Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Final: A New Look On Life Itself

Life Outside of Life

Before taking this class I already had an interest in the environment. This was one of the main reasons why I decided to study Environmental Sustainability and Technology. I wanted to learn more about life outside of life.

Taking this class opened my eyes to a lot of different things. From reading other people's views on different topics to other people commenting on my views. It all allowed me to look at the world in a different aspect.

When I read Tiara's post on Vegetarian Myths, I really got to see another side of how some people view vegetarians. Although I am not a vegetarian myself, I grew up around it. So I never thought about them consuming plants could, in a sense, be the same as them consuming animals. They are both living things, so how do you make one ethical and not the other. When I really sat down and thought about it, I had to realize that she wasn't completely wrong. Even down to the vegans, they eat nothing that comes from animals, but eat plants. Just because they aren't animals doesn't mean that they aren't living things. Even when Dr. Oliver showed us that their are actual rules to consuming food. Who ever knew that? The only rules that I ever heard of were the ones when I was a child, "eat your vegetables first" "don't drink all that juice" , etc. I never knew that their were actual rules.

Even when I read "Staying with the Trouble", I was able to learn how some people actually think that technology could be our savior. While I disagreed, Dr. Oliver showed me that it was ok to disagree. He didn't feel that technology could be our savior either but it definitely wasn't "the main thing hurting us". Reading his comment in a way showed me that even though technology has crippled the world in a lot of aspects, we still need it to survive.


Reading Madison's post on "Birth Strike", was very informal. I never knew that this even existed. I was able to learn how it not only existed but people that had been yearning for kids were even participating in this. The strikers knew that they had to keep global warming under 1.5°C,after which,“ even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.” These people were willing to sacrifice their opportunity of having a family in order to protect the climate. Wanting to be a environmental engineer, I don't think I would be willing to not bare children in order to protect the climate. What if that child that I was supposed to have could have came up with a more ethical way to solve this crisis. We would have never known.

Tiara's post about her home town was quite interesting to read. How do you deal with keeping a certain animal from becoming extinct but not cutting off the income of the people in your community. I didn't think that the Bahamas was going through a crisis like this. At least we know that their fish is real and not genetically modified, because if it was they wouldn't have to worry about it becoming extinct. But could that be a answer to their problem? People would still be able to fish and make a profit. You wouldn't have to worry about them turning to a different type of fish to keep their business a float. But this is a issue that our world is facing.


Talking about issues, why did I not know that the government plays a big role in the Health of American Citizens. The companies that you go to for help are the main ones giving you medicine to fix one problem back make another one worse! This is all a money game and a way for the government to get rid of civilians by letting them fall into their trap. This might not be a environmental issue, but it can turn into one and is still indeed a issue that should not go unnoticed. Humans have a great impact on the environment, if all of them cease to exist what will happen to the environment. Will it prosper or die out?

Humans do play a big role in the tarnishing of the environment, but honestly without us would it even exist?

Some people look at humans to be the "super heroes" of the environment.... but honestly how can all of that responsibility fall on us? Its going to take more than a couple of strikes to replenish the environment to what it is supposed to be. But then again, it is our fault for the state that the environment is in now.

Being in this class has taught me to think deeper on a situation. Being able to post my thoughts and read other's, was a very helpful experience. I was able to learn so much about different issues within the environment and as well as about myself.

How did this class help me to learn about myself?

I had to realize that my opinions aren't always what everyone else see's. There is way more that I could do to help my environment. I'm not saying that I would go as far as going on a strike, but I could help by starting campaigns like "hug a tree save a tree" or the "plastic campaign" getting others around me involved in making a difference with the environment. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be in this class. Even though I was a little late, I still gained a lot.

"Outdoors for All"

Outdoors for All

A nascent global movement proclaims that access to nature is a human right

A nascent global movement proclaims that access to nature is a human right

BY RICHARD LOUV | APR 25 2019

A FEW YEARS AGO, pediatrician and clinical scientist Nooshin Razani treated a four-year-old girl whose family had recently fled Yemen and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. The family had received news the night before that members of the father's family had been killed in a bombing back home. The child was suffering from anxiety. "I was thinking, 'I have nothing to give to this little girl. What can I give her?'" Razani says. The typical medical response would be to offer the girl some counseling and, if necessary, medication. Razani decided the patient needed an additional, broader prescription. She asked the girl and her parents if they would like to go to the park with her. "The expression on that child's face, the yearning for a piece of childhood, was deeply moving," the doctor recalls.

Razani is the founder of the Center for Nature and Health, which conducts research on the connection between time in nature and health and is the nation's first nature-based clinic associated with a major health provider, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland, California. The clinic collaborates with the East Bay Regional Park District to offer a program called Stay Healthy in Nature Everyday. Participating physicians share local park maps with their patients and offer family nature outings–70 of them so far. Often, the physicians will join the outings. Burned-out doctors need these experiences too, Razani says... (continues)

Monday, April 29, 2019

Uninhabitable Earth, Losing Earth

Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH
Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells

LOSING EARTH
A Climate History
By Nathaniel Rich

Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged around individual and group interests. These interests have to do with class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your own list. By asserting these interests, we call out to each other so that as a collective we see and hear one another. From that beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition, representation and rights.

The problem with climate change, as an existential challenge to humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet. And because the areas first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.

The demand climate change makes on us is to feel empathy for the unborn poor of the global south, and change our economies to act on the basis of their needs. That’s something humanity has never done before.

Pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. It leads only to despair, despair to inaction, and inaction to a future world David Attenborough has described as “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.” To avoid the most terrible possible versions of our future, we have to stay positive; it’s the only moral response to this crisis. And there are grounds to do so, as David Wallace-Wells argues in his brilliant new book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming”: “We have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy, a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.”

