We're in the middle of a climate crisis. We need big ideas.
Monday, November 22, 2021
Saturday, November 20, 2021
“Our house is on fire”
"...Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swedish activist who, in 2018 after Sweden's fierce hot summer of wildfires and omens of disaster, sat outside the Swedish parliament every day to get her message across. Her message was simple: "Our house is on fire."
Five words, not one wasted, and you could paint it on any wall and everyone would know what you mean.
Five words, not one wasted, and you could paint it on any wall and everyone would know what you mean.
Children have great power to shame the rest of us, as every parent knows, and this cause is worth their effort. It's about the survival of our kind. Everything we love is in the balance, language, art, music, history, the art of story, dance, Eros, baseball, bird-watching, and the effect of apocalypse on the bond market would not be good..."
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/#:~:text=Greta%20Thunberg%2C%20the,not%20be%20good.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
Tech Can’t Fix the Problem of Cars
Flashy new car technology may be exciting, but it might also be distracting us from what we need.
...Our health and that of the planet will significantly improve if we switch to electric cars. They are one focus of the global climate summit underway in Glasgow. And taking error-prone drivers out of the equation could make our roads much safer. But making better cars isn't a cure-all.
Popularizing electric vehicles comes with the risk of entrenching car dependency, as my New York Times Opinion colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote. Driverless cars may encourage more miles on the road, which could make traffic and sprawl worse. (Uber and similar services once also promised that they would reduce congestion and cut back on how many miles Americans drove. They did the opposite.)
...
nyt
...Our health and that of the planet will significantly improve if we switch to electric cars. They are one focus of the global climate summit underway in Glasgow. And taking error-prone drivers out of the equation could make our roads much safer. But making better cars isn't a cure-all.
Popularizing electric vehicles comes with the risk of entrenching car dependency, as my New York Times Opinion colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote. Driverless cars may encourage more miles on the road, which could make traffic and sprawl worse. (Uber and similar services once also promised that they would reduce congestion and cut back on how many miles Americans drove. They did the opposite.)
...
nyt
Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Greta animated
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
Future-world
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Monday, August 23, 2021
Saturday, August 21, 2021
"This Is the World Being Left to Us by Adults"
"We will not allow the world to look away."
Last week, some of the world's leading climate change scientists confirmed that humans are making irreversible changes to our planet and extreme weather will only become more severe. This news is a "code red for humanity," said the United Nations secretary general.
It is — but young people like us have been sounding this alarm for years. You just haven't listened... (continues)
It is — but young people like us have been sounding this alarm for years. You just haven't listened... (continues)
Monday, July 12, 2021
Jane Goodall Still Has Hope for Us Humans
"Traveling the world I'd see so many projects of restoration, people tackling what seemed impossible and not giving up."
... you don't have hope, why bother? Why should I bother to think about my ecological footprint if I don't think that what I do is going to make a difference? Why not eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die?
Saturday, July 10, 2021
Displacing the human: "The Overstory”
After a Hard Day’s Writing, Michael Pollan Likes to Unwind With a Novel “Getting to read fiction purely for pleasure is the carrot I hold out for myself as a reward for the work of reporting and writing.”
...
What’s the last great book you read?
“The Overstory,” by Richard Powers, is a book that, the further I am from reading it, looms larger and larger in my imagination. My über-subject as a writer is our species’ engagement with nature, and in “The Overstory” Powers has done something no one else has done (outside of science fiction): Displace the human in favor of other species in a realistic narrative about people and the natural world...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/books/review/michael-pollan-by-the-book-interview.html?smid=em-share
A Young Naturalist Inspires With Joy, Not Doom
At 17, Dara McAnulty is becoming one of Britain’s most acclaimed nature writers, with work that touches on his autism as much as the world around his home.
MONEYDARRAGH, Northern Ireland — While he carefully stepped from one moss-carpeted rock to another, Dara McAnulty outlined his rules for nature watching.
BOOKS: Be the first to read books news and see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.
Sign Up
“You’ll never see something if you bring a camera,” he said on this coastal stretch of Northern Ireland, “and you’ll definitely never see what you’re intending to find.”
His rules quickly proved true. McAnulty had wanted to use the ramble near his home to show off the local curlew population, but it was high tide — with waves sending salt spray spurting over the rocks — and there were no birds to be seen.
Instead, he squatted down to stare into a rock pool in search of his latest obsession: shrimp. Seaweed swayed in the water, but there were no signs of marine life. Then, suddenly, he noticed the smallest movement. “Oh, there’s a shrimpy boy!” he shouted. “Oh my God, it’s amazing. Can you see it? Can you see it?”
