Book note: Under a White Sky

UNDER A WHITE SKY: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert (2021)

Under a White Sky is an informative, readable book, which I recommend.

It is a book about people tampering with the environment to counteract damage done by previous tampering with the environment.

These people risk unintended consequences in order to undo previous unintended consequences.

This is unavoidable, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote.  There’s no state of unspoiled nature to get back to.  Doing nothing is an option, but it is not a good option.  The best that can be hoped for is to minimize previous damage.

Her first example is the ongoing struggle to keep Asian Carp, an invasive species, from jumping from the Mississippi Valley watershed to the Great Lakes Basin.

Introduction of Asian Carp (four different species) into the North American environment was actually a suggestion by the great environmentalist Rachel Carson.

She thought the carp would be a good alternative to pesticides to control the growth of aquatic weeds and algae.   Aquatic weeds were choking some rivers so badly that not only boats, but swimmers, were unable to get through them.

Asian Carp accomplished their intended purpose. The carp ate up the weeds, but they also ate up and crowded out native fish, mussels and other water life.

On the Illinois River, Asian Carp are nearly two-thirds of estimated fish biomass, Kolbert wrote; on other tributaries, the proportion is even higher.

She wrote that one species can grow to more than 80 pounds, eat half its weight in a day and lay hundreds of thousands of eggs.  Another species can grow to 100 pounds.

There is an ongoing struggle to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes Basin, which is connected with the Mississippi watershed by means of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which was originally constructed to divert sewage and other pollution away from Chicago beaches.

The canal was originally so polluted that it was toxic to fish.  But thanks to the Clean Waters Act and the work of Friends of the Chicago River, it is now possible for the Asian Carp to survive.

The carp are held back by massive fishing, which can yield literally tons of carp in a few days, and by an electrified fence on the Chicago River.

The irony of all this is obvious, but Kolbert does not criticize Rachel Carson or the diggers of the Chicago and Ship Canal.  They did the best they could on the basis of what they knew.  This is life.  This is the human condition.

Eternal spring: a time lapse of ice melting

Melting mounds of snow, icicles dripping from gutters, and morning frost quickly disappearing from the grass are all telltale signs that spring is near. But what happens when the landscape is suspended in a perpetual state of thaw not tied to the change of the season? Christopher Dormoy wades into this question in “Eternal Spring,” a mesmerizing short film that magnifies the properties of melting ice.

Shot with a macro lens, the timelapse zeroes in small frozen pockets that appear like cavernous landscapes and vast tundras, tying the film to its large-scale concerns. “Melting ice is beautiful and symbolizes spring, but it can also symbolize the problematic aspect of our climate,” the Montreal-based art director says. Given the incredible loss of ice already happening at the poles, “Eternal Spring” takes on additional meaning when linked to the climate crisis and what it means to inhabit a rapidly warming planet.

The film is part of a larger archive of Dormoy’s experimental projects, which you can find on Vimeo.

==Via the Colossal web site, which is a good source for interesting photography and other things.

Hard choices for a world that’s heating up

The world is still getting warmer.  Charts like this shouldn’t be necessary to prove this fact.  All that is necessary is to have lived a certain number of decades, and remembering how things used to be.

The scientific consensus is that a big driver of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels.  But cutting down on fossil fuels may not be compatible with maintaining current material standards of living.

And the methods used to replace fossil fuels are very likely to have unintended consequences.  Take electric vehicles.  The batteries currently in use require lithium to operate.

Lithium is a non-renewable resource.  Someday the supply will run out.  It is toxic.  Mining  lithium and industrial use of lithium are bad for the environment and dangerous to human health.

I’m not absolutely opposed to mining lithium.  I don’t know enough to suggest a substitute for lithium.  In the tradeoffs among mitigating global warming, reducing environmental pollution and limiting use of non-renewable resources, using lithium batteries for electric-powered vehicles may be the least bad choice, or maybe the least bad politically acceptable choice.

Lithium is just one example of many.  We the people of the world are past the point where it is possible to avoid bad consequences of global warming, and almost every choice (including the choice of doing nothing) comes at great cost to human beings and the non-human environment.  If you read all three linked articles below, you will see why there are no easy answers..

LINKS

How many solar panels can dance on the head of a pin?  Thoughts on the eschatology of energy transition by Chris Smaje for Small Farm Future.

Whither energy? by Eliza Daley for By My Solitary Hearth.

Inexhaustable flows? by Tom Murphy for Do the Math.

Summertime ain’t what it used to be

The following is by my e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey.  He lives in Baltimore.

SUMMERTIME AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE.

By Bill Harvey

The climate crisis.  Yep, it’s real bad.

There are many reasons for understanding that “The future ain’t what it used to be” — the increasingly dangerous burden of a declining US imperialism on the world, including its burden on the American people; an economic system that is becoming more and more recognizably set up for profit, not people, foundationed as it is in the everyday practice of alienated labor; the increasing likelihood of scarcity of many nature-provided resources that are essential to what we know as life; the accelerating unraveling of “Our Democracy” (whatever that is or ever was), the instrument that we’re told is the tool by which we can address all of the above bumps in the road.

There’s a lot to be worried about, people!  No sweat — Put all that and more aside for the moment so we can talk climate crisis.  An excellent place to start is in Bernie Sanders’s FOX NEWS op-ed below.  He peels off a number of the basic points in a very useful size-up of the situation. An even more worldly place to start than Bernie’s list of high temperatures — or my perfectly reasonable outburst, above — is to observe the obvious, that “Summertime ain’t what it used to be.”  It’s no longer “when the livin’ is easy,” to be sure.

Put aside, too, the longer term less visible problems like sea level rise and the heating of the oceans.  Solutions to those problems can wait, can’t they?