Global emissions could be cut by a third if the richest 10 percent of humanity cut their use of energy to the same level as affluent, comfortable Europe. One prospective technique to scrub carbon from the atmosphere would cost $3 trillion a year, a colossal amount — but significantly less than the current level of subsidies paid out globally for fossil fuel, estimated at $5 trillion. Taken all in all, solutions are “obvious” and “available.” The only obstacle to implementing them is political will.

This litany of ideas might make “The Uninhabitable Earth” sound upbeat. That would be misleading. At the heart of Wallace-Wells’s book is a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet. Climate change is “not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced but a threat of an entirely different category and scale,” he writes. Even if collective action manages to keep us to 2 degrees Celsius of warming — a target it looks like we are currently on course to miss — we would be facing a world in which “the ice sheets will begin their collapse, global G.D.P. per capita will be cut by 13 percent, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer.”

But remember, he writes, “this is our best case scenario.” Wallace-Wells takes us through a compendium of the ways in which things could get so much worse, from simple “heat death” through catastrophic storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, pollution, plague, economic collapse and war. We will see migration on a scale the world has never experienced: United Nations and World Bank estimates of how many people will be forcibly displaced by the middle of this century range from the tens to the hundreds of millions. All of this will affect the world’s poor far more than the world’s rich. The innocent, who have done the least to damage the environment through the consumption of fossil fuels, will suffer more than the guilty.

“The Uninhabitable Earth” gives readers’ emotions a thorough workout along that pessimism-to-despair spectrum, before we are brought round to the writer’s “acceptance of responsibility.” I stress the emotional aspect because it is crucial: We are facing a call to action that we are, on the evidence of our behavior so far, likely to ignore, unless we directly feel its urgency. We know this, because that’s what we have been doing. The science of global warming has been settled for 40 years, but we have not just continued to pollute, we have accelerated the rate at which we’ve been doing so. Most of the carbon humans have put into the atmosphere has been emitted in the last three decades. As Wallace-Wells tartly puts it, “We have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on the climate than in all the centuries — all the millenniums — that came before.”

This is part of the tragedy. It’s not just that we know what’s happening, it’s that we’ve known for years and done nothing. Nathaniel Rich observes in “Losing Earth: A Recent History” that “nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979.” His gripping, depressing, revelatory book is an expanded version of a whole-issue article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine last year. It is an account of what went wrong — of how it was that a moment of growing awareness of climate change, and an apparent willingness to act on the knowledge, was allowed to dissipate into stasis and inaction.

The story runs from 1979 to 1989. Rich frames his narrative through a central character, Rafe Pomerance, a Friends of the Earth lobbyist who first came across the issue of global warming in a 1979 E.P.A. report. In the ’80s, Congress had several hearings into climate change, which was accepted as an urgent priority even by a figure as conservative and anti-intellectual as Dan Quayle: “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue. We need to get on with it.”

So why didn’t they?

Rich offers a number of reasons. Scientists struggled to put across a clear message with sufficient force, for one. Pomerance looked with envy at the clarity with which the “hole in the ozone layer” was targeted for action by concerned scientists, notwithstanding the fact that, as Rich writes, “there was no hole, and there was no layer.” The climate scientists’ honorable struggles with complexity, probability models and time-lags between cause and effect helped dilute the impact of their message. A 1983 report by the Academy of Sciences, “Changing Climate,” was interpreted as calling for “caution not panic.” Roger Revelle, one of America’s leading scientists and author of a 1957 paper that was one of the first to describe the greenhouse effect, said that “we’re flashing a yellow light but not a red light. It’s not an unmitigated disaster by any means. It’s just a change.” The effect of all this was that the fight against climate change lost momentum at a critical point.

The greater part of responsibility for the failure, however, lies with politicians and energy companies. The big fossil fuel firms knew the realities of human-caused climate change but chose to ignore them and to lobby for the right to damage the environment; the Republican Party had factions that were in league with Big Energy, overlapping with other factions in denial about the scientific realities. The Reagan administration fought hard against environmental protections of any kind; the Bush administration made rhetorical gestures but John Sununu, George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, did not believe in anthropogenic climate change and fought the scientists hard, and ultimately successfully.

The first meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1989 ended without the thing it was convened to achieve, binding targets on global emissions. With American leadership, Rich writes, “warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.” The United States chose to shoot down the agreement. “And with that a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating progress turned to air.” More carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere since that 1989 conference than in the preceding history of civilization.

Climate change is a tragedy, but Rich makes clear that it is also a crime — a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That, I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and impossible to forgive.
nyt

John Lanchester is the author, most recently, of “The Wall.”

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH
Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells
310 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $27.

LOSING EARTH
A Climate History
By Nathaniel Rich
204 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

Monday, April 22, 2019

Conchservation

Being from The Bahamas, I thought it was necessary to share some common problems that we face on our islands. We had cases of many species going endangered, some extinct, due to over fishing. I would expect this to happen because many people on the island, especially the family island depend on selling fish for a living. Our latest problem that we face is the depletion of conch in areas where they are usually in abundance. We are now considering having an open and closed season on this Bahamian delicacy because of the over-consumption. Many people disagree with this because this a very well liked mean down on the islands. The Bahamas National Trust did a mini presentation on when I went back home over the Christmas break. Here is a video that tells some stuff that they talked to about in their informational.

https://bnt.bs/science/conchservation/

Earth Day!

Rachel Carson’s Bittersweet Farewell to the World: Timeless Advice to the Next Generations from the Woman Who Catalyzed the Environmental Movement

figuring_jacket_final.jpg?fit=320%2C486
In 1962, after pioneering a new aesthetic of poetic writing about science and the natural world, the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making book Silent Spring — a courageous exposé of the pesticide industry, illuminating the profound interconnectedness of nature. It stunned and sobered humanity’s moral imagination, effecting a tidal wave of unprecedented citizen concern, with consequences reaching across popular culture and policy, leading to the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carson had been following the science of pesticides and their grim effects on nature, meticulously glossed over by the agricultural and chemical industries, for more than a decade. Already the most esteemed science writer in the country, she used her voice and credibility to hold the government accountable for its abuses of power in the assault on nature. “Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent,” she wrote to her beloved. Fully aware that speaking out against the pesticide industry would subject her — as it invariably did — to ruthless attacks by corporate and government interests, she saw no moral choice but to defend what she held dearest by catalyzing a new kind of conscience...