(continues) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/books/dara-mcanulty-diary-of-a-young-naturalist.html?smid=em-share
Sunday, June 27, 2021
What if American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?
Ezra Klein and four environmental thinkers discuss the limits of politics in facing down the threat to the planet.
The Participants
Saul Griffith
Chief scientist and founder of both Otherlab and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that advocates rapid electrification to meet our climate goals.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Climate-policy director at the Roosevelt Institute and an author of the Green New Deal.
Sheila Jasanoff
Professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Novelist and author, most recently, of "The Ministry for the Future."
________________________________
Are our political systems even capable?
Ezra Klein: The American Jobs Act, President Biden's infrastructure bill, includes an ambitious clean-energy standard and huge investments in renewable-energy and electric-car technologies. It is effectively this administration's big climate bill. Its passage right now certainly isn't clear. But even if it did pass in its proposed form, how far would it get us on the climate fight?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: It would certainly be a good start, but it really leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, the scale is simply too small; $900 billion on climate is not enough to catalyze the pace of decarbonization we will need in order to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030, while providing millions of good jobs. That's more like $10 trillion over 10 years. It isn't entirely the Biden administration's fault. The reconciliation process in Congress, just because of the way that it is structured, really forces you to rely really heavily on existing programs. For example, the plan routes some of its investments in the built environment through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant program, which has a history of being exploited by developers. It also relies heavily on existing tax credits to fund the building and deployment of clean-energy infrastructure. If the programs that we had were enough to decarbonize, they would have done that already. It is certainly better than what we have now, but there's still a lot of room to improve.
Saul Griffith: It's not even remotely close to sufficient. But something extraordinary did happen when the Biden administration came out and said it was aiming for a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It may not be binding, but that is enormously more ambitious than John F. Kennedy standing up and saying we'll go to the moon by the end of the decade. We knew how to build rockets, and we knew where the moon was. We don't know all the answers of where we're going... (continues)
Saul Griffith
Chief scientist and founder of both Otherlab and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that advocates rapid electrification to meet our climate goals.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Climate-policy director at the Roosevelt Institute and an author of the Green New Deal.
Sheila Jasanoff
Professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Novelist and author, most recently, of "The Ministry for the Future."
________________________________
Are our political systems even capable?
Ezra Klein: The American Jobs Act, President Biden's infrastructure bill, includes an ambitious clean-energy standard and huge investments in renewable-energy and electric-car technologies. It is effectively this administration's big climate bill. Its passage right now certainly isn't clear. But even if it did pass in its proposed form, how far would it get us on the climate fight?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: It would certainly be a good start, but it really leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, the scale is simply too small; $900 billion on climate is not enough to catalyze the pace of decarbonization we will need in order to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030, while providing millions of good jobs. That's more like $10 trillion over 10 years. It isn't entirely the Biden administration's fault. The reconciliation process in Congress, just because of the way that it is structured, really forces you to rely really heavily on existing programs. For example, the plan routes some of its investments in the built environment through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant program, which has a history of being exploited by developers. It also relies heavily on existing tax credits to fund the building and deployment of clean-energy infrastructure. If the programs that we had were enough to decarbonize, they would have done that already. It is certainly better than what we have now, but there's still a lot of room to improve.
Saul Griffith: It's not even remotely close to sufficient. But something extraordinary did happen when the Biden administration came out and said it was aiming for a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It may not be binding, but that is enormously more ambitious than John F. Kennedy standing up and saying we'll go to the moon by the end of the decade. We knew how to build rockets, and we knew where the moon was. We don't know all the answers of where we're going... (continues)
Eco-philosophy
READ: @five_books asked me to recommend the best books that contemplate eco-philosophy and our place on this Earth. Check out my suggestions. #nonfiction #bookshttps://t.co/bhsUT6LvUk
— Rupert Read 🌍 (@GreenRupertRead) June 25, 2021
Saturday, June 19, 2021
Ecstatic environmentalism
From Emerson to Humboldt to Muir to Leopold to Stewart Brand to Gail Bradbrook, you could tell a history of environmentalism through the ecstatic experiences that inspired its leaders. https://t.co/cd83Z6g1zl https://t.co/HlEIeDfaqs
(https://twitter.com/JulesEvans11/status/1406151595965005825?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/JulesEvans11/status/1406151595965005825?s=02)
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Let’s Celebrate a Lower Birthrate, Not Lament It
Readers criticize two Times pieces that raised concerns about slow population growth, instead viewing the trend as a positive for the planet.