Consider extreme heat, wildfires, floods. air quality, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, likely early hurricane seasons — again, no sweat, unless, say, you’re trying to plan a D-Day level operation like a trip to the grocery or taking a walk.

I can’t remember when I started saying “30 or 40 more years of this at this rate and I see no way that people will be able to put a life together” —15 years ago?  The only part I had wrong was the timeline.  It’s here now.  It’s not too far-fetched, I think, to imagine that within a decade millions of Americans will have a hard time finding scarce vital resources like potable drinking water and even food ‚ and not only as a result of the climate crisis.  Some will call this alarmist, whatever.  I call it the trend.

Unless we organize to build power against the capitalist system that’s taking us in this direction.

I’m shocked that Sanders missed the economic boom that a just transition to solar and wind energy would bring.  How many jobs would be created by a project of putting solar panels on the rooftops of every building in the country?  It should be possible to do that in a predictable few years.  After that, all that labor would not be needed for rooftop panels.  What then?  Certainly other climate-related projects.  Then?  A six-hour workday?  Maximum safety and health protections for every worker?…Not likely under capitalism.

An enormous project, a small slice of things:

Climate change is a threat to the planet: We must address it by Bernie Sanders for Fox News.

Biden Betrays Youth With Willow Project—and Breaks His Own Promise by Dejah Powell for In These Times.

Eastern Kentucky after region’s worst flooding

Eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest areas of the USA, has been devastated by the worst floods in the history of the region, the result of climate change and the wreckage of watersheds by strip mining.

Tarance Ray, one of the Trillbillies, wrote an article about it in The Baffler.

Will anything meaningful be done to help the flood victims?  Or prevent future floods? he asked.  Not likely, he answered; not by the present powers that be.

When several complexes of “training thunderstorms” established themselves over Eastern Kentucky on July 25, pounding the Kentucky River watershed with upwards of fourteen inches of rain over the next five days, the conditions were ripe for a catastrophically fatal outcome.

First of all, the Kentucky River watershed had been subjected to many decades of strip mining, which decreases the soil’s ability to retain water. So, when the rains came, the water was funneled into creeks—and peoples’ homes.

There’s a reason Knott County has had the highest number of flooding fatalities: its narrow valleys created virtual traps in the face of rushing water, pinning people to the ground at the exact moment they needed to be anywhere but.

Whitesburg, Kentucky

The … [town of]  Neon is the best example of what this looks like.  Just a few miles upstream from it is an old strip mine. When the water came through that area, it ran through the community like a stampede of bulls. Neon is now a wasteland of twisted metal. There are cars in houses, houses on top of houses, an entire building unmoored from its foundation. City Hall has had to set up in a muddy parking lot under a pop-up tent and a camper van.

Even further upstream from Neon, in a community called McRoberts, I saw something I’d never seen before: two cars freestanding end-to-end on a bridge rail, completely mangled and disassembled but perfectly preserved in their disassemblage, like they’d been pinned to something larger while the water stripped them apart, piece by piece. It now remains like a statue, a testament to the power of deluge.  [snip]

More than twenty-three thousand lost electricity.  Roads and bridges have collapsed, leaving entire communities inaccessible. Others, like Neon, are without running water and waste disposal, and it may be months before this can be fixed.

While President Joe Biden declared the flood a major disaster on July 29, it was another two days before the state’s first FEMA mobile registration center opened to help residents access relief; additional centers did not reach Knott, Breathitt, and other counties until August 2.

You can easily talk yourself out of criticizing this delay until you concede that, yes, OK, we do live in the wealthiest, most technologically advanced society in human history, so surely something else must be going on here.

When dead eagles fall from the sky

Catastrophic climate change is already here.  It’s just not evenly distributed yet.  A blogger named Umair Haque writes: 

My friends in the Indian Subcontinent tell me stories, these days, that seem like science fiction. The heatwave there is pushing the boundaries of survivability. My other sister says that in the old, beautiful city of artists and poets, eagles are falling dead from the sky. They are just dropping dead and landing on houses, monuments, shops. They can’t fly anymore.

First aid to sick eagle

The streets, she says, are lined with dead things. Dogs. Cats. Cows. Animals of all kinds are just there, dead. They’ve perished in the killing heat. They can’t survive.

People, too, try to flee. They run indoors, spend all day in canals and rivers and lakes, and those who can’t, too, line the streets, passed out, pushed to the edge. They’re poor countries. We won’t know how many this heatwave has killed for some time to come. Many won’t even be counted.

Think about all that for a moment. Really stop and think about it. Stop the automatic motions of everyday life you go through and think about it.

He goes on to say that people in the USA and other rich countries are only kidding ourselves if we think it can’t happen to us.

My Western friends don’t think these days. This fantasy of turning up the air conditioning and sitting in your apartment or house? They ignore the now obvious signs. Birds falling from the sky, Dead things lining the streets. What are you going to do, sit in your air conditioned home while everything else goes extinct?

It doesn’t work like that. Those things, those beings — birds, cows, sheep, chickens, whatever — they provide us with the basics, too. They perish, we perish. Insects nourish our soil, birds eat insects, and on and on. My Western friends don’t understand that we are part of systems. Ecosystems, in this case. And as their foundations are ripped out, we can scarcely survive. The idea that you can sit in your air conditioned home in comfort while everything else goes extinct is a fantasy, a delusion. What will you eat? Who will turn the soil? Who’ll keep the crops healthy? Where will the basics of life come from?

Our civilization collapses somewhere between fifty and sixty degrees Celsius [120 to 138 degrees Fahrenheit]. Bang, poof, gone. Nothing works after that point. Everything begins to die — not just animals and us in the case, but our systems which depend on them. Economics crater, inflation skyrockets, people grow poorer, fascism erupts as a consequence. You can already see that beginning to happen around the globe — but it’s just the beginning. Imagine how much worse inflation’s going to get when Extinction really begins to bite.