Rachel Carson’s Bittersweet Farewell to the World: Timeless Advice to the Next Generations from the Woman Who Catalyzed the Environmental Movement

figuring_jacket_final.jpg?fit=320%2C486
In 1962, after pioneering a new aesthetic of poetic writing about science and the natural world, the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making book Silent Spring — a courageous exposé of the pesticide industry, illuminating the profound interconnectedness of nature. It stunned and sobered humanity’s moral imagination, effecting a tidal wave of unprecedented citizen concern, with consequences reaching across popular culture and policy, leading to the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carson had been following the science of pesticides and their grim effects on nature, meticulously glossed over by the agricultural and chemical industries, for more than a decade. Already the most esteemed science writer in the country, she used her voice and credibility to hold the government accountable for its abuses of power in the assault on nature. “Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent,” she wrote to her beloved. Fully aware that speaking out against the pesticide industry would subject her — as it invariably did — to ruthless attacks by corporate and government interests, she saw no moral choice but to defend what she held dearest by catalyzing a new kind of conscience...
==
CBS Sunday Morning ðŸŒž (@CBSSunday)
Earth Matters: Climate change challenges from every corner of the globe #Earthday cbsn.ws/2vjl62g pic.twitter.com/MkM6zn73Mm

Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)
Grateful as always to ⁦‪@wenstephenson‬⁩ for his insight and steadfastness. This reading of my new book taught me a thing or two about it!
thenation.com/article/climat…

NPR (@NPR)
New #EarthDay Poll: Fewer than half of parents have discussed climate change with their children. n.pr/2XvdMwH


Varshini Prakash ðŸŒ… (@VarshPrakash)
On Earth Day in 2019 let’s remember this image of Earth Day in 1970.

20 million marched the streets, calling for clean air & water as part of a revolution that would pass the most sweeping env. legislation this country had ever seen.

Remember the true legacy of this day. pic.twitter.com/qMGpmIDSgd


Gaia revisited

The Earth Is Just as Alive as You Are

Scientists once ridiculed the idea of a living planet. Not anymore.

Every year the nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon rain forest and all the creatures that depend on them are drenched in seven feet of rain — four times the annual rainfall in London. This deluge is partly due to geographical serendipity. Intense equatorial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean, and bordering mountains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense. Rain forests happen where it happens to rain.

But that’s only half the story. Life in the Amazon does not simply receive rain — it summons it. All of that lush vegetation releases 20 billion tons of water vapor into the sky every day. Trees saturate the air with gaseous compounds and salts. Fungi exhale plumes of spores. The wind sweeps bacteria, pollen, leaf fragments and bits of insect shells into the atmosphere. The wet breath of the forest, peppered with microbes and organic residues, creates ideal conditions for rain. With so much water in the air and so many minute particles on which the water can condense, rain clouds quickly form.

The Amazon sustains much more than itself, however. Forests are vital pumps of Earth’s circulatory system. All of the water that gushes upward from the Amazon forms an enormous flying river, which brings precipitation to farms and cities throughout South America. Some scientists have concluded that through long-range atmospheric ripple effects the Amazon contributes to rainfall in places as far away as Canada.

The Amazon’s rain ritual is just one of the many astonishing ways in which living creatures transform their environments and the planet as a whole. Much of this ecology has only recently been discovered or understood. We now have compelling evidence that microbes are involved in numerous geological processes; some scientists think they played a role in forming the continents... (continues)

Saturday, April 20, 2019

Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Are humans the problem or is Technology?


We live in an era where Humans are the determinants of transformations amongst the earth. We have destroyed ecosystems, burned through fossil fuels, and chartered a course for uninhabitable climate change. We are still exponentially increasing our numbers, and because of this, we are on the brink of an ecological global disaster. 

Donna Hardway denies none of these facts but is impatient with what she sees as the two dominant responses. The two responses are, "technology will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but clever children" and "the game is over, it's too late, there's no sense in trying to make anything better". 

These two views are the reason why Hardaway proposes that we "stay with the problem". We should face the situation head-on. Why should we expect technology to save us when it is the main thing hurting us. Humans made technology so do we honestly think it's going to help us. We made this mess so we are the ones that need to fix it. No, we should not give up. If we give up the world as we know it will no longer exist. 

Hardaway stated, "We become one with each other or not at all". I agree fully with this statement. In order for the world to change it's going to take more than 10 people. Everyone is going to have to come on one accord. The question is will that ever happen? If we make people realize that the world we know will not be the world that our grandchildren will experience then that will spark intrest for change in most people. 

Overall I enjoyed reading this. I related a lot with most of the points that were made. It is time for humans to take responsibility for their actions and not wait for technology or a new generation to fix everything. 

Thursday, April 18, 2019

A Market-Driven Green New Deal? We’d Be Unstoppable

Any serious energy transformation will need to harness America’s powerful and creative economic engine.

By Amory B. Lovins and Rushad R. Nanavatty

Mr. Lovins and Mr. Nanavatty work at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is focused on creating a clean, low-carbon energy future.

The best thing to come from the Senate’s floor debate on the Green New Deal late last month may have been these eminently sane remarks, calling on lawmakers of both parties to “move together” in order “to lower emissions, to address the reality of climate change, recognizing that we’ve got an economy we need to keep strong, that we have vulnerable people we need to protect, that we have an environment that we all care about — Republicans and Democrats.”

Who said it? A Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who leads the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “My hope is we get beyond the high-fired rhetoric to practical, pragmatic, bipartisan solutions,” she said on the chamber floor.

