for US airports since last March.
posted by notswedish at 12:46 PM on March 24, 2021 [16 favorites]
the Deep Adaptation movement (earlier) is working on ways to process those emotions
The climate reasoning by sociologist J. Bendell's Deep Adaptation movement is unfortunately unsound; that said, it doesn't surprise me that the only hope, for some, is to deny hope for others.
posted by progosk at 12:46 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
The climate reasoning by sociologist J. Bendell's Deep Adaptation movement is unfortunately unsound; that said, it doesn't surprise me that the only hope, for some, is to deny hope for others.
posted by progosk at 12:46 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
Space fantasy is great because it turns complex political and ecological problems into engineering ones.
We're pretty good at solving engineering problems; there is little evidence that we are collectively any good at solving social or political problems more directly. I mean, that's how we got into this mess, because we're not good at that stuff. Collective-action problems are hard even at small scales, and they're basically-unsolvable at global scale, as far as anyone can tell from this vantage point.
If you can shift the problem from the social/political domain and into the engineering domain, I'd have much more confidence in our ability to actually make some sort of real progress. Maybe even survive with something resembling technological civilization at the end of it. And if we're lucky, maybe even with most of the world's population intact.
We're on track right now to have a micro-colony on the Moon in a few decades (technically feasible, expensive, but the Chinese can afford it and the Russians have the know-how), and potentially one on Mars (really depends on the water situation there, jury is still out), because those are engineering and supply-chain problems that can be solved with the application of what amounts to brute force. There are still unsolved problems there, but they look like tractable problems when you compare them to "how do we get people to care about people on the other side of the planet more than their own comfort?" or "how do we get people to care about their descendants more than themselves?"
Asking how we could hypothetically solve a bunch of problems by fundamentally changing our society is a fun game, I guess, but it's not very useful, because we're no good at fundamentally changing our societies (at least, not for the better, very often). There aren't a lot of levers to pull to achieve those sort of dramatic positive outcomes. I'd argue that positive social change most often comes from incrementalism and gradual improvements over generations, and if we don't have time for that, well... then we'd better look for solutions elsewhere.
But: we are demonstrably good at engineering and supply-chain type problems. Breaking down a big problem into a bunch of little problems and handing them out to people to solve, and then putting those little solutions together into a Great Big Thing, that's what we're collectively pretty good at doing, when the motivation exists.
If we don't have the time left for a political solution—and I don't think we do—then we'd better hope like hell that there's an engineering solution. Because barring that, the solution will probably be a military one, and I doubt most of the world will enjoy it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:48 PM on March 24, 2021 [8 favorites]
We're pretty good at solving engineering problems; there is little evidence that we are collectively any good at solving social or political problems more directly. I mean, that's how we got into this mess, because we're not good at that stuff. Collective-action problems are hard even at small scales, and they're basically-unsolvable at global scale, as far as anyone can tell from this vantage point.
If you can shift the problem from the social/political domain and into the engineering domain, I'd have much more confidence in our ability to actually make some sort of real progress. Maybe even survive with something resembling technological civilization at the end of it. And if we're lucky, maybe even with most of the world's population intact.
We're on track right now to have a micro-colony on the Moon in a few decades (technically feasible, expensive, but the Chinese can afford it and the Russians have the know-how), and potentially one on Mars (really depends on the water situation there, jury is still out), because those are engineering and supply-chain problems that can be solved with the application of what amounts to brute force. There are still unsolved problems there, but they look like tractable problems when you compare them to "how do we get people to care about people on the other side of the planet more than their own comfort?" or "how do we get people to care about their descendants more than themselves?"
Asking how we could hypothetically solve a bunch of problems by fundamentally changing our society is a fun game, I guess, but it's not very useful, because we're no good at fundamentally changing our societies (at least, not for the better, very often). There aren't a lot of levers to pull to achieve those sort of dramatic positive outcomes. I'd argue that positive social change most often comes from incrementalism and gradual improvements over generations, and if we don't have time for that, well... then we'd better look for solutions elsewhere.
But: we are demonstrably good at engineering and supply-chain type problems. Breaking down a big problem into a bunch of little problems and handing them out to people to solve, and then putting those little solutions together into a Great Big Thing, that's what we're collectively pretty good at doing, when the motivation exists.
If we don't have the time left for a political solution—and I don't think we do—then we'd better hope like hell that there's an engineering solution. Because barring that, the solution will probably be a military one, and I doubt most of the world will enjoy it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:48 PM on March 24, 2021 [8 favorites]
As I was reading these words, 4,000 people per day were dying of COVID-19 in the US, and it was the busiest day for US airports since last March.
And the US has just had its TWELFTH MASS SHOOTING IN A WEEK, as gun sales once again spike and half of our elected officials are jockeying to get in front of the cameras to urge us not to politicize the issue...
posted by darkstar at 12:48 PM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
And the US has just had its TWELFTH MASS SHOOTING IN A WEEK, as gun sales once again spike and half of our elected officials are jockeying to get in front of the cameras to urge us not to politicize the issue...
posted by darkstar at 12:48 PM on March 24, 2021 [3 favorites]
I know, I know. War is bad.