We can see climate-related catastrophe all around us—record heat waves, forest fires, droughts, devastating storms.     If things go on as they are, we face the possibility of the collapse of industrial civilization, or worse.

Global warming is here: We need to deal with it

Global warming is already here.  It is too late to avoid an era of continuing emergencies due to storms, floods, fires, droughts, heat waves and tidal waves.  The question is whether it will be possible to cope with these emergencies and to stop the acceleration of climate catastrophe.  

20 billion-dollar weather climate disasters in historical context by Adam B. Smith for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the Climate-Watching World, Everything New Is Old Again by Thomas Neuburger for God’s Spies.

Climate barbarism: Adapting to a wrong world by Jacob Blumenthal for Wiley Online Library.

The global rich and global climate change

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

The great economic historian Adam Tooze wrote an eye-opening article about how the global rich (the richest 10%) are the chief drivers of climate change.  What he should have noted is that, at least in the immediate future, they will suffer the least from living on a hotter planet.

Tooze noted that their consumption causes nearly half of the world’s carbon emissions, and the global middle class (the next 40%) cause nearly all the rest.  The global poor (the bottom 50%) are responsible for hardly any, yet they will be the hardest hit.

He said we need to think less about which nations are the chief cause of the problem, and more about the different economic classes.  Global warming has been affected even more by the super-rich (the top 1%) in the OPEC nations and in China than the super-rich in North America.

China accounts for half the increase in global emissions from 1990 to 2015.  One-sixth of the total global increase comes from China’s rich and one third from China’s middle class. 

The betterment of material living standards in China during that period is one of the world’s great positive achievements.  But it also, according to Tooze, is a big contributor to what may be the world’s greatest problem.

It is not just that the richest 10 percent consume so much.  They are the ones who make the investment decisions.  This is true not only of private investment decisions, but of government investment, to the extent that it is financed by borrowing.

Add to that the fact that the richest 10 percent are the dominant political class in most countries.

Adam Tooze did not spell out the implications of this, but they are important.

The richest 10 percent, along with the global middle class, will try to meet the challenge of global warming by investing in alternative technologies that will maintain their material standard of living.

The problem is that making windmills, solar panels or electric vehicles is energy-intensive and uses up non-renewable resources.  Probably there is a net benefit at some point; I’m not qualified to say. The point is, you have to burn a lot of fossil fuels to create the alternatives to fossil fuels. 

What the global rich, and the global middle class, are not considering, is austerity for themselves.  Nobody that I know of advocates giving up air travel, for example. 

The shortages of catastrophe

Many people have noted how a tiny group of billionaires have increased their share of the world’s wealth during the coronavirus pademic.

A blogger named Umair Haque pointed out that this is no coincidence. There are shortages of all kinds of thing across the economy, driven by the pandemic.  This has driven up prices, mainly to the benefit of corporate monopolies and other big businesses, and of the multi-billionaires who control them.

The shortages ripping across the economy are forcing up prices dramatically — and weirdly. The prices, for example, of used cars are skyrocketing. Clothes and food have gotten dramatically more expensive, from what I can see. And of course electronics — well, good luck getting them.

But this isn’t inflation. Sorry, armchair economists. I know that American pundits love to spout seriously on this issue — but they’re wrong. Inflation is a “wage price spiral.” This is something very, very different. Your income isn’t going up, at least not nearly as much as prices are. And prices are going up because of what economists call an “exogenous shock” — an act of God, or in this case, at least, an act of humankind.

These are shortages of catastrophe. They’re caused by what Covid did to global supply chains. It happened something like this — I’ll oversimplify to make the point easy to grasp. For a year or so, the world plunged into lockdown. Demand ground to a halt for many, many things. Retail stores closed in a tidal wave.

And then as lockdown was lifted, demand began to rise. But by this point, global supply chains — which operate on a “just in time” principle — were wrecked, shut down for too long, unable to cope again with normal levels of wants and needs. 

[snip]

Covid’s ripped the global economy apart — but the next wave of shocks coming our way are going to be much, much bigger. Think about climate change. Electronics were already expensive due to microchip shortages as Covid increased demand, but then there was a fire at one of the main suppliers of microchips in the world.

What is climate change going to do? Cause megafires, megafloods, megatyphoons. And yet increasingly, our civilization’s production of stuff is centralized. Your iPhones come from a few megafactories, and so do all those big TVs, cars, even medicines, food, and clothes. That reflects the mega corporations who make megaprofits from all these products — centralization in production reflects centralisation in profits.

One fire took out the factory which supplies much of the world’s microchips. Now imagine what happens as climate change intensifies, and megafires, megafloods, and megatyphoons become the norm. All that centralised production is at severe risk. Maybe this year the iPhone factory burns down, maybe next year, the Tesla factory does. And so on.

But that — massive risk to production — is just one effect. There’s also a massive and heightened risk to distribution. Think how fast Covid shut down distribution — it’s one reason things are more expensive now. Sending things by boats and planes and trucks is harder in an age of lockdowns and checks and so forth. But now imagine what happens if a megatyphoon takes out this shipping lane, or that fleet of super carriers. Or what happens if a mega flood makes that entire region — which products have to travel through — impassable. Or what happens as ports begin to drown.

Disease, drought, floods and storms would disrupt international trade no matter what the trading system.  But global supply chains are much more fragile than they need to be because of the neoliberal drive to prioritize cost-cutting and short-term profits over stability and sustainability. 

In fact, there would probably be breakdowns in that delicate system even without climate- or disease-related crises.

The Biden administration begins

Joe BIden is sworn in as President

Joe Biden would be a reasonably good President for a nation enjoying peace and prosperity.

He is a nice person who doesn’t want to upset anybody’s apple cart. Like Warren G. Harding a century ago, he represents the human desire for “a return to normalcy.”