The path is there, if our leaders will only choose to take it. In 2011, Reinventing Fire, an energy study by Rocky Mountain Institute, where we work, showed how a business-led transition could triple energy efficiency, quintuple renewables and sustain an American economy 2.6 times larger in 2050 than it was in 2010 with no oil, coal or nuclear energy, and one-third less natural gas. The net cost was $5 trillion lessthan business-as-usual — or even more valuable if a price was put on carbon emissions.

Any serious energy transformation effort — whether the Green New Deal or “pragmatic, bipartisan solutions” called for by Senator Murkowski — will need to harness America’s immensely powerful and creative economic engine, not dismantle it. This means unleashing the market in sectors where we already know how to profitably reduce emissions (electricity, transportation, buildings), creating markets for solutions in areas where there aren’t yet enough answers (heavy industry, agriculture) and fixing market failures (unpriced carbon, for instance, or rewarding utilities for selling more electricity rather than cutting your bill)...

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Art of the Green New Deal

Richard Powers's "Overstory" wins Pulitzer for fiction

Winner: THE OVERSTORY, by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton)



Our reviewer called this novel a “delightfully choreographed, ultimately breathtaking hoodwink.” One might think, at first, that its tales are about unrelated people, but “standing overhead with outstretched limbs are the real protagonists. Trees will bring these small lives together into large acts of war, love, loyalty and betrayal.”

Mr. Powers, 61, is known as a brainy novelist, but “The Overstory” tested even his intellectual capacity: Its central characters are trees. The environmental plot involves humans, but also communication occurring in nature. Mr. Powers called the Pulitzer Prize “an astonishing recognition,” and he said the reception to the novel proved to him that readers were “hungry for a story that takes the nonhuman seriously, and tries to reconnect the human to a world we’re so alienated from.”

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Bill McKibben on Fresh Air


This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. If you want to hear some alarming facts about climate change, Bill McKibben has them. He writes in his new book that as the Earth warms, we're now seeing lethal heatwaves in some parts of the world and that the largest physical structures on our planet - the ice caps, coral reefs and rainforests - are disappearing before our eyes.


McKibben's been writing about and advocating for action on climate change since the 1980s, but his new book isn't just a warning of impending disaster. And it isn't just about climate change. McKibben says there are also threats to humanity as we know it from human genetic engineering and from the unbridled development of artificial intelligence. Bill McKibben has written 15 books and is the founder of the environmental organization 350.org. His new book, which offers some dark visions of the future and hope for real change, is called "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?"


Bill McKibben, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You know, you note that climate change is such a familiar term that - you know, like urban sprawl or, you know, gun violence that it's sort of a part of our journalistic lexicon. And there's been a lot of alarming information about climate change. And when I read your book, I found even more alarming information. And I think it's worth dwelling on it just a little bit. One of the things that struck me was heat waves - not heat waves 50 years from now but heat waves today. What are we finding?


BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, we're already finding heat that taxes the ability of the human body to endure it. The highest reliably recorded temperatures on Earth have happened in the last couple of years. They've been in parts of the Mideast and the Asian subcontinent where city temperatures have reached 129 degrees. When they try to factor in the humidity and dew point, people have been describing - feels like temperatures as high as 165 degrees. I mean, 129 degrees Fahrenheit - that's about where my oven begins, you know? And a human being can survive it maybe for a few hours inside, in the shade. But they can't survive it long term. And the scientists are telling us without any hesitation that, on current trends, by the middle or latter part of the century, vast swaths of the planet will be experiencing those temperatures for weeks on end. And there'll be, in essence, no-go zones for human beings, no-go zones in those continental interiors but also, of course, no-go zones along the coasts where the oceans are rising and where storms are getting more powerful. The game board on which we play the game of human beings is shrinking and shrinking dramatically for the first time since humans wandered out of Africa and started expanding their range.


DAVIES: It's shrinking because coastlines are receding but also because there are places where people can only survive by cowering together in air conditioning.


MCKIBBEN: That's right. And there've become severe limits to how long you can make that work. Already, the World Labor Organization (ph) says that human beings are able to do about 10 percent less work in the course of a day outdoors than they used to be able to. It's simply gotten too hot and too humid. By mid-century, that number will be something like 30 percent less work. Really, the ability to be human is starting to vanish in many, many places.


DAVIES: What's happening with food supplies? And what can we expect?


MCKIBBEN: Well, human beings have had a great run of increasing their supply of food since the end of World War II. But as the Green Revolution begins to play itself out, coming the other direction are these vast heatwaves and shortages of water. And so we're already seeing real effects. I mean, the Arab Spring was triggered in large part by the rise of wheat prices that followed epic drought. The hideous civil war in Syria was triggered in part by epic drought, the deepest drought in the history of what we used to call the Fertile Crescent, that drove a million farmers off their land and into the already destabilized cities of the brutal Assad regime. And we see how those things play out not just in those places but around the world. The refugees that streamed out of Syria were enough to undermine the politics of Western Europe. The refugees now fleeing the highlands of Guatemala and Honduras, where drought has made raising crops an ever iffier proposition, they're, you know, showing up on the southern border and being used as scapegoats by the most vicious elements of our political culture.


DAVIES: So climate change-related drought is what's driving the surge of immigrants?


MCKIBBEN: There's a terrific story on the front page of The Sunday Times talking about precisely how destabilizing the drought and heat has been. If you look at a map of Central America, it's one of the few places in the world where there are big oceans close by on either side. As, you know, the oceans are soaking up most of the excess heat that we're producing. And that makes places like that particularly vulnerable to kind of whipsaw changes in temperature.


DAVIES: And fire. I mean, we've focused a lot on the fires in California because they are nearby. And we see them on television. And they've affected and killed a lot of people. But you write that there are really alarming fires in other parts of the world that we don't pay as much attention to.