A central point of Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is that the two global wars of the 20th century had the greatest leveling impact on wealth distribution. After all the political movements and reformist campaigns, it takes mass slaughter to scare (enough of) the global elite to make a few small concessions. Grossly over-simplified, but anyone have a competing narrative to offer?
posted by elkevelvet at 12:49 PM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
A central point of Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is that the two global wars of the 20th century had the greatest leveling impact on wealth distribution. After all the political movements and reformist campaigns, it takes mass slaughter to scare (enough of) the global elite to make a few small concessions. Grossly over-simplified, but anyone have a competing narrative to offer?
posted by elkevelvet at 12:49 PM on March 24, 2021 [4 favorites]
the solution will probably be a military one
There are already ominous signs of this framing being normalized by the new administration, indeed.
posted by progosk at 12:52 PM on March 24, 2021
There are already ominous signs of this framing being normalized by the new administration, indeed.
posted by progosk at 12:52 PM on March 24, 2021
progosk, why is the Deep Adaptation thinking unsound when it seems to align, sadly, with article in the original post?
posted by PhineasGage at 1:17 PM on March 24, 2021
posted by PhineasGage at 1:17 PM on March 24, 2021
Well, (*hikes suspenders*) when I was a young-un we were all gonna die from the Russians droppin A-bombs on us, hell there were movies about it on the TV (I'll explain those later) almost every month...
I've mentioned it twice so far, so I'll mention it again, The Doomsday Argument. Mathematically, you're not likely to be around for the end of things. Though, of course, if the decline is long enough, that could be its own fresh hell.
I've been trying to figure out the hook for a sci-fi novel: In it a mad genius is sucking Carbon out of the atmosphere and turning it into a giant diamond, of course last week I read about two different firms doing just that... Innovation is our only, current, superpower. I will not be surprised for a minute if massive, efficient, useful carbon remediation schemes get underway in the next decade.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:25 PM on March 24, 2021
I've mentioned it twice so far, so I'll mention it again, The Doomsday Argument. Mathematically, you're not likely to be around for the end of things. Though, of course, if the decline is long enough, that could be its own fresh hell.
I've been trying to figure out the hook for a sci-fi novel: In it a mad genius is sucking Carbon out of the atmosphere and turning it into a giant diamond, of course last week I read about two different firms doing just that... Innovation is our only, current, superpower. I will not be surprised for a minute if massive, efficient, useful carbon remediation schemes get underway in the next decade.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:25 PM on March 24, 2021
why is the Deep Adaptation thinking unsound when it seems to align, sadly, with article in the original post?
It's actually no surprise that these two different strands of inevitabilism align, tbh. Each rely on a premise that is not borne out by the best available science, in Ehrlich's case the overpopulation myth, as regards Bendell's, the two discussions I linked to lay it out in more detail than I can.
Resigning oneself to "the inevitable" is sadly a very common alibi to avoid the immense hard work that we are facing, if humanity is to deserve to make it.
posted by progosk at 1:43 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
It's actually no surprise that these two different strands of inevitabilism align, tbh. Each rely on a premise that is not borne out by the best available science, in Ehrlich's case the overpopulation myth, as regards Bendell's, the two discussions I linked to lay it out in more detail than I can.
Resigning oneself to "the inevitable" is sadly a very common alibi to avoid the immense hard work that we are facing, if humanity is to deserve to make it.
posted by progosk at 1:43 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
I'm encouraged by a few things.
There are definitely collective solutions that can have a major impact, and which are not farcically unrealistic to implement. Bans (or punitive taxation) on single-use plastics, like plastic grocery bags. Construction code requirements that stipulate green construction like double-paned windows, solar panels, etc.
Speaking of which, the development of green energy options seems to be driven by market forces as much as by the interest in being sustainable. For example, coal is unequivocally the dirtiest power source, and it is swiftly cratering due to economics. (Coal lost half of its US market share in the past ten years.) Natural gas, wind and solar are on the rise. Residential solar power systems have reduced in price by about 80% since I researched them 20 years ago.
Electric vehicles are poised to become a major US market share in the coming generation, particularly with larger, progressive states like California getting on board and setting the curve. While generating the electricity to run them is still problematic, combined with solar power generation, that can remove a LOT of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. (Even considering the manufacturing issues with solar panels.) The two drawbacks to electric vehicles now -- charging infrastructure and battery range -- are improving every year.
Also, the more we can transition from biological meat to artificial meat options, or to veganism outright, that will have an even greater impact than our transportation choices. I've seen reports that suggest that veganism has increased from 1% of the US public in 2014 to 6% in 2017. That's a massive increase in sustainability driven by food choices.
Just this past two decades, the developed world has shifted significantly away from incandescent light bulbs to CFLs and now to LEDs. The energy savings from that have been enormous.
I'm not saying that "technology will save us", because that is a statement that lacks nuance. But there are technological developments that are definitely helping. And with some social and political trends, I think we have reason for some optimism.
That said, I think there will still be pain and hard work ahead. But there is an end game that doesn't have to look like a barren post-apocalyptic hellscape.
posted by darkstar at 1:44 PM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
There are definitely collective solutions that can have a major impact, and which are not farcically unrealistic to implement. Bans (or punitive taxation) on single-use plastics, like plastic grocery bags. Construction code requirements that stipulate green construction like double-paned windows, solar panels, etc.
Speaking of which, the development of green energy options seems to be driven by market forces as much as by the interest in being sustainable. For example, coal is unequivocally the dirtiest power source, and it is swiftly cratering due to economics. (Coal lost half of its US market share in the past ten years.) Natural gas, wind and solar are on the rise. Residential solar power systems have reduced in price by about 80% since I researched them 20 years ago.