His predecessor’s administration was one long series of self-created crises, until last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

I don’t know how well a Biden administration will deal with the pandemic, but, unlike Donald Trump, Biden won’t be actively against doing reasonable things (like masking) to deal with the crisis. 

He has said he’ll bring the United States back into the World Health Organization, mandate masks on federal property and interstate travel and push for a huge $1.9 trillion COVID relief package (which may or may not get through Congress).  He’ll extend restrictions on evictions and foreclosures and continue the pause in student loan payments.

This could be good.  But he is not going to push for any overhaul of the U.S. health insurance or public health systems.  And the restrictions on evictions, foreclosures and student loan payments are not sustainable long term.  BIden assumes a quick return to normal, which may not happen.

Biden, unlike Trump, is not actively opposed to action on climate change.  He will rejoin the Paris climate accords, push for a “climate world summit” and order the drawing-up of a plan for 100 percent clean energy and zero net emissions by the year 2050—that is, 30 years from now.

We Americans have made progress in reducing emissions.  But to accomplish the goals that Biden has set forth would require shutting down the coal, oil and natural gas industries, and the industries that burn these fossil fuels, and replacing them with new industries that provide just as many jobs and, hopefully, just as much business profit.

There is a name for such a transition.  It is called a Green New Deal.  It would be a big change, bigger than the original New Deal.  I don’t know if Biden would be up for so big a change or not.

Biden promised to end the “Muslim ban,” which restricts travel and immigration to the U.S. from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, plus five non-Muslim countries added in 2020.  But he has not to my knowledge said anything about ending military intervention in those countries, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions being made refugees.

The USA needs to end our forever wars if we are to regain our self-respect and the respect of the world.  But it would be no easy task.  A peace economy would mean shutting down a big part of the U.S. economy.  I don’t know whether Biden has even thought about this.

Lastly a large part of the U.S. population regards the present administration as illegitimate.  Biden has to deal with rioters and insurrectionists, while trying to unite the American people as a whole.

The new President faces challenges that would task the ability of an Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt.  I don’t expect greatness of Joe Biden.  I expect him to be better than Donald Trump, which is a low bar.

LINKS

Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address.

What Joe Biden has promised to do on Day One and his first 100 days as president by Ed Erickson for CBS News.

Hard Times: Will America recover under Biden? by Andrew Cockburn for Harper’s magazine.

Biden’s American Rescue Plan and Its Opponents by Jack Rasmus.

The CDC’s Mission Impossible by “Yves Smith” for Naked Capitalism.  The pandemic crisis.

The New Domestic War on Terror Is Coming by Glenn Greenwald on Substack.

Image via Chicago Tribune.

Domestic fossil fuel industries in crisis

The domestic U.S. fossil fuel industry is in trouble.  Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake.  President Joe Biden will face a choice: try to save them or replace them with something better.  There is a good article in Dissent magazine about this.

In 2016,  [Donald] Trump charged Barack Obama with waging a “war against coal” and promised to bring the sector back to its former glory.

He manifestly failed to do so, but his rhetoric still proved an effective bludgeon against Hillary Clinton in Appalachia during the campaign.  In fact, more coal plants were retired under Trump than in either of Obama’s terms in office.

U.S. coal production had already been declining for years, as cheap natural gas edged it out of the energy mix used in power plants.  Coal jobs had been disappearing for years even before that, as the industry replaced workers with machines.

At its peak in the 1920s, the industry employed over 800,000 people in the United States.  Today, only about 42,000 coal mining jobs remain.

As coal companies have gone bankrupt, they have shed their pension obligations to former workers, leaving the federal government to pick up the bill.  Last December, Congress bailed out nearly 100,000 coal miners’ pensions.

In the long run, this was a good thing, not a bad thing.  Of all the important sources of energy production, coal is the dirtiest.  It generates the most air and water pollution and the greatest hazards to its workers’ health and the public health.  Still, that is no consolation if your livelihood depends on coal.

As energy researchers point out, coal is the canary for other fossil fuel industries. Oil isn’t on quite the same decline yet, but it’s headed in that direction.

The American fracking industry has expanded rapidly in the past decade with the use of cheap credit, and with encouragement from Obama, who boasted of making the United States the world’s leading oil producer.

But the shale oil that fracking produces is only profitable when oil prices are relatively high, and the overproduction of shale gas has glutted global markets.

The combination of a pandemic-spurred decline in demand and a price war between Saudi and Russian producers sent oil prices plummeting this year, resulting in a record number of bankruptcies among American oil producers.  An estimated 107,000 oil industry workers lost their jobs in the United States this year.

While some of those may come back as the economy recovers (whenever that is), many will not. Some energy analysts suggest that the world may have hit “peak oil demand,” as renewable energy begins to replace fossil fuels.  The Houston Chronicle reports that oil production employment in Texas “may never fully recover” as the overextended shale oil sector consolidates and learns to get by with fewer workers.

Source: Dissent Magazine

The fact that the fracking industry, or any other fossil fuel industry, is unprofitable doesn’t necessarily mean it will cease operations.  The economic incentive for an industry in the red is to do everything possible—in this case, extract every little globule of shale oil and gas—to minimize the loss.

Of course, moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing, not a bad thing—also overall.  Global warming is not imaginary.  Greenhouse gas emissions are real.  But what about all the people whose jobs depend on oil and gas?

We need something like a Green New Deal to create useful and sustainable jobs to replace jobs lost.  Without some such program, Americans will be forced to choose between short-run economic survivable and a livable planet in the long run.

A utopian novel of climate change

Kim Stanley Robinson is an award-winning science fiction writer whose novels have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list.

His newest novel, THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, is about the effects of climate change and environmental devastation, but is different from most SF novels on this theme.