To the Editor:
“World Is Facing First Long Slide in Its Population” (front page, May 23) misses the big picture. World population is still growing by 80 million people annually, and it won’t stop for several more decades.
Most of that growth is happening in the poorest places on earth — many in sub-Saharan Africa. If the Italian towns of Capracotta and Agnone want to boost their populations of working-age residents, there’s a steady stream of people willing to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean to get there.
The article refers to a paradigm shift necessary to address the “strain of longer lives and low fertility” that “threatens to upend how societies are organized.” As the status quo changes, people adapt to the new normal.
If public health campaigns can get billions of people to wear masks and stay six feet apart for over a year, surely economists and politicians can figure out how to restructure economies away from a strict dependency on infinite population growth. Perhaps the cleaner air and water that will result from our slower growth will even be inspirational...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/opinion/letters/population-birthrate.html?smid=em-share
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Be inconvenient
Al Gore (@algore) tweeted...
Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of An Inconvenient Truth. I'm inspired by those who've worked for decades to solve the climate crisis. We're finally crossing the political tipping point. So let's persist, #BeInconvenient & secure a sustainable future.
(https://twitter.com/algore/status/1396996483203932163?s=02)
Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of An Inconvenient Truth. I'm inspired by those who've worked for decades to solve the climate crisis. We're finally crossing the political tipping point. So let's persist, #BeInconvenient & secure a sustainable future.
(https://twitter.com/algore/status/1396996483203932163?s=02)
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Good intentions not enough
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Monday, April 26, 2021
Icelandic gutpunch
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
“Most humans dead...”
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Biden’s climate moonshot
On Thursday and Friday of last week, April 22 and 23, President Biden convened a virtual meeting of 40 world leaders to discuss addressing climate change. It is no longer possible to ignore changes in the world's climate: the last decade was the hottest in recorded history, and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached record levels. Arctic ice is melting; last summer's fires in Australia, California, and Colorado were catastrophic...
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-25-2021?r=iqpjt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=email
Saturday, April 24, 2021
Why Bitcoin Is Bad for the Environment
...According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, bitcoin-mining operations worldwide now use energy at the rate of nearly a hundred and twenty terawatt-hours per year. This is about the annual domestic electricity consumption of the entire nation of Sweden. According to the Web site Digiconomist, a single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month, and is responsible for roughly a million times more carbon emissions than a single Visa transaction. At a time when the world desperately needs to cut carbon emissions, does it make sense to be devoting a Sweden’s worth of electricity to a virtual currency? The answer would seem, pretty clearly, to be no. And, yet, here we are...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-bitcoin-is-bad-for-the-environment?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Earth from space
Without the first photographs of the earth from space, there would be no #EarthDay.
https://t.co/x1maRCNjCA
(https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1385378135324119043?s=02)
https://t.co/x1maRCNjCA
(https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1385378135324119043?s=02)
How long? Not long
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Monday, April 19, 2021
Earth Day
We Were Born To Be Wild
Earth Day is a reminder that we are living creatures all the same.
...Many people no longer feel a connection to the natural world because they no longer feel themselves to be a part of it. We've come to think of nature as something that exists a car ride away. We don't even know the names of the trees in our own yards.
Nature is all around us anyway, and I'm not talking about just the songbirds and the cottontail rabbits in any suburban neighborhood. I'm talking about the coyote holed up in a bathroom at Nashville's downtown convention center; the red-tailed hawks nesting in Manhattan; the raccoon climbing a skyscraper in St. Paul, Minn.; the black bear lounging in a Gatlinburg, Tenn., hot tub; the eastern box turtle knocking on my friend Mary Laura Philpott's front door.
These encounters remind us that we are surrounded by creatures as unique in their own ways as we are in ours. And our delight in their antics tells us something about ourselves, too. We may believe we are insulated from the natural world by our structures and our vehicles and our poisons, but we are animals all the same.
Thursday is Earth Day, and even if you can't observe it by planting trees or pulling trash out of nearby streams, this week is a good time to remember that it's never too late to become a naturalist. And the first step is simply waking up to our own need for the very world we have tried to shut out so completely.
For we belong to one another — to the house finches and the climbing raccoons and the door-knocking turtles and the bathing bears. Recognizing that kinship will do more than keep our fellow creatures safer. It will also keep us safer, and make us happier, too.
Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/opinion/earth-day-nature-environment.html?smid=em-share
Earth Day is a reminder that we are living creatures all the same.
...Many people no longer feel a connection to the natural world because they no longer feel themselves to be a part of it. We've come to think of nature as something that exists a car ride away. We don't even know the names of the trees in our own yards.
Nature is all around us anyway, and I'm not talking about just the songbirds and the cottontail rabbits in any suburban neighborhood. I'm talking about the coyote holed up in a bathroom at Nashville's downtown convention center; the red-tailed hawks nesting in Manhattan; the raccoon climbing a skyscraper in St. Paul, Minn.; the black bear lounging in a Gatlinburg, Tenn., hot tub; the eastern box turtle knocking on my friend Mary Laura Philpott's front door.
These encounters remind us that we are surrounded by creatures as unique in their own ways as we are in ours. And our delight in their antics tells us something about ourselves, too. We may believe we are insulated from the natural world by our structures and our vehicles and our poisons, but we are animals all the same.
Thursday is Earth Day, and even if you can't observe it by planting trees or pulling trash out of nearby streams, this week is a good time to remember that it's never too late to become a naturalist. And the first step is simply waking up to our own need for the very world we have tried to shut out so completely.
For we belong to one another — to the house finches and the climbing raccoons and the door-knocking turtles and the bathing bears. Recognizing that kinship will do more than keep our fellow creatures safer. It will also keep us safer, and make us happier, too.
Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/opinion/earth-day-nature-environment.html?smid=em-share
Saturday, April 17, 2021
"Climate is everything "
For TIME's cover, artist Red Hong Yi and her team constructed a 7.5 x 10-foot world map out of 50,000 matchsticks.
"She then set the artwork on fire—representing how the global climate crisis touches all of us, no matter where we live," writes @dwpine https://t.co/KUTa93aMki
(https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1383405269959405571?s=02)
"She then set the artwork on fire—representing how the global climate crisis touches all of us, no matter where we live," writes @dwpine https://t.co/KUTa93aMki
(https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1383405269959405571?s=02)
Sunday, April 11, 2021
Living in a World in Which Nature Has Already Lost
Second Nature, by Nathaniel Rich
On average, an American man puts 85 man-made chemicals into his body every day, while an American woman takes in nearly twice that amount.
Rich tourists pay top dollar for disaster tours to gawk at New Orleans's Katrina-devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where the people who have remained struggle to survive.
In Aspen, Colo., dogs fly in private jets to "Billionaire Mountain" to join their owners in multimillion-dollar homes for two weeks of the year.
Cattle exposed to DuPont's toxic chemicals drool uncontrollably and birth stillborn calves. Their teeth turn black, and blood gushes from their noses, mouths and rectums. When they are cut open, they are found to be filled with giant tumors, collapsed veins and green muscles...
Thursday, April 1, 2021
Shared from BBC:How mammoths could fight climate change
https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p09cdh9z/how-mammoths-could-be-our-surprising-climate-saviours?ocid=ww.social.link.twitter&ocid=ww.social.link.email
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Monday, March 29, 2021
The problem with invasive plants
Margaret Renkl:
What You May Not Know About Those April Flowers
Americans have cultivated nonnative plants and flowers for so long it has skewed our experience of spring.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/28/opinion/immigrant-plants-ecosystem.html?smid=em-share
What You May Not Know About Those April Flowers
Americans have cultivated nonnative plants and flowers for so long it has skewed our experience of spring.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/28/opinion/immigrant-plants-ecosystem.html?smid=em-share
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Fossil finance
"Despite the economic recession induced by the coronavirus pandemic, more money went into the industry in 2020 than in 2016"
Since the signing of the Paris Agreement the world's 60 largest banks have invested 3.8 trillion USD in the fossil fuel industry.
https://t.co/QXjwWiOWxu
(https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1374790863390453760?s=02)
Since the signing of the Paris Agreement the world's 60 largest banks have invested 3.8 trillion USD in the fossil fuel industry.
https://t.co/QXjwWiOWxu
(https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1374790863390453760?s=02)
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Green ideas
Grateful to Penguin for publishing parts of The End of Nature in their intriguing new #penguingreenideas series. Good fun to be alongside so many remarkable writers, from Rachel Carson all the way up to @TempestWilliams @NaomiAKlein and @GretaThunberg https://t.co/N69KGvTLJV
(https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1371806486167437313?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1371806486167437313?s=02)
Monday, March 15, 2021
(Some) hope
Margaret Renkl, NYT
NASHVILLE — I’ve been keeping a collection of links to good news about the environment as a hedge against despair when so much of the news from nature is devastating. Rolling pandemics. The near annihilation of birds and insects. Even the end of sharks. In short, a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals,” according to a recent report in Frontiers in Conservation Science.