Electric vehicles are poised to become a major US market share in the coming generation, particularly with larger, progressive states like California getting on board and setting the curve. While generating the electricity to run them is still problematic, combined with solar power generation, that can remove a LOT of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. (Even considering the manufacturing issues with solar panels.) The two drawbacks to electric vehicles now -- charging infrastructure and battery range -- are improving every year.
Also, the more we can transition from biological meat to artificial meat options, or to veganism outright, that will have an even greater impact than our transportation choices. I've seen reports that suggest that veganism has increased from 1% of the US public in 2014 to 6% in 2017. That's a massive increase in sustainability driven by food choices.
Just this past two decades, the developed world has shifted significantly away from incandescent light bulbs to CFLs and now to LEDs. The energy savings from that have been enormous.
I'm not saying that "technology will save us", because that is a statement that lacks nuance. But there are technological developments that are definitely helping. And with some social and political trends, I think we have reason for some optimism.
That said, I think there will still be pain and hard work ahead. But there is an end game that doesn't have to look like a barren post-apocalyptic hellscape.
posted by darkstar at 1:44 PM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
I just finished reading The Ministry for the Future, and I recommend it highly. Not because it's a good book -- the writing's fun but uneven, and it's far too long. But it starts out with a hard-eyed look at the sort of events across the mid-21st century that could actually lead to governments taking real action on climate change.
Yes, I think the "adverse weather events" described in that book are not unrealistic forays into climate doomerism, but extremely realistic forecasts of what will actually happen. However, I also think the solutions are realistic even if the political will isn't currently there.
The resignation and defeatism in some of these comments is remarkable. If you had asked me in 2008 that gay marriage would be a reality in America just 7 years after Prop 8 had just been passed, I wouldn't have believed you, but I would have fought like hell to make it reality (and that's exactly what I did). I have uncles and aunties who are alive today who still bear the literal scars of British colonialism and yet, they are no longer colonized subjects. I don't think they found liberation from white supremacy by sitting back and giving up.
Why should canceling the apocalypse be any different?
posted by Ouverture at 2:37 PM on March 24, 2021 [7 favorites]
Yes, I think the "adverse weather events" described in that book are not unrealistic forays into climate doomerism, but extremely realistic forecasts of what will actually happen. However, I also think the solutions are realistic even if the political will isn't currently there.
The resignation and defeatism in some of these comments is remarkable. If you had asked me in 2008 that gay marriage would be a reality in America just 7 years after Prop 8 had just been passed, I wouldn't have believed you, but I would have fought like hell to make it reality (and that's exactly what I did). I have uncles and aunties who are alive today who still bear the literal scars of British colonialism and yet, they are no longer colonized subjects. I don't think they found liberation from white supremacy by sitting back and giving up.
Why should canceling the apocalypse be any different?
posted by Ouverture at 2:37 PM on March 24, 2021 [7 favorites]
The wonderful, dramatic changes that have happened in human societies just in our lifetimes don't necessarily make the case that we can also bring about fast, significant changes in the trajectory of climate change. Physics operates in an entirely different way and at an entirely different scale than human events and societies do. I'm not making an argument in support of either the "we're doomed" or the "let's just buckle down and fix things" sides, just pointing out the difference in scale, which drives some to the doom side.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:56 PM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by PhineasGage at 2:56 PM on March 24, 2021 [6 favorites]
I think I understand the interlocking systems of physics, chemistry, and ecology well enough to understand some significant amount of suffering is already baked in thanks to the decades-long bipartisan collaboration of liberals and conservatives doing nothing meaningful about climate change, but it is clear there is a lot that can be done without throwing away the lives of billions of people of color under starvation and inundation (or thinking that massive world wars will magically lead to a better world?).
To pull from the article:
But this piece, along with tens of thousands of climate scientists, offers another way out by jumping above to the more effective points of intervention in this grand system. If that change is scary to people, the first chapter of The Ministry For The Future offers a very realistic forecast into the price of inaction.
posted by Ouverture at 3:09 PM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]
To pull from the article:
Those 17 scientists did not want you to despair. “Ours is not a call to surrender,” they wrote. It was meant as a kick in the ass—a reminder that our only chance is a thoroughgoing transformation. Specifically: “fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth.” Radical as this call may seem, it was hardly an outlier demand from a few oddball pinko Ph.Ds. In 2019, 11,258 scientists from 153 countries signed a “Warning of a Climate Emergency” that called for “bold and drastic” changes to the economy, including a shift away “from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being.” Two years before that, the Alliance of World Scientists made a similar call in a “Warning to Humanity” that garnered 15,364 signatures. We are supposed to listen to science now. This is what the scientists are saying: Everything must change.I am reminded of Donella Meadows's iconic piece, "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System". It is understandable to see no way out if all we focus on is the lowest leverage domain of constants, parameters, and numbers. There are no taxation structures or subsidies that can escape the regulatory capture of carbon capital without anything above it moving our entire human world away from endless growth on a limited planet.
But this piece, along with tens of thousands of climate scientists, offers another way out by jumping above to the more effective points of intervention in this grand system. If that change is scary to people, the first chapter of The Ministry For The Future offers a very realistic forecast into the price of inaction.
posted by Ouverture at 3:09 PM on March 24, 2021 [5 favorites]
foreign policy constructed to at all costs preserve a hegemony that for most of the last century has hinged on control of the planet’s oil reserves must be radically reconfigured.