Such novels typically are set in a future in which all the bad things we’re being warned about have come true.  In contrast, Robinson’s novel is utopian, not dystopian.  It is about disparate people struggling for decades to achieve a better world and eventually making headway.

It belongs on the same shelf as H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887.

The novel begins in the near future, where an American named Frank May is doing humanitarian aid word in a village in India. A heat wave strikes in the start of the monsoon, combined with a failure of the electrical grid across India.

Robinson tells in grim detail what it would be like to die of inescapable heat and humidity—the humidity preventing sweat from evaporating and cooling you off.

The catastrophe causes the Paris Climate Agreement signatories to meet and consider what to do.  Their only action is to create a subsidiary body with ample funding, but no powers, to advocate for future generations, children and those who have no voice.

The new organization, nicknamed the Ministry for the Future, is headed by an idealistic, middle-aged Irish politician named Mary Murphy, who becomes one of the main viewpoint characters of the novel.

Her team comes to the conclusion that the main barriers to action on climate change are the legal system and perverse economic incentives. 

For example, one principle of economics is the discount rate—the idea that a dollar next year is worth less than a dollar today.  Even a modest discount rate, that $100 next year is only worth $99 now, effectively makes it uneconomic to invest in anything with a payoff more than a few decades away.

The Ministry comes up with ideas for changing this.  The most important one is the “carbon coin.”  It is a currency to be paid to anyone who sequesters a ton of carbon, either by removing it from the atmosphere or preventing it from being burned.  Its value is guaranteed by making it legal tender for payment of carbon taxes.

The world’s bankers aren’t interested.  Not their job, they say.

A terrorist organization called the Children of Kali emerges.  Like the Thugs of old-time India, they worship the goddess of death.  Their program is to kill plutocrats and politicians responsible for heating up the world. 

From that they move on to downing aircraft and sinking ships that burn diesel fuel.  Their weapon of choice is flocks of bird-sized flying killer drones, guided by artificial intelligence.  They are widely dispersed until they converge on their targets, and cannot be defended against.

Ocean and air travel by fossil fuel becomes uneconomic.  A worldwide economic depression results.  But then high-tech dirigibles and sailing ships emerge.  They have battery-powered electric motors, which are charged by photo-electric and piezoelectric materials that cover all surfaces.

So progress comes about, as one character remarks, through a combination of “arbitrage and sabotage.”   Mary Murphy gets her carbon coin, which is a form of block-chained BItcoin, which can be deposited with a guaranteed rate of interest.

The test of reality

For decades, the USA and other rich nations have had the luxury of dealing with self-created problems.’

Some were self-created (deregulation of finance, foreign intervention), some symbolic (the border wall, Confederate statues) and some imaginary (the Russiagate plot).

Now, however, we’re up against real things.  Pandemics don’t care about public opinion polls.  Climate change doesn’t care about the limits of the politically possible.

Some nations are demonstrating the resiliency needed to rise to these challenges.  Some aren’t.  In a few years, we’ll have the results of real-life experiments as to what works and what doesn’t.

My hope is that we Americans will learn from experience.  My fear is that we will be unable to endure the pain of facing reality and the consequences of what we have allowed our rulers to do.

∞

COVID-19 is the quiz, climate change is the final exam by Jeff Masters for Yale Climate Connections.

Is green technology a mirage?

If a problem cannot be solved, it may not be a problem, but a fact.  [Attributed to Donald Rumsfeld]

It is possible to ignore reality, but it is not possible to ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.  [Attributed to Ayn Rand]

A new Michael Moore movie, “Planet of the Humans,” is an attack on the renewable energy movement.  Environmentalists by and large are outraged, and some demanded the movie be suppressed.

It actually was taken down from YouTube for 11 days, but it’s back up now.  If it is taken down again, you can view it on the Planet of the Humans Home page.

It runs for 100 minutes, which is a long time to watch something on a computer screen.  But it held my interest, and maybe it would hold yours, too.

In the first part of the movie, director Jeff Gibbs shows that solar panels and windmills are built through energy-intensive industrial processes and that they are made of materials such as high-grade quartz and rare earths that are scarce and non-renewable.

Solar panels and windmills wear out and have to be replaced.  In one scene, he visits Daggett, California, which pioneered in the development of solar and wind energy.  He sees a wasteland of dilapidated panels and windmills, because the pioneers couldn’t afford to keep them up.

And they don’t even fully replace fossil fuels.  Because of variability of sun and wind, backup electrical generators have to keep spinning, and the ones that aren’t hydroelectric use coal, gas and nuclear fuel.

In the second part, he looks at the environmental destruction caused by biomass energy.  There is no gain from freeing yourself from dependence on coal companies and embracing logging companies.

He makes a big point of pointing out the corporate ties of environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and of environmentalists such as Al Gore, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Richard Branson and even Bill McKibben.

He questions the whole premise, promoted by advocates such as Al Gore, that it is possible for middle-class Americans to enjoy our current material standard of living simply by adopting a new technology.

Fossil fuels made possible a world with an exponentially increasing population with the average individual using an ever-increasing amount of fuel and raw materials, Gibbs said.  Such a world isn’t sustainable, he said.

Waffle House prepared to weather the storms

USA Today recently had a good article about how the Waffle House restaurant chain is organized to provide food and shelter during storms, floods and other disasters.

Waffle House stockpiles emergency supplies, employs special teams ready to rush to the scene of an emergency and has thick loose-leaf binders of directions as to what to do in any kind of emergency.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency rates the seriousness of emergencies based on the status of the nearest Waffle House – “green” (Waffle House operating normally), “yellow” (Waffle House operating on a limited basis) and “red” (Waffle House close, which almost never happens).

This is a good example of how managers of corporations and other big institutions need to think during the coming bad years.