MCKIBBEN: There are fires in places where there never used to be. I mean, we're seeing routinely now fires 3, 4, 5 degrees of latitude north of where we ever saw them - across Siberia, across much of the Arctic. It's just gotten too hot and too dry. But we shouldn't skip lightly over those California fires, either. I mean, when you look at a place literally called Paradise that literally turned into hell inside half an hour, you begin to understand how the psychological space that we inhabit is beginning to shrink, too... (continues)

Sunday, April 14, 2019

The Next Reckoning: Capitalism and Climate Change

From the Times Magazine's climate issue-
Fixing the planet is going to be expensive. Can we stomach the bill for human survival?
The world’s most difficult problem has a solution so simple that it can be expressed in four words: Stop burning greenhouse gases. How exactly to pull this off is somewhat more complicated — just not as complicated as most Americans have been led to believe. As James Hansen, the don of modern climate science, told me last year, “From a technology and economics standpoint, it is still readily possible to stay under two degrees Celsius.” Readily possible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report from last October, which provoked widespread terror, echoed this conclusion. Keeping warming to 1.5 degrees above historical averages was possible, it found, provided we immediately began to eliminate carbon-dioxide emissions. This was terrifying only because we have not begun to do any such thing.
Most zero-emissions plans — “road maps,” in bureaucratese, or “pathways,” per the I.P.C.C. — propose some combination of the following elements: carbon taxes, effectual international treaties, increased subsidization of renewable energy, decreased subsidization of fossil fuels, nuclear energy, reforestation, land-use reform and investments in energy efficiency, energy storage and carbon-capture technology. But when it comes to drafting actual laws to achieve these policies, to quote the Heritage Foundation fellow Nick Loris, “the devil’s in the details.”
The Heritage Foundation ought to know; for decades, it has demonstrated mastery of the dark arts of climate-change denialism. This strain of influence peddling would be harmful enough had it managed merely to deepen the public ignorance about global warming. But denialism has had devastating downstream effects (to borrow an industry term). It has managed to defer meaningful consideration of nearly every urgent policy question that now awaits us, if we are serious about trying to stop this.
The most fundamental question is whether a capitalistic society is capable of sharply reducing carbon emissions. Will a radical realignment of our economy require a radical realignment of our political system — within the next few years? Even if the answer is no, we have some decisions to make. How, for instance, should the proceeds of a carbon tax be directed? Should they be used to finance clean-energy projects, be paid out directly to taxpayers or accrue to the national budget? In a healthy democracy, you could expect a rigorous public debate on this question. But such a debate has rarely surfaced in the United States because, as of this writing, only a handful of Republican members of the House of Representatives, out of a caucus of 197, have endorsed the basic concept of a carbon tax — an idea that has its roots in conservative economic thought.
And what should be done, if anything, about the people who lose their jobs once coal plants, whether because of market pressures or federal mandate, are forced to close? Should unemployed coal miners be retrained as wind farmers, receive unemployment checks or be abandoned to their plight? You could imagine a robust political debate about this issue as well — perhaps with the right in favor of letting miners fend for themselves and the left supporting a federal welfare program — were such questions allowed to be debated.
What should be done for the far greater number of people in poor and neglected communities, both in the United States and abroad, that stand to suffer most grievously from a hotter climate in the years ahead? What penalties should Exxon and the other major oil and gas companies suffer for their sins? What branch of government should impose those penalties, and should criminal liability be extended to individual lobbyists and chief executives? Should old, declining nuclear plants be preserved, and should new, smaller plants be commissioned, and who ought to make such decisions? How much federal funding should be invested in researching speculative geoengineering or carbon-capture technologies? Should insurance rates in coastal regions be increased abruptly to reflect the actual threat of sea-level rise, or phased in gradually? What sanctions should be imposed on foreign nations that fail to comply with the terms of global climate treaties? On these and many other such questions, reasonable minds might disagree. But beyond the reaches of the scholarly and activist literature, reasonable minds have not been given the opportunity.
It has become commonplace to observe that corporations behave like psychopaths. They are self-interested to the point of violence, possess a vibrant disregard for laws and social mores, have an indifference to the rights of others and fail to feel remorse. A psychopath gains a person’s trust, mimics emotions but feels nothing and passes in public for human (with a charming Twitter feed, say). The psychopath is calm, calculated, scrupulous — never more so than while plotting murder. There can be no reasoning with a psychopath; neither rational argument nor blandishment has a remote chance of success. If this indeed is the pathology that we are dealing with when it comes to the climate impasse, then we should be honest about the appropriate course of treatment. Coercion must be the remedy — exerted economically, politically and morally, preferably all at once. The psychopath respects only force. nyt
Nathaniel Rich is the author of the new book “Losing Earth: A Recent History,” based on an article that appeared in this magazine.

Saturday, April 13, 2019

"We have the resources not only to avoid catastrophe..."




Philosophy Lyceum: Against Democracy?

Libertarianism, Climate Change Denial, Democracy (In Chains) 

David Schweickart ,Loyola University Chicago

Friday, April 12, 2019 at 5:00 pm, COE, Room 164

An Informal Reception to Follow

In 2016, Jason Brennan, a prominent libertarian philosopher, published a provocative book entitled Against Democracy. Schweickart will engage with Brennan, arguing that there is a crucial connection between libertarianism and climate-change denialism which has serious political implications for the future of our species.

Professor Schweickart holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics (University of Virginia) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Ohio State University). His primary areas of research are social and political philosophy, philosophy and economics, and Marxism.

He is internationally recognized for his contributions to the area of "Market Socialism" which he calls "Economic Democracy." His publications in this area include After Capitalism, Capitalism Or Worker Control?, Against Capitalism, and Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists (with B. Ollman, J. Lawler, and H. Ticktin).

His work has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, Norwegian, Slovak, Farsi, and Catalan.
==
Postscript. Professor Brennan takes issue with Professor Schweikart:
"Pace what Schweikart insinuates, I am not a climate change denier. In this chapter from my 2018 OUP book In Defense of Openness, my co-author and I acknowledge climate change is a very serious issue, and talk at length about the difficult trade-off between promoting economic growth (through open borders and trade) as a means of helping the poor while also trying to reduce the threat of climate change. We rely heavily on recent Nobel prize-winner Nordhaus’s (by no means a libertarian) models for part of our argument."
It promises to be a spirited Lyceum!
==
Post-postscript...