Proven reserves (millions of barrels) U.S. EIA (start of 2020)[2] OPEC (end of 2017)[3] BP (end of 2015)[4] Other Reserves-to-production ratio
Country Rank Reserves Rank Reserves Rank Reserves Source/Date Reserves Production (million bbl/year, 2016)[1] Years
Venezuela (see: Oil reserves in Venezuela) 1 302,809 1 302,809 1 300,900 831.1 364
Saudi Arabia (see: Oil reserves in Saudi Arabia) 2 267,026 2 266,260 2 266,000 3818.1 70
Canada (see: Oil reserves in Canada) 3 167,896 22 4,421 3 172,200 Natural Resources Canada, end 2014[5] 171,000 1336.8 126
Iran (see: Oil reserves in Iran) 4 155,600 3 208,600[6] 4 155,600 1452.9 107
Iraq (see: Oil reserves in Iraq) 5 145,019 4 147,223 5 143,100 1624.8 89
Kuwait (see: Oil reserves in Kuwait) 6 104,000 6 104,000 6 104,000 1067.2 97
UAE (see: Oil reserves in the United Arab Emirates) 7 98,630 7 98,630 8 98,630 1133.7 87
Russia (see: Oil reserves in Russia) 8 80,000 7 80,000 6 102,400 3851.3 21
Libya (see: Oil reserves in Libya) 9 48,363 8 74,363 9 78,400 366.1 132
United States (see: Oil reserves in the United States) 10 47,053 10.....
posted by clavdivs at 4:02 PM on March 24, 2021
Proven reserves (millions of barrels) U.S. EIA (start of 2020)[2] OPEC (end of 2017)[3] BP (end of 2015)[4] Other Reserves-to-production ratio
Country Rank Reserves Rank Reserves Rank Reserves Source/Date Reserves Production (million bbl/year, 2016)[1] Years
Venezuela (see: Oil reserves in Venezuela) 1 302,809 1 302,809 1 300,900 831.1 364
Saudi Arabia (see: Oil reserves in Saudi Arabia) 2 267,026 2 266,260 2 266,000 3818.1 70
Canada (see: Oil reserves in Canada) 3 167,896 22 4,421 3 172,200 Natural Resources Canada, end 2014[5] 171,000 1336.8 126
Iran (see: Oil reserves in Iran) 4 155,600 3 208,600[6] 4 155,600 1452.9 107
Iraq (see: Oil reserves in Iraq) 5 145,019 4 147,223 5 143,100 1624.8 89
Kuwait (see: Oil reserves in Kuwait) 6 104,000 6 104,000 6 104,000 1067.2 97
UAE (see: Oil reserves in the United Arab Emirates) 7 98,630 7 98,630 8 98,630 1133.7 87
Russia (see: Oil reserves in Russia) 8 80,000 7 80,000 6 102,400 3851.3 21
Libya (see: Oil reserves in Libya) 9 48,363 8 74,363 9 78,400 366.1 132
United States (see: Oil reserves in the United States) 10 47,053 10.....
posted by clavdivs at 4:02 PM on March 24, 2021
If you're curious about Ministry for the Future, our online book club read it last year. You can find our discussions here.
posted by doctornemo at 4:22 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 4:22 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
It's useful to consider what COVID showed us about how humanity might respond to the deepening climate emergency.
We see deep divides on taking science seriously. Obviously that's already happening wrt climate science.
We remain national or local creatures and resist thinking globally. Time and against we've seen nations acting on their own, making decisions that break from their neighbors or against international plans. We've seen nations rush to stockpile vaccines but not share them. There's little interest in making the proprietary vaccine information generic or otherwise shared with the developing world. International cooperation is slight. Instead, we seem to have chosen something like (forgive my poor Latin) cuius regio, eius morbus.
So climate change... we'll address in this national and local way, it seems.
We've also seen some sloshing of large amounts of money for certain purposes. Some governments and companies have, at times, for specific purposes, spent deeply. Operation Warp Speed cost around $15 billion, which dwindles in comparison to the trillions spend by two American presidents on pandemic aid - just so far! Allied to this point is our newfound capacity to anti-spend: to willingly shut down economic production for the pandemic. Combined, this suggests we may well have the reflex to spend on certain climate change items, such as storm relief, population relocation, or geotechnology.
There is, on average, some concern for some marginalized populations. Alongside Trumpian racism we've seen calls to rebalance imbalances by prioritizing support for the marginalized - for example, in the US, getting vaccines into people of color especially. For climate change, this suggests we'll allocate some resources to helping marginalized populations, such as people most at risk from sea level rising who also lack resources to respond. Alongside that climate justice movement, more racism.
We may also see a focus on mental/spiritual responses to climate chaos, based on the COVID story. Already there are many calls for escalating mental health support for those who have experienced illness, deaths, and damage around them. We could expect echoes of this to grow as climate change ratchets up, as there's already a burgeoning psych literature on climate grief etc.
This may branch out into religious and/or spiritual levels. Historically plagues prompt both increases in belief and unbelief. Again, we could see waves of changed religious affiliation and behavior follow as climate change worsens.
Elsewhere on the psych front, shaming has reemerged as a popular social tool during the pandemic. Some will shame people who don't wear masks (I've done this just today). Others will shame antivaxxers; I suspect this might strengthen as the vaccinated population approaches some herd immunity threshold. On the reverse anti-mask and -vax activists also deploy shame, albeit not at such scale, and sometimes with guns. Shame is obviously a deeply seated part of the human psyche and we should expect it deployed around climate change in multiple ways. "Your geoengineering project is evil!" "How dare you drive a gas-burning car?!"