LINKS

How Does Waffle House Stay Open During Disasters? by Jason Kottke for kottke.org.

Hurricane Dorian: ‘Waffle House Index’ put to test during disasters by Annie Blanks for the Pensacola News-Journal and USA Today.

What Do Waffles Have to Do With Risk Management? by Laura Walter for EHS Today magazine.

The next ten billion years.

The only thing certain about the future is that this, too, shall pass away.  To get an idea of what that may mean, click on The Next Ten Billion Years by John Michael Greer on The Archdruid Report.  It’s not that his specific predictions are sure to come true, although there’s no specific reason why they couldn’t.  It’s that almost everything we think is important is just a blip in the cosmic scheme of things.

The USA could use a disaster response corps

Click to enlarge. Source: Climate.gov.

Click to enlarge. Source: Climate.gov.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions down to zero is not enough.  Any Green New Deal needs a disaster relief component, because climate change is already bringing floods, fires and other emergencies.

The United States needs a Disaster Response Corps, organized along the lines of the original New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps, to deal with climate emergencies.  Like the CCC, it also would be a jobs program.

Right now disaster response is the responsibility of state and local governments, and non-profit organizations.  The federal government’s role is limited to coordination and providing financial aid.

Commonly volunteer groups, such as the Cajun Navy or Occupy Sandy, have to step in when organized relief efforts fail.

The outlook is for more and worse climate- and weather-related disasters.  It won’t be just fires and floods.  As droughts become worse, we can expect internal climate refugees, like the “okies” who were driven off the land during the Dust Bowl disaster in the 1930s.

My idea is that virtually anyone would be able to enlist in the Disaster Relief Corps for a fixed amount of time.  Enlistees would agree to accept military-type discipline and go where they’re sent.  The time between emergencies would be spent in training or maybe taking on some of the tasks of the 1930s CCC..

Pay would be comparable, in inflation-adjusted terms, to what CCC workers or enlisted soldiers got in the 1930s.  Enlistees could be discharged for misconduct, neglect of duty or refusal to follow orders.

The Corps’ mission should not be assigned to the military.  The military is for warriors; the Corps would be for rescuers.

It would be tricky to set it up in a way that didn’t undermine existing efforts, programs and volunteer efforts, but I think it could be done.

Maybe in time the U.S. could help fund a United Nations International Disaster Relief Corps.  There would be plenty of work for it to do.

Climate change is already upon us.  Cutting back in greenhouse gasses will limit how much worse it gets, but that won’t make it go away.  We have to deal with what’s already happening.

LINKS

U.S. Disaster Relief at Home and Abroad by Rocio Cara Labrador for the Council on Foreign Relations.

34 Disaster Relief Organizations, a list by Raptim Humanitarian Travel.  They’re doing good work.  But should they be expected to do it all?

Flood control and the failure of maintenance

Lambert Strether of Naked Capitalism wrote two good posts about how the floods in the Midwest reflect not only a changing climate, but a failure of government to maintain and improve flood control systems.

After disastrous floods in 1936, Congress authorized a construction program of dams, and channels to prevent a recurrence.  These dams and levees have not been maintained, with disastrous results.

One was a breach of the levees around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  Strether cited similar failures of infrastructure in the Midwest now.

In the 1930s, we Americans were capable of national efforts that served the common good.  Now we don’t seem to be able to maintain what we have, even when obviously necessary.

As Strether noted, a 21st century flood control program would be less about dams, levees and channels and more about protecting wetlands and moving development back from flood plains, so that flood waters can be soaked him instead of directed elsewhere.   But the principle is the same.  The nation needs to come together again.

LINKS

‘Breaking Everywhere’: Flooding Bursts Midwest Levees and Tough Questions Follow by Mitch Smith and John Schwartz for the New York Times.

The New Deal, the Green New Deal and Flood Control by Lambert Strether for Naked Capitalism.

More on Flood Control: The Missouri River, the Levees and the Gavins Point and Spencer Dams by Lambert Strether for Naked Capitalism.

Global warming requires global action

Click to enlarge.  Source: The Conversation

We Americans have actually done quite a bit to cut back on greenhouse gas emission, as the chart above shows.

But while we and the other North Atlantic nations have been cutting back, China and other nations have been pumping out more.

The average Chinese doesn’t add all that much to global warming, compared to the average American.  But there are so many more Chinese than Americans that China as a nation does more heat up the world more than the USA does.

Click to enlarge. Source: The Conversation.

The problem is that, for now, the economic growth of China, India and the Global South in general requires more use of coal, oil and natural gas.  If I were Chinese or Indian, I would be unwilling to give up my hope of a better material standard of living while Americans and Europeans have so much more than I do and individually leave so larger a carbon footprint than I do.

The needed radicalism of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal resolution of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey is more radical and far-reaching than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original New Deal.

The non-binding resolution calls for a mass mobilization of American government and society against catastrophic climate change, on a scale as great or even greater than mobilization to fight World War Two.

The mobilization Ocasio-Cortez and Markey call for would mean a closing down or drastic shrinkage of industries that depend on fossil fuels.  This would be a threat not only to the profits of powerful vested interests, but to the livelihoods of millions of good, hard-working people.   

That is why the Green New Deal is also a deal.  It includes social reform and a job creation program  to get buy-in from working people and minorities, who might otherwise

There are two problems with the resolution.  One is that it is too radical to gain political acceptance anytime soon.  The other is that, radical as it is, its proposals may not be enough to deal with the crisis.

∞∞∞

If you read my previous post or the text of the resolution, you’ll see that it is largely a wish list of the environmental and labor movements for the past 20 or so years.  Getting these movements on the same page would be a big accomplishment, because they haven’t always been friends.