The trouble with Hooligans
Robert B. Talisse
Philosophy Department, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA
ABSTRACT
This essay covers two criticisms of Brennan’s Against Democracy. The first
charges that the public political ignorance findings upon which Brennan relies
are not epistemically nuanced to the degree required by his argument. The
second covers an internal difficulty with his trio of political personae, hobbits,
Vulcans, and hooligans. As it is part of the nature of hooligans to take
themselves to be Vulcans, any epistocratic arrangement that does not favor
the hooligans’ perspectives will be met by them with hostility. Thus, it is not
clear whether any epistocratic order could be stable if Brennan’s tripartite
scheme of political personalities is correct. Finally, the paper raises the
possibility that Brennan’s favored forms of epistocracy are ultimately not truly
anti-democratic at all, but rather forms of democracy epistemic enhancement.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 30 May 2018; Accepted 18 June 2018
KEYWORDS Brennan, Jason; political ignorance; democracy; epistocracy

Although the word ‘democracy’ is commonly used to denote all that is
good in politics, democracy is actually a curious proposal. It is the thesis
that free and equal persons can be morally obligated to live according
to rules that they reject. In fact, democracy claims that you may be
required to live according to rules that you reject, simply because those
rules are favored by others. Put more starkly, democracy is the thesis that
there are conditions under which forcing a person to live according to
rules she rejects is nevertheless consistent with a due recognition of her
status as a free and equal moral person. According to views of democracy
that define freedom and equality in terms of the office of democratic citi-
zenship, the exercise of force is not merely consistent with a due recog-
nition of freedom and equality – it is required by it... (continues)

INQUIRY
https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2018.1502933




In M'boro 4.12.19:

"Imagine for a moment a world where cities have become peaceful and serene because cars and buses are whisper quiet..."


"A Miraculous Moment"


A Future Without Fossil Fuels? Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben
2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming
a report by Kingsmill Bond
41 pp., September 2018, available at carbontracker.org

A New World: The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation
a report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation
88 pp., January 2019, available at irena.org

“Kingsmill Bond” certainly sounds like a proper name for a City of London financial analyst. He looks the part, too: gray hair expertly trimmed, well-cut suit. He’s lived in Moscow and Hong Kong and worked for Deutsche Bank, the Russian financial firm Troika Dialog, and Citibank. He’s currently “new energy strategist” for a small British think tank called Carbon Tracker, and last fall he published a short paper called “2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming.” It asks an interesting question: At what point does a new technology cause an existing industry to start losing significant value?

This may turn out to be the most important economic and political question of the first half of this century, and the answer might tell us much about our chances of getting through the climate crisis without completely destroying the planet. Based on earlier technological transitions—horses to cars, sails to steam, land lines to cell phones—it seems possible that the fossil fuel industry may begin to weaken much sooner than you’d think. The British-Venezuelan scholar Carlota Perez has observed that over a period of twenty years, trains made redundant a four-thousand-mile network of canals and dredged rivers across the UK: “The canal builders…fought hard and even finished a couple of major canals in the 1830s, but defeat was inevitable,” as it later was for American railroads (and horses) when they were replaced by trucks and cars.

Major technological transitions often take a while. The Czech-Canadian academic Vaclav Smil has pointed out that although James Watt developed the coal-powered steam engine in 1776, coal supplied less than 5 percent of the planet’s energy until 1840, and it didn’t reach 50 percent until 1900. But the economic effect of those transitions can happen much earlier, Bond writes, as soon as it becomes clear to investors that a new technology is accounting for all the growth in a particular sector.

Over the last decade, there has been a staggering fall in the price of solar and wind power, and of the lithium-ion batteries used to store energy. This has led to rapid expansion of these technologies, even though they are still used much less than fossil fuels: in 2017, for instance, sun and wind produced just 6 percent of the world’s electric supply, but they made up 45 percent of the growth in supply, and the cost of sun and wind power continues to fall by about 20 percent with each doubling of capacity. Bond’s analysis suggests that in the next few years, they will represent all the growth. We will then reach peak use of fossil fuels, not because we’re running out of them but because renewables will have become so cheap that anyone needing a new energy supply will likely turn to solar or wind power.

Bond writes that in the 2020s—probably the early 2020s—the demand for fossil fuels will stop growing. The turning point in such transitions “is typically the moment when the impact is felt in financial markets”—when stock prices tumble and never recover. Who is going to invest in an industry that is clearly destined to shrink? Though we’ll still be using lots of oil, its price should fall if it has to compete with the price of sunshine. Hence the huge investments in pipelines and tankers and undersea exploration will be increasingly unrecoverable. Precisely how long it will take is impossible to predict, but the outcome seems clear.

This transition is already obvious in the coal markets. To understand, for example, why Peabody, the world’s largest private-sector coal-mining company, went from being on Fortune’s list of most admired companies in 2008 to bankrupt in 2016, consider its difficulties in expanding its market. India, until very recently, was expected to provide much of the growth for coal. As late as 2015, its coal use was expected to triple by 2030; the country was resisting global efforts like the Paris Accords to rein in its carbon emissions. But the price of renewable energy began to fall precipitously, and because India suffered from dire air pollution but has inexhaustible supplies of sunlight, its use of solar power started to increase dramatically.

“In 2017, the price in India of wind and solar power dropped 50 percent to $35–40 a megawatt hour,” said Tim Buckley, who analyzes Australasia/South Asia for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Fifty percent in one year. And a zero inflation indexation for the next twenty-five years. Just amazing.” This price drop occurred not because India subsidizes renewable energy (it doesn’t), but because engineers did such a good job of making solar panels more efficient. The cost of power from a newly built coal plant using Indian coal is, by comparison, about $60 a megawatt hour. If you have to import the coal, the price of power is $70/megawatt hour. And solar’s $40/megawatt hour price is guaranteed not to rise over the thirty-year life of the contract the suppliers sign—their bids are based on building and then running a facility for the life of the contract. No wonder that over the first nine months of 2018, India installed forty times more capacity for renewable than for coal-fired power.