We are also interested in conserving as much as we can, contra this post's linked article. Despite the pandemic's enormous stresses and the attending chaos, we are struggling mightily and often successfully to maintain the status quo. Adundhati Roy asked us to imagine a new world, but the world many have in mind looks a lot like 2019. Think of American president Biden's "build back better" slogan and his general campaign tone of recovery, restoration. Or consider how America's public health system has been shown to be a mess, while our medical system is grotesquely unequal; most of political discourse avoids talk of reforming either. Similarly, while some debate the causes of COVID (animal to human transmission?), there are no serious drives to change anything that enabled the virus to leap into a global menace. Some signs of disgust at Chinese wet markets have not translated into movements towards vegetarian or vegan diets. Looking ahead, COVID tells us we'll approach climate change with a desire to maintain every bit of carbon-era life we can.
More, the global consensus is still around growth. Economic shutdowns have revealed that we do have the power to consciously and at scale cease burning so much carbon. You've all seen those images of cities from last spring, where skies opened up to astonishing clarity. Yet the consensus is that these moves were humanitarian disasters. Necessary for the pandemic or otherwise, every nation I've seen has viewed these shutdowns as horrible. Those who believe in voluntary simplicity, cutting back consumerism, adopting the circular economy, or degrowth have attained no purchase in public opinion. Overall, we do not think smaller is better.
....but these extrapolations will be flawed once they hit the world. It may be that the many COVID failures shock survivors into different behavior. And generations who didn't grow up immersed in the Cold War's deep training might be more amenable to new economic models.
posted by doctornemo at 4:37 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
We see deep divides on taking science seriously. Obviously that's already happening wrt climate science.
We remain national or local creatures and resist thinking globally. Time and against we've seen nations acting on their own, making decisions that break from their neighbors or against international plans. We've seen nations rush to stockpile vaccines but not share them. There's little interest in making the proprietary vaccine information generic or otherwise shared with the developing world. International cooperation is slight. Instead, we seem to have chosen something like (forgive my poor Latin) cuius regio, eius morbus.
So climate change... we'll address in this national and local way, it seems.
We've also seen some sloshing of large amounts of money for certain purposes. Some governments and companies have, at times, for specific purposes, spent deeply. Operation Warp Speed cost around $15 billion, which dwindles in comparison to the trillions spend by two American presidents on pandemic aid - just so far! Allied to this point is our newfound capacity to anti-spend: to willingly shut down economic production for the pandemic. Combined, this suggests we may well have the reflex to spend on certain climate change items, such as storm relief, population relocation, or geotechnology.
There is, on average, some concern for some marginalized populations. Alongside Trumpian racism we've seen calls to rebalance imbalances by prioritizing support for the marginalized - for example, in the US, getting vaccines into people of color especially. For climate change, this suggests we'll allocate some resources to helping marginalized populations, such as people most at risk from sea level rising who also lack resources to respond. Alongside that climate justice movement, more racism.
We may also see a focus on mental/spiritual responses to climate chaos, based on the COVID story. Already there are many calls for escalating mental health support for those who have experienced illness, deaths, and damage around them. We could expect echoes of this to grow as climate change ratchets up, as there's already a burgeoning psych literature on climate grief etc.
This may branch out into religious and/or spiritual levels. Historically plagues prompt both increases in belief and unbelief. Again, we could see waves of changed religious affiliation and behavior follow as climate change worsens.
Elsewhere on the psych front, shaming has reemerged as a popular social tool during the pandemic. Some will shame people who don't wear masks (I've done this just today). Others will shame antivaxxers; I suspect this might strengthen as the vaccinated population approaches some herd immunity threshold. On the reverse anti-mask and -vax activists also deploy shame, albeit not at such scale, and sometimes with guns. Shame is obviously a deeply seated part of the human psyche and we should expect it deployed around climate change in multiple ways. "Your geoengineering project is evil!" "How dare you drive a gas-burning car?!"
We are also interested in conserving as much as we can, contra this post's linked article. Despite the pandemic's enormous stresses and the attending chaos, we are struggling mightily and often successfully to maintain the status quo. Adundhati Roy asked us to imagine a new world, but the world many have in mind looks a lot like 2019. Think of American president Biden's "build back better" slogan and his general campaign tone of recovery, restoration. Or consider how America's public health system has been shown to be a mess, while our medical system is grotesquely unequal; most of political discourse avoids talk of reforming either. Similarly, while some debate the causes of COVID (animal to human transmission?), there are no serious drives to change anything that enabled the virus to leap into a global menace. Some signs of disgust at Chinese wet markets have not translated into movements towards vegetarian or vegan diets. Looking ahead, COVID tells us we'll approach climate change with a desire to maintain every bit of carbon-era life we can.
More, the global consensus is still around growth. Economic shutdowns have revealed that we do have the power to consciously and at scale cease burning so much carbon. You've all seen those images of cities from last spring, where skies opened up to astonishing clarity. Yet the consensus is that these moves were humanitarian disasters. Necessary for the pandemic or otherwise, every nation I've seen has viewed these shutdowns as horrible. Those who believe in voluntary simplicity, cutting back consumerism, adopting the circular economy, or degrowth have attained no purchase in public opinion. Overall, we do not think smaller is better.