The environmental movement has sometimes worked to the benefit of the well-to-do, such as subsidies for electric cars and solar panels, while putting the burden of change on the less-well-off, with higher gasoline and fuel prices.  The labor movement has sometimes accepted the argument that it is necessary to sacrifice health, safety and the environment just to protect jobs.

Working people have good reason to be suspicious of promises that, if they give up what they have, they’ll be given something else just as good or better.  This was the promise of NAFTA and the other trade agreements under the Clinton administration and after—that the loss of grungy industrial jobs will be offset by new bright, shiny high-tech jobs.  This didn’t happen.

An expression that occurs repeatedly in the resolution is “vulnerable and frontline communities.”  This refers to the communities left behind by de-industrialization and globalization during the past 30 years.  It also refers to the communities that will bear the brunt of climate change—usually poorer, often minorities, such as the people left stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrine.  The resolution promises they won’t be left behind this time.

What the Green New Deal proposes

ADDED 3/24/2019.  I MADE A BIG MISTAKE HERE.  THIS IS THE DRAFT PROPOSAL BY ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, NOT THE VERSION THAT WAS ACTUALLY INTRODUCED.

The Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey proposes to address a climate change crisis and a social-economic crisis.  Here’s a quick summary of what they specifically propose.

• Build infrastructure to create resiliency against climate change-related disasters
• Repair and upgrade U.S. infrastructure, including ensuring universal access to clean water.
• Meet 100% of power demand through clean and renewable energy sources
• Build energy-efficient, distributed smart grids and ensure affordable access to electricity
• Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency
• Massively expand clean manufacturing (such as solar panel factories, wind turbine factories, battery and storage manufacturing, energy-efficient manufacturing components) and remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing “as much as is technically feasible.”
• Work with farmers and ranchers to create a sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas-free, food system that ensures universal access to healthy food and expands independent family farming.
• Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becomes unnecessary and create affordable public transit available to all, with the goal of replacing every combustion-engine vehicle.
• Mitigate long-term health effects of climate change and pollution
• Remove greenhouse gases from our atmosphere and pollution through afforestation, preservation and other methods of restoring our natural ecosystems
• Restore all our damaged and threatened ecosystems
• Clean up all the existing hazardous waste sites and abandoned sites, identify new emission sources and create solutions to eliminate those emissions
• Make the US the leader in addressing climate change and share our technology, expertise and products with the rest of the world to bring about a global Green New Deal.

‘It is worse, much worse, than you think’

“It is worse, much worse than you think.”  So begins David Wallace-Wells’ THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: Life After Warming (2019), one of the most important books I’ve read in years.  

It is not proof that global warming is taking place, and it is not a plan to mitigate or reduce global warming.  It is simply a compilation of all the ways that climate change is disrupting the world we live in, and what may happen if nothing is done.

The best-case scenario is a future like the present, only more so—more storms, more droughts, more floods, more wildfires, more tidal waves, more heat waves, but with the basic social order remaining intact.

The worst-case scenario, which can’t be ruled out, is that most or all of the earth’s surface becomes unfit for human habitation.

When I first heard about global warming, I wondered whether it was real.  I didn’t see how it was possible to measure average temperatures over the whole Earth to within a degree or so, or rise in average sea levels within inches.  Actually, I still don’t.

Still, I thought, the possibility of global warming provides one more reason for doing a lot of things that are desirable in themselves—reducing air and water pollution, switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Over the years I came to the realization that since the greenhouse effect was scientific fact, and since greenhouse gasses were being emitted into the air at an ever-increasing rate, there was bound to be a crisis sooner or later.

That crisis is now upon us.

Fourteen of the world’s 20 largest cities have experienced water shortages or drought.  Cape Town, South Africa, nearly ran out of water.  Freshwater lakes from Lake Mead to Lake Chad are drying up.  The number of major floods have quadrupled since 1980 and doubled since 2004.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is dying because of the warming ocean.  The melting of the Arctic ice cap has changed wind patterns in China in ways that caused life-threatening smog in major cities.

The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major  hurricanes arriving in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes.

Then the record- breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic.  It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures killing 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan and 124 in Algeria.  

In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than 50 and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage.  

There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way to the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres.  Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100.  In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

The years to come will not be better.  One key fact about the greenhouse effect is that it is additive.  Nothing that is done to reduce greenhouse gasses in the future will remove the greenhouse gasses now in the atmosphere, at least not in the lifetime of any living person or their future children.

Another is that annual greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing.  Half of the emissions that occurred since the start of the industrial revolution took place in the last 30 years.

We can’t predict how successful the world’s nations will be in cutting back on fossil fuels and other sources of greenhouse gasses.  We can’t predict the exact impact of these gasses.

All we know for sure is that every addition to the world’s greenhouse gasses makes this worse.  And everything that is done to stop additional greenhouse gasses prevents things from being worse than they otherwise would be.

Climate, migration and border militarization

Click to enlarge.

The two agencies of the U.S. government that take climate change most seriously are the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

They foresee droughts, floods and storms on a scale that will create global political instability and millions of climate refugees, mainly from countries already ravaged by war and poverty.  While other parts of the government dither and deny, they have spent billions since 2003 preparing for the coming emergency.

Their preparation, however, is not aimed at preventing or slowing down climate change, nor is it principally aimed at relieving distress.  Rather it is in protecting the U.S. homeland and American business interests from the desperate masses.

A journalist named Todd Miller did a good job of reporting on this in STORMING THE WALL: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security, published in 2017.

He attended a Defense, National Security and Climate Change conference in Washington, D.C., in 2015, attended by top military brass and government and corporate officials.  A NASA representative told how the Space Shuttle and F-35 fighter required chrome, columbium and titanium, which are sourced from South Africa, Congo and Zambia, all threatened with political instability due to climate change.

“If these stressing factor result in increased migration,” he said, “it will just increase the potential for instability and conflict,” which would affect the U.S. ability to obtain elements “critical to the alloys we need to support the system.”