Much the same is happening around the world. President Drumpf has spared no effort to help the coal industry, but more coal-fired power plants shut down during the first two years of his presidency than during President Obama’s entire first term. American coal consumption fell 4 percent in 2018. In 2017 Kentucky’s coal-mining museum installed solar panels on its roof in order to save $10,000 a year on electric costs.

And it’s not just coal that’s on the way out. Natural gas was supposed to be the planet’s next big fuel source, since it produces less carbon than coal (although its production releases great clouds of methane, another potent greenhouse gas). While fracking has produced high volumes of natural gas—especially in the US, where it was pioneered—wells tend to dry out quickly, and despite enormous investment, the International Energy Agency estimates that between 2010 and 2014 the shale industry operated with negative cash flows of more than $200 billion.

Even “cheap” natural gas is now starting to look expensive compared to the combination of sun, wind, and batteries. In an essay for Vox, the energy reporter David Roberts listed all the natural gas plants—many of them designed to provide quick bursts of “peaking power” on heavy demand days—whose planned construction has been canceled in recent months, as utilities and banks began to figure out that over the projected forty-year life of a new plant, there was a good chance it would become an uncompetitive “stranded asset” producing pointlessly expensive electricity. The chief executive of one US solar company said in January, “I can beat a gas peaker anywhere in the country today with a solar-plus-storage power plant. Who in their right mind today would build a new gas peaker? We are a factor of two cheaper.”

You get some sense of the future from the stunning fall of General Electric. “They were the world leader, the thought leader, the finance leader, the IT leader,” said Buckley. “And their share price is down 70 percent in the last two and a half years, in a market that’s up 50 percent. It’s a thermal power–reliant basket case.” That’s in large measure because manufacturing turbines for coal- and gas-fired power plants was a significant part of the company’s business; in 2015, it hugely expanded that capacity by buying its largest European competitor, Alstom. But then the bottom dropped out of the industry as proposed new generating plants couldn’t find financing. GE makes wind turbines, too, but that’s a lower-margin business with many more competitors. The fall in GE’s stock has meant “hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder value reduction,” according to Buckley. Last June, after more than a century, General Electric was dropped from the Dow Industrial Index, replaced by a drugstore chain.

Oil was believed to be better protected than coal and gas from competition because cars have long needed liquid fuel to run. But electric cars are becoming affordable for more and more consumers. In 2017 only three million out of a worldwide total of 800 million cars were electric, but they accounted for 22 percent of the growth in global car sales. The world’s leading car companies have become convinced that electric vehicles will account for all the growth in demand by the early 2020s. That’s why, by January 2018, they had committed $90 billion to developing electric vehicles—and why, by 2017, Tesla was worth more than GM or Ford. And for every Tesla that rolls off the assembly line, Chinese manufacturers are producing five electric cars. Auto analysts are already warning consumers to think twice before buying a gas-powered car, since its resale value may fall dramatically over just the next three years.

The oil companies tell investors not to worry. In mid-February Exxon announced that it had found huge new deepwater oil deposits off the coast of Guyana, and that overall it planned to pump 25 percent more oil and gas in 2025 than it had in 2017, which, it claimed, would triple its profits. In September, OPEC released a report predicting higher oil demand due to increases in jet travel and the production of plastics, which are made from petrochemicals. Analysts like Bond are skeptical of such claims. Although oil has been the planet’s most important industry for over a century, over the last five years it’s been the slowest-growing sector of the stock market. Petrochemicals and jet fuel are indeed harder to replace with renewable energy, but they make up a relatively small part of the market for oil—even if demand for them grows, it can’t offset the losses in core uses like pumping gas for cars.

The recent history of European utilities may provide a more realistic preview of what will happen in the rest of the world. In the early years of this century the German government increased the pace of decarbonization, subsidizing solar and wind energy. As more and cheaper renewable supplies became available, the existing utilities were slow to react. They had built new gas plants to account for what they assumed would be rising demand, but solar and wind cut into that demand, and the price of electricity began to fall. So far, European utilities have written down about $150 billion in stranded assets: fossil fuel installations that are no longer needed. “In the Netherlands, by the time the last three coal plants were turned on, their owners had already written them down by 70 percent,” said Buckley. And they’re scheduled to close by 2030.

One obvious question is why the fossil fuel companies don’t simply transform themselves into renewable energy companies and use the huge cash flows they still have to gain control of future markets. “They’re putting under ten percent of capital expenditures into renewables,” says Bond, which translates into about one percent of their balance sheets. As Exxon’s CEO recently told The Economist, “we have much higher expectations for the returns on the capital we invest” than sun and wind can provide. From their point of view, there’s some money to be made from putting up solar panels, but once they’re on the roof the sunshine is free. For corporations that made vast profits by selling their customers fuel every day for a century, that’s not an attractive business model.

Another important question is whether this transition will crash the world economy. Investors have money at risk, and not just in fossil fuel shares: a shift of this size will affect car companies, machinery companies, and many others. But as the climate activist and billionaire investor Tom Steyer has pointed out, most technological transitions damage existing industries without wrecking the economy because they create value even as they destroy it. “Look at the communications industry over the last two decades, as the Internet came of age,” Steyer said. “Some of the most valuable businesses on the planet that had been around for more than a century got decimated. I mean, Newsweek sold for a dollar. But a lot of new businesses got created that were worth more.”

And banks have had at least some warning to prepare for this enormous shift. In 2015 Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, began issuing strident warnings about stranded fossil fuel assets, urging the banks he regulated to begin taking close account of their exposure. He gave a memorable speech on the trading floor of Lloyds of London, pointing out that if countries made serious efforts to meet climate targets, vast amounts of money spent on oil wells, pipelines, coal mines, and tankers would be written off. He had to issue the warnings, he said, because the normal time horizon for financiers was too short. “Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late,” he said, noting that “the exposure of UK investors, including insurance companies, to these shifts is potentially huge.” He urged them to start preparing for a lower-carbon world. Companies, he said, should “disclose not only what they are emitting today, but how they plan their transition to the net-zero world of the future.”