....but these extrapolations will be flawed once they hit the world. It may be that the many COVID failures shock survivors into different behavior. And generations who didn't grow up immersed in the Cold War's deep training might be more amenable to new economic models.
posted by doctornemo at 4:37 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
I have been working in ecological design for 30+ years. If I could bank the pats on the back and the “2 thumbs up” I have received over the years, I would be a millionaire. About 8 years ago I retreated from activism/teaching and very outward work, to a very quiet life of ecological restoration in a secluded valley in the Catskills. Recently, an individual with prominence in the progressive publishing world has taken a deep interest in my work, and seems to be trying to convince me (and the leadership) that I need to become a public face for the org I work with, and start teaching and working in leadership again. The internal resistance that I have is strong, as:
(1) I don’t think that we humans have the collective understanding of the dire situation we are in
(2) We have to drawdown carbon VERY fast, not just stop pumping more into the atmosphere, which means redesigning the global ag systems in less than 10 years (grass lands and tundras hold 3x more carbon than forests—holistic land management works)
(3) I don’t feel good about passing my despair on to others
(4) Organizing humans is a drag
(5) The renewable energy sector is big money, dependent of this ruthless form of capitalism we have accepted as the norm (tech bro/money bro)
(6) Nature does not need to have meetings to get things done, nor have HR issues
posted by tarantula at 4:40 PM on March 24, 2021 [17 favorites]
(1) I don’t think that we humans have the collective understanding of the dire situation we are in
(2) We have to drawdown carbon VERY fast, not just stop pumping more into the atmosphere, which means redesigning the global ag systems in less than 10 years (grass lands and tundras hold 3x more carbon than forests—holistic land management works)
(3) I don’t feel good about passing my despair on to others
(4) Organizing humans is a drag
(5) The renewable energy sector is big money, dependent of this ruthless form of capitalism we have accepted as the norm (tech bro/money bro)
(6) Nature does not need to have meetings to get things done, nor have HR issues
posted by tarantula at 4:40 PM on March 24, 2021 [17 favorites]
So climate change... we'll address in this national and local way, it seems.
I think this is probably quite true. And from it we can also suppose that any climate remediation plan that takes on premise or requires a great degree of transnational coordination, is probably dead right out of the gate.
So what we will probably see, in the short- to medium-term, is more and more ambitious national projects, e.g. water desalinization, forest planting, centralized solar power, coastal dike construction, etc. These are things that can be done at the nation-state level and have both long-term and demonstrable short-term benefits. They're complex, but the complexity is manageable; most rely on scaling up established technologies, not inventing new ones. That's what I suspect we will occupy ourselves with for at least the next decade or so, for good or ill.
Where things get unpredictable, though, is when one nation decides that another nation is harming it via the mechanism of climate change, and decides to do something about it, via the mechanism of a cruise missile. There are lots of ways that even a small nation could exert asymmetrical pressure on another, in order to make a particular commercial behavior, such as pumping oil, unproductive.
In other words, I don't think we'll ever see a global transnational carbon tax. But we might see a lot of flaming oil refineries or coal-fired power plants in the meantime. And if enough oil refineries and coal plants mysteriously blow up, well, there's your tax on carbon right there. It may not be the most socially useful or administratively efficient form of taxation, but it works just as well if your only goal is to discourage a behavior.
When is the tipping point—when do certain countries on the "losing side" of carbon pollution and climate change decide they've had enough, and start to push back hard? That's the question I'd really like to know the answer to.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:49 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
I think this is probably quite true. And from it we can also suppose that any climate remediation plan that takes on premise or requires a great degree of transnational coordination, is probably dead right out of the gate.
So what we will probably see, in the short- to medium-term, is more and more ambitious national projects, e.g. water desalinization, forest planting, centralized solar power, coastal dike construction, etc. These are things that can be done at the nation-state level and have both long-term and demonstrable short-term benefits. They're complex, but the complexity is manageable; most rely on scaling up established technologies, not inventing new ones. That's what I suspect we will occupy ourselves with for at least the next decade or so, for good or ill.
Where things get unpredictable, though, is when one nation decides that another nation is harming it via the mechanism of climate change, and decides to do something about it, via the mechanism of a cruise missile. There are lots of ways that even a small nation could exert asymmetrical pressure on another, in order to make a particular commercial behavior, such as pumping oil, unproductive.
In other words, I don't think we'll ever see a global transnational carbon tax. But we might see a lot of flaming oil refineries or coal-fired power plants in the meantime. And if enough oil refineries and coal plants mysteriously blow up, well, there's your tax on carbon right there. It may not be the most socially useful or administratively efficient form of taxation, but it works just as well if your only goal is to discourage a behavior.
When is the tipping point—when do certain countries on the "losing side" of carbon pollution and climate change decide they've had enough, and start to push back hard? That's the question I'd really like to know the answer to.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:49 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
The Monkey Wrench Gang was published in 1975. When it comes to asymmetric warfare I rather suspect we'll continue to see what we've seen lately -- oil-rich countries fighting proxy wars in the aforementioned desperate nations, each attempting to strand the oil assets of the other.
posted by aramaic at 6:35 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by aramaic at 6:35 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Another long-term ecol designer, since '91, and likewise re pats on the back vs $.
Changing world one landscape at a time not fast enough. True some are huge but still, not so huge as they're bounded by NZ.