It’s so bad that I’ve begun to mutter darkly about the end of humanity. So bad that sometimes I wonder if the end of humanity would be such a bad thing. Once we’re out of the way, the earth might have a chance to recover before everything is gone.
Y’all know it is bad when pondering the death of humanity cheers up a person who is really hoping to have grandchildren someday.
In honor of the spring solstice, which falls this coming weekend and brings with it the return of longer days, I offer some news that might bring you, too, a glimmer of light in all this darkness. I share these stories with the usual caveat attached to any kind of climate optimism: Hope is not a license to relax. Hope is only a reminder not to give up. As bad as things are, it is far too early to give up... (continues)
It’s so bad that I’ve begun to mutter darkly about the end of humanity. So bad that sometimes I wonder if the end of humanity would be such a bad thing. Once we’re out of the way, the earth might have a chance to recover before everything is gone.
Y’all know it is bad when pondering the death of humanity cheers up a person who is really hoping to have grandchildren someday.
In honor of the spring solstice, which falls this coming weekend and brings with it the return of longer days, I offer some news that might bring you, too, a glimmer of light in all this darkness. I share these stories with the usual caveat attached to any kind of climate optimism: Hope is not a license to relax. Hope is only a reminder not to give up. As bad as things are, it is far too early to give up... (continues)
Sunday, March 14, 2021
Humans have rapidly remade the Earth — and imperiled its future
How dramatically do humans dominate the Earth? As late as 1800, the total weight of wild mammals was greater than that of all domesticated species. By 1900, with the bison gone and cattle herds roaming the plains of the Americas, cows alone bulked twice as heavy as all remaining wild mammals. A century later, domesticated animals outweighed wildlife by a factor of 20. In less than the life span of the U.S. Constitution, the Earth has gone from half-wild to a global farm...
Sunday, February 28, 2021
The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome
From The New York Times: The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome As automakers promise to get rid of internal combustion engines, Heidelberg is trying to get rid of autos. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/28/business/heidelberg-cars-environment.html?smid=em-share
Saturday, February 27, 2021
15 recommended reads
Confused about what's going on with our climate? Here are 15 reads recommended by scientists and @TEDTalks speakers @DrKWilkinson and @AyanaEliza: https://t.co/66ScR5kcYK
(https://twitter.com/TEDCountdown/status/1365830769281798145?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/TEDCountdown/status/1365830769281798145?s=02)
Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.
...“The savage people in many places of America,” writes Thomas Hobbes in “Leviathan,” responding to the charge that human beings have never lived in a state of nature, “have no government at all, and live in this brutish manner.” Like Plato, Hobbes associates anarchy with animality and civilization with the state, which gives to our merely animal motion moral content for the first time and orders us into a definite hierarchy. But this line of thought also happens to justify colonizing or even extirpating the “savage,” the beast in human form.
Our supposed fundamental distinction from “beasts, “brutes” and “savages” is used to divide us from nature, from one another and, finally, from ourselves. In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates divides the human soul into two parts. The soul of the thirsty person, he says, “wishes for nothing else than to drink.” But we can restrain ourselves. “That which inhibits such actions,” he concludes, “arises from the calculations of reason.” When we restrain or control ourselves, Plato argues, a rational being restrains an animal.
In this view, each of us is both a beast and a person — and the point of human life is to constrain our desires with rationality and purify ourselves of animality. These sorts of systematic self-divisions come to be refigured in Cartesian dualism, which separates the mind from the body, or in Sigmund Freud’s distinction between id and ego, or in the neurological contrast between the functions of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
I’d like to publicly identify this dualistic view as a disaster, but I don’t know how to refute it, exactly, except to say that I don’t feel myself to be a logic program running on an animal body; I’d like to consider myself a lot more integrated than that. And I’d like to repudiate every political and environmental conclusion ever drawn by our supposed transcendence of the order of nature. I don’t see how we could cease to be mammals and remain ourselves...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/humans-animals-philosophy.html?smid=em-share
Monday, February 22, 2021
Storm Victims Didn’t Bring It on Themselves
Disasters call for compassion and action, not sniping on social media.