Carney’s warning—which reverberated out from the financial center of London—seems to have spurred a reevaluation of fossil fuel exposure by many big financial institutions. “The major banks are now addressing this risk, whereas three years ago they were asleep to it,” Buckley said. “Now in Australia all our banks have climate policy, where they didn’t three years ago. We didn’t even have data.” A report in late February from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis showed that since 2013 a hundred major banks had restricted coal lending or gotten out of the business altogether.

A far more important question, of course, is whether the changes now underway will happen fast enough to alter our grim climatic future. Here, the answers are less positive. Scientists, conservative by nature, have routinely underestimated the pace of planetary disruption: the enormous melt now observed at the poles was not supposed to happen until late in the century, for instance, and the galloping pace of ocean acidification wasn’t even recognized as a threat two decades ago. That means that we have very little time to act—not enough, certainly, for business cycles to do the job alone. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last autumn, laid out a strict timeline: we need to effectively halve our use of fossil fuels within a dozen years to prevent the worst damage, which is why activists and politicians have called for dramatic government interventions like the Green New Deal recently proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Democratic colleagues.2

Government action is required because, for one thing, there’s vast inertia in the energy system. Plants are built to last decades, and even if plants that use fossil fuels aren’t built today, banks will insist that existing ones operate long enough to pay back their investments. And in some parts of the world, fossil fuel expansion continues: China, for instance, is trying to close down its own coal-fired power plants because its cities are choked in smog, but Chinese companies are using their expertise to build coal-powered plants abroad. Buckley noted that the opportunities for bribes on colossal projects mean, among other things, that a number of developing countries may indeed continue down the fossil fuel path.

In countries like the US or Canada, the political power of the fossil fuel industry is still considerable. Barack Obama boasted to a Texas audience last year that during his administration the US had passed Russia and Saudi Arabia as the biggest producer of hydrocarbons; even the progressive Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau recently spent billions in tax dollars to finance a pipeline designed to increase exports from the country’s environmentally ruinous tar sands.

That’s why the most important aspect of the decline of fossil fuel companies might be a corresponding decline in their political influence. The coal, oil, and gas industries have been the architects of the disinformation campaigns that kept us from responding earlier to scientists’ warnings about climate change, and they are using every trick they know to keep us from making a quick transition. History indicates that “the oil majors—and those who invest in them—will…bribe and fund Drumpf-type candidates and use their money in any other way” to slow down change, Carlota Perez said.

But change is here. While engineers are doing their part by making renewable energy cheaper, activists are mounting efforts to weaken the companies directly, and there are some signs that the pressure is working. An effort that I helped launch beginning in 2012 to persuade universities and churches to divest their fossil fuel shares has spread rapidly and become the largest divestment campaign in history. Over the last five years, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds have joined in, raising the total value of endowments and portfolios involved to over $8 trillion, and prompting Shell to declare the campaign a material risk to its future business. (Early last year, the governments of New York City and London pledged to divest their pension funds, and the entire nation of Ireland joined in midsummer.) Campaigns have also targeted banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase to force them to stop supporting particular pipelines.

The bottom line is clear: to the degree that the fossil fuel industry is weakened by some combination of technological change and furious activism, the chances for serious change increase. If energy barons like the Koch Brothers and Exxon remain flush with cash, they can probably delay or undermine initiatives like the Green New Deal. But if their businesses are under strong pressure from a rapidly changing energy economy, polities around the world would be freer to take the steps that scientists insist are necessary with the speed required to prevent global catastrophe. Should these changes happen quickly, they could do more than save us from planetary peril.

“A New World,” the January report on the geopolitics of energy transformation from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), is one of the most hopeful documents I’ve read in a long time: it points out that for the 80 percent of the world’s population that lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels, the transition to renewable energy means the end of a crushing import burden. “The long-term consequences of a switch to renewables are very positive,” said Bond, who helped write the report. “Fossil fuels are produced by a small number of companies and countries and the benefits flow to a small number of people. With solar and wind you get a lot more local jobs, a lot more local investment. You get a whole new geopolitics.”

Take India, the poorest large nation on earth. It imports 80 percent of its oil and 40 percent of its gas, along with much of its coal. Currently that costs the country $240 billion a year; if, as its leaders hope, its economy grows 7 percent annually, that figure would double in a decade—which is economically unsustainable. “Renewables also offer developing economies an opportunity to leapfrog, not only fossil fuels, but, to some extent, the need for a centralized electricity grid,” the IRENAreport concludes.

Countries in Africa and South Asia have a golden opportunity to avoid expensive fixed investments in fossil fuels and centralized grids by adopting mini-grids and decentralized solar and wind energy deployed off-grid—just as they jumped straight to mobile phones and obviated the need to lay expensive copper-wired telephone networks.

The changeover, of course, would be rocky. Beyond the effects on the global economy or on particular companies and their investors, countries like Russia or Saudi Arabia (and increasingly parts of the US) are essentially oil companies themselves. As these petro-states face a fall in the value of their only real asset, there is a risk of destabilization on a vast scale; in fact, it’s possible that we’re in the early stages of this process, with mischief and cruelty increasingly on display as countries with no other source of economic power struggle to maintain profits while they can. The worst damage will, as usual, be inflicted on the poorest oil producers: Kuwait might be able to manage the transition, but could Angola?

Yet overall the benefits would be immeasurable. Imagine a world in which the tortured politics of the Middle East weren’t magnified in importance by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands. And imagine a world in which the greatest driver of climate change—the unrelenting political power of the fossil-fuel industry—had begun to shrink. The question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time.

NYRB, APRIL 4, 2019 ISSUE