(1) I don’t think that we humans have the collective understanding of the dire situation we are in
^ Yep, I have a good grip on what eCO2 is doing to living systems, but no one really wants to know (even here where we have a climate commission*); they think understanding 'warming' is enough. High CO2 freaks me out; have a big folder of all kinds of weird effects (many already evident), changing plant flammability < and >, allergens, water runoff (anyone noticed floods getting bigger?), it's not just more intense rain storms, but also a fast-rising change in plant water use efficiency.
Here's a good place to start - The effect of plant-physiological responses to rising CO2 1 on global streamflow -
It's 'interesting' finding NZ scientists scratching their heads as they try to work out where the 'extra' water is coming from as they have not considered CO2 at all, this is a recent classic for a river not 50km away from me:
Potential evapotranspiration method influence on climate change impacts on river flow: a mid-latitude case study - Siloed minds threaten all our lives.
* Where my application for an Advisor was just turned down, they'll have to fix the planet without me! Even here where supposedly everything is being aligned with carbon/climate, many bureaucrats in the system seem unable to look at worst (likely IMO) case scenarios, think hard about what it means and run with it. Much better to stare into the abyss now.. while we can act.
posted by unearthed at 6:45 PM on March 24, 2021 [8 favorites]
Changing world one landscape at a time not fast enough. True some are huge but still, not so huge as they're bounded by NZ.
(1) I don’t think that we humans have the collective understanding of the dire situation we are in
^ Yep, I have a good grip on what eCO2 is doing to living systems, but no one really wants to know (even here where we have a climate commission*); they think understanding 'warming' is enough. High CO2 freaks me out; have a big folder of all kinds of weird effects (many already evident), changing plant flammability < and >, allergens, water runoff (anyone noticed floods getting bigger?), it's not just more intense rain storms, but also a fast-rising change in plant water use efficiency.
Here's a good place to start - The effect of plant-physiological responses to rising CO2 1 on global streamflow -
It's 'interesting' finding NZ scientists scratching their heads as they try to work out where the 'extra' water is coming from as they have not considered CO2 at all, this is a recent classic for a river not 50km away from me:
Potential evapotranspiration method influence on climate change impacts on river flow: a mid-latitude case study - Siloed minds threaten all our lives.
* Where my application for an Advisor was just turned down, they'll have to fix the planet without me! Even here where supposedly everything is being aligned with carbon/climate, many bureaucrats in the system seem unable to look at worst (likely IMO) case scenarios, think hard about what it means and run with it. Much better to stare into the abyss now.. while we can act.
posted by unearthed at 6:45 PM on March 24, 2021 [8 favorites]
Given that, the single best thing anyone can do for the biosphere is to not have children, especially people living in resource-intense cultures such as the US.
This might be true but as advice for a better future it contains a fundamental contradiction, as far as “skin in the game.”
posted by atoxyl at 6:53 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
This might be true but as advice for a better future it contains a fundamental contradiction, as far as “skin in the game.”
posted by atoxyl at 6:53 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
The renewable energy sector is big money, dependent of this ruthless form of capitalism we have accepted as the norm (tech bro/money bro)
The most hopeful thing I’ve heard about anything energy related in recent years is an acquaintance who works in petroleum saying that most people don’t understand how strong the commercial trajectory of renewables versus fossil fuel already actually looks.
I don’t know how much this considers the other resources required to scale up renewable energy, though.
posted by atoxyl at 6:58 PM on March 24, 2021
The most hopeful thing I’ve heard about anything energy related in recent years is an acquaintance who works in petroleum saying that most people don’t understand how strong the commercial trajectory of renewables versus fossil fuel already actually looks.
I don’t know how much this considers the other resources required to scale up renewable energy, though.
posted by atoxyl at 6:58 PM on March 24, 2021
Terraforming is basically a nonexistent technology, and the question of whether rehabilitating Venus's hostility or establishing the bare necessities of life on Mars would be easier is not one we really have the data to answer fully.
I am by no means an expert, but it seems to me that terraforming Mars would take centuries. Venus would take millennia.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:39 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
I am by no means an expert, but it seems to me that terraforming Mars would take centuries. Venus would take millennia.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:39 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Indeed, even in a runaway climate change scenario where the Earth's surface becomes inhospitable to mammalian life, keeping 10 000 people alive in cramped domes would be far easier on Earth than on Mars.
Rand Paul has suggested that "we should begin creating atmospheres on suitable moons or planets". This means, as someone has observed, that he thinks anthropogenic climate change is possible on other planets but not the one he currently lives on.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:46 PM on March 24, 2021 [18 favorites]
Rand Paul has suggested that "we should begin creating atmospheres on suitable moons or planets". This means, as someone has observed, that he thinks anthropogenic climate change is possible on other planets but not the one he currently lives on.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:46 PM on March 24, 2021 [18 favorites]
This might be true but as advice for a better future it contains a fundamental contradiction, as far as “skin in the game.”
Holy shit I feel like we just finished our last war over "whether the childless can give a fuck about the Earth," can we fucking NOT do this again already?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:58 PM on March 24, 2021 [13 favorites]
Holy shit I feel like we just finished our last war over "whether the childless can give a fuck about the Earth," can we fucking NOT do this again already?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:58 PM on March 24, 2021 [13 favorites]
Many things to say on this topic, but I am not sure if saying any of them in this thread will be helpful. I won't dwell on topics such as: gigadeaths ; coercive vs non-coercive options for population control (esp. in countries with high per-capita environmental impact, like mine) ; incompatibility of philosophies such as individual freedom of choice/action versus hard environmental constraints ; I don't think the overton window has shifted far enough yet, it'll probably only have shifted far enough once the impacts are being clearly and unambiguously felt and the trajectory is irreversibly locked in. And then: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".