It was at that meeting that Miller for the first time heard the expression, “military-environmental-industrial complex.”  Billions of dollars are being spent to, on the one hand, wean the U.S. military itself from dependence on fossil fuels and, on the other, maintain the political and economic status quo in the face of climate-driven upheaval.

He devoted several chapters of the book to migration from central America and Mexico into the southwest USA.  He showed that the border is not a line on the map separating the United States from Mexico.

The border area extends 100 miles into the interior of the United States, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acts like a military occupying force.  Miller noted that an order by President Obama against racial profiling specifically exempted the Department of Homeland Security.

It also extends down through Mexico into Central America, where there are a series of checkpoints, aided by U.S. military advisers and U.S. military equipment, designed to intercept migrants on their way.  There are fewer arrests nowadays at the international border, but this may not mean that fewer people are trying to cross the border.  It may just mean that more of them are intercepted before they get close.

The U.S. Coast Guard nowadays does more than guard the coasts.  After the 2010 earthquake, the Coast Guard patrolled the coast of Haiti, turning back anyone who tried to flee, and even set up a detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Migrants leave their home countries for many reasons—commonly poverty, war, tyranny or crime.  But, in the words of a Marine Corps general, climate change is a “threat multiplier.”  Events such as the 2015 drought in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua make all the underlying social problems worse.

The United States is not unique.  The new “smart border” between Turkey and Syria has a new tower every 1,000 feet, a three-language alarm system, and “automated firing zones” supported by hovering zeppelin drones, Miller wrote.

Experts say floods and a rising sea will cause millions to flee Bangladesh.  India has a 2,000-mile ‘iron wall” on its border and soldiers with orders to shoot to kill.  More than 1,000 Bangladeshis were killed between 2001 and 2011 while trying to cross the border.

Storms, floods and climate apartheid

An extreme city, according to Ashley Dawson, is a city in which extremes of rich and poor render it unable to deal with extreme weather events.

In case of storm and flood, the rich people on the high ground almost always get priority over the poor people down by the waterfront—what Dawson calls climate apartheid.

And the people who live in rich places, such as Houston, who are mostly lighter-skinned, get priority over the poorer places, such as Port-au-Prince or San Juan, who are mostly darker-skinned.

Beyond this, Dawson wrote, the incentives of a market economy will almost always favor real estate development over public safety.

The best way to protect cities from high water is to pull back from the shoreline and create or expand wetlands to sponge up the high water.

But property developers, not to mention individual homeowners, want seawalls to protect their investments and enable them to recover their sunk costs.  Our economic system is based on continued growth.  There is no incentive system for pulling back.

Dawson said this is as true of New York City, where he lives, as it is of any city in the world.

This is no small thing.  Nearly half the world’s 7 billion people now live in cities.  Virtually all of them are on ocean coastlines or other bodies of water.  In the Global South, drought is driving increasing numbers of poor people off the land and into urban slums.

Dawson does not view global warming as a doom we can avoid if we try hard enough.  He sees it as an emergency that is already upon us, and that most of us are unprepared for.

He does not view it as merely a scientific and technical problem.  He says it is a social justice issue—a question of who drowns (usually the poor and dark-skinned) and who is saved (usually the rich and light-skinned)

Click to enlarge

When Superstorm Sandy was about to hit New York City in 2012, the city government told residents of the potential flood areas to evacuate.  Soon after subway service was shut down, which meant that those without cars were stranded in their neighborhoods.  Soon after high water left thousands without access to electricity and heat, or to essential supplies.

The first responders were volunteers, including veterans of the Occupy Wall Street movement, who reconstituted themselves as Occupy Sandy.  They did whatever it took to provide food and water and rescue stranded elderly and disabled people on upper floors of apartment buildings.

The official disaster relief agencies showed up only a few days date and, according to Dawson, were happy to make use of Occupy Sandy and other volunteers, but reluctant to help or share information.  The reason, he said, is that the official organizations are engaged in a dog-eat-dog competition for funding and don’t want any of their rivals to gain an advantage.

Dawson wrote that when Mayor Michael Bloomberg showed up at the flood-stricken Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn, the only people he wanted to talk to were the business owners.  They were the ones who got the funds to rebuild.  The neighborhood and Occupy Sandy leaders were brushed aside.

Twenty years onward: the coming bad years

Sometimes I wish I could live for 20 more years to see what the future brings.  Most of the time I’m glad I’m 82 and almost certainly won’t.

I envision a USA very different from today—one shaped by a catastrophic climate change that can’t be averted, and by an economic collapse that can be averted only by drastic economic and political reforms that seem highly unlikely today.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine New York City during the Great Depression being hit by Superstorm Sandy.

Catastrophic climate change is usually discussed as a doom that will full upon us unless we accomplish X things by the year Y.  In fact, catastrophic climate change is already upon us.

We can by our actions influence how bad things are going to get, but existing greenhouse gasses will produce increasing numbers of floods, droughts, heavy snow storms and power outages.

We the citizens of Rochester N.Y., located as we are on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, are fortunate. Cities such as Miami and New Orleans will meet the fate of Atlantis, but we have a good chance to survive.

We’re not in danger of tidal waves.  We have had relatively few severe storms compared to other regions.  We have access to a relatively abundant supply of fresh water which, however, we are not caring for.

Climate crisis is likely to be combined with financial crisis.  Starting with the Reagan administration and especially since the Clinton administration, the U.S. government has turned over management of the economy to the financial markets.

There have been a series of financial crisis, each one worse than the one before.  The response of the U.S. government has been to rescue failed financial institutions, and allow the cycles to continue.

At some point, there will be a financial crisis too big to resolve.  Instead of financial institutions being “too big to fail,” they will be “too big to bail.”