> Why we must do everything differently to ensure the planet’s survival
There's a bit of rhetoric here that perhaps makes things seem bleaker than they are. It is unlikely that humanity will destroy the planet. It's unlikely that all life will become extinct, although a huge fraction of current species have gone and will continue go extinct. It's unlikely that all human life would become extinct, although if the status quo keeps rolling for many more decades then life may become much harder for survivors. Even if all current complex life becomes extinct, given another few hundred million years, who knows what new life may appear. The planet will be okay -- well, at least until our handy local non-renewable star starts to die.
A few things I've found that give me a bit of perspective and be at more peace with the situation is to read about:
* the history of the planet - the various changes in Earth's environmental conditions & mass extinctions along the way
* the history of civilisations - and their collapse (e.g. Tainter's work)
* Roy Scranton's Learning How To Die In The Anthropocene
posted by are-coral-made at 5:18 AM on March 25, 2021 [3 favorites]
> Why we must do everything differently to ensure the planet’s survival
There's a bit of rhetoric here that perhaps makes things seem bleaker than they are. It is unlikely that humanity will destroy the planet. It's unlikely that all life will become extinct, although a huge fraction of current species have gone and will continue go extinct. It's unlikely that all human life would become extinct, although if the status quo keeps rolling for many more decades then life may become much harder for survivors. Even if all current complex life becomes extinct, given another few hundred million years, who knows what new life may appear. The planet will be okay -- well, at least until our handy local non-renewable star starts to die.
A few things I've found that give me a bit of perspective and be at more peace with the situation is to read about:
* the history of the planet - the various changes in Earth's environmental conditions & mass extinctions along the way
* the history of civilisations - and their collapse (e.g. Tainter's work)
* Roy Scranton's Learning How To Die In The Anthropocene
posted by are-coral-made at 5:18 AM on March 25, 2021 [3 favorites]
What if there's another pandemic?
posted by Frowner
No if in that equation. It is going to happen. Repeatedly.
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* the history of civilisations - and their collapse (e.g. Tainter's work)
posted by are-coral-made
One of my favourite YT channels. (All episodes are available as audio only, and as audio plus visuals.)
posted by Pouteria at 6:06 AM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Frowner
No if in that equation. It is going to happen. Repeatedly.
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* the history of civilisations - and their collapse (e.g. Tainter's work)
posted by are-coral-made
One of my favourite YT channels. (All episodes are available as audio only, and as audio plus visuals.)
posted by Pouteria at 6:06 AM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]
Where things get unpredictable, though, is when one nation decides that another nation is harming it via the mechanism of climate change, and decides to do something about it, via the mechanism of a cruise missile. There are lots of ways that even a small nation could exert asymmetrical pressure on another, in order to make a particular commercial behavior, such as pumping oil, unproductive.
Very good point, Kadin2048. This can unfold in all kinds of ways, from cyberwar to trade policy to working through alliances.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future offers a complementary version of this, when certain nations take large steps without getting buy in from other nations, and how this drives further geopolitical tension.
posted by doctornemo at 7:20 AM on March 25, 2021
Very good point, Kadin2048. This can unfold in all kinds of ways, from cyberwar to trade policy to working through alliances.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future offers a complementary version of this, when certain nations take large steps without getting buy in from other nations, and how this drives further geopolitical tension.
posted by doctornemo at 7:20 AM on March 25, 2021
unearthed: "Siloed minds threaten all our lives."
Agreed. I'm writing about this now, looking at academia's response to climate change. On the one hand, many disciplines are diving into the climate emergency using their own tools and within their own boundaries, to different degrees and with different histories.
On the other, interdisciplinary work is really building up. It starts within and across the natural sciences, but there's also more research connecting social and natural sciences, with the humanities starting to reach out as well. My tentative conclusion is that climate change may become the biggest boost for interdisciplinary research we've ever seen.
posted by doctornemo at 7:24 AM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]
Agreed. I'm writing about this now, looking at academia's response to climate change. On the one hand, many disciplines are diving into the climate emergency using their own tools and within their own boundaries, to different degrees and with different histories.
On the other, interdisciplinary work is really building up. It starts within and across the natural sciences, but there's also more research connecting social and natural sciences, with the humanities starting to reach out as well. My tentative conclusion is that climate change may become the biggest boost for interdisciplinary research we've ever seen.
posted by doctornemo at 7:24 AM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]
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I mean broadly I agree: modern western life as we know it is unsustainable. But the passage quoted above is doing a lot of work to beef up the importance and objectivity of the cited article, even though the article is the scientific version of a polemic, which features the perspective of noted doomsayer Paul R. Ehrlich. Which of course is all well and good, and diverse perspectives are key here. But I'm rifling through these pieces and trying to get at a message, and all I come up with is "we need more will".
What does it mean, "Everything must change?" Shall we burn down all the cities and whittle our populations down to isolated hunter gatherer societies? If dramatic action is the key to victory, well that certainly seems dramatic! Or maybe a lot of progress is boring incrementalism, based on the government structures we have, rather than the ones we wished existed. And maybe the dramatic action we need is not the product of passion, but rather careful reasoning towards key changes that can make outsized differences toward fighting climate change. Which I'm not seeing a lot of in these pieces.
posted by Alex404 at 5:49 AM on March 24, 2021 [13 favorites]