NASHVILLE — Last week's fierce winter storms didn't change all that much at our house. We got mostly snow and sleet here, not freezing rain, so we never lost power. The roads were a catastrophic mess, but our refrigerator and cupboards were full — it's a time-honored Southern tradition to clear store shelves of milk and bread when the forecast calls for even a flake of snow — and we didn't have to risk our lives to get to work because we can do our work from home. We were lucky.
That's all in the world it was: pure dumb luck.
Others were not nearly so fortunate. More than four million people lost power in Texas. Hundreds of thousands of other Americans — mainly in the South, where such weather has historically been an anomaly — soon found themselves in the same boat. Pipes froze. Roadways were lethal. Makeshift attempts to keep warm turned deadly. Vaccine distribution came to a halt.
Weather-related disasters used to be called acts of God: events that are rare, unforeseen and above all nobody's fault. You don't blame people living in trailers for the tornado that turned their homes into twisted wreckage. You don't blame drowning people for the flooded river. An act of God might engender a crisis of faith, but in the old days it didn't cause a crisis of community. If you were untouched by disaster, you felt lucky, and you rolled up your sleeves to help the ones who weren't.
You certainly didn't tell suffering people in the midst of a deadly crisis that they had brought their suffering on themselves.
"Hey, Texas!" the novelist Stephen King wrote in a tweet that has been liked or shared by nearly 100,000 people. "Keep voting for officials who don't believe in climate change and supported privatization of the power grid!" He failed to mention the 300,000 citizens of hyper-liberal Portland, Ore., who also lost power in the storm.
Liberals, of course, weren't the only ones playing the blame game in the media last week. In Texas, electricity comes primarily from fossil fuels, but that didn't stop the governor, Greg Abbott, from peddling the lie that power outages in Texas were the fault of, get this, renewable energy. Never mind that the frozen wind turbines in his state represent only a small fraction of the energy lost to failures in natural gas production during the freeze. Or that there are ways to keep turbines from freezing in the first place.
This whole conversation was playing out while people were freezing to death in their homes and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning in their cars. While people were burning their belongings to keep warm and frantically trying to find backup power for oxygen-dependent family members. And none of it had anything to do with their voting record.
I'm amazed that I have to keep saying this, but not all Southerners believe the lies about climate change trotted out by Republican politicians enslaved to the fossil-fuel industry. Southern Republicans tell their constituents many, many lies, and plenty of people believe them. But not all of us. Nowhere near all of us. In the 2020 presidential election, 5,259,126 Texans voted for Joe Biden. That's more than 46 percent of voters in the state, and it's a fairly safe bet that those folks believe in climate change.
But does it even matter? Does how someone votes determine his or her worth as a human being? Absolutely not. It doesn't take a degree in ethics to understand that people don't deserve to die just because they made the mistake of trusting greedy, power-mad liars to tell them the truth.
Predictably, the Texas politicians who deny the reality of climate change and the utility executives who mismanaged the Texas power grid weren't the ones who suffered the most in last week's winter storms. And the people who were hardest hit — residents of minority neighborhoods — sure couldn't jet off to Cancún with Ted Cruz to escape the cold. "Let them eat snow," indeed.
There will be investigations into the full array of reasons for the power failures, and Texas officials may even pull themselves together enough to make a plan for mitigating the damage from future extreme weather events. But at this point there is no stopping the weather calamities themselves.
We don't know for a fact that these particular storms were a result of an unstable climate, though there is science to support that theory. What we do know is that extreme weather is no longer remarkable. The once-in-100-years floods of old — like the 100-year hurricanes and the 100-year forest fires and the 100-year winter storms — are happening far more often now, and their frequency will continue to rise.
These are not acts of God. These are acts of human behavior, the erratic weather patterns of a climate we have incinerated. And as they always do, the poor and the disenfranchised will suffer the most from the damage we've done.
In this context, the impulse to take a cheap shot at Southerners on Twitter isn't remotely as dangerous as the impulse to deny climate change itself, but it matters. Every form of prejudice matters, perhaps especially so when the people who keep pointing out the splinter in someone else's eye are trying to see around a plank in their own.
Where climate-related weather disasters are concerned, none of us is innocent. We all created this emergency. With our gasoline engines and our chemically fertilized crops and our factory farms and our addiction to plastic and paper towels, we're all guilty. And if we have so far escaped the worst ravages of that unstable climate, we need to admit that it's not because of how we vote or who we are or what we believe. It's just luck. Just pure dumb luck. And it's time to roll up our sleeves.
Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/opinion/texas-storm-politics.html?smid=em-share
That's all in the world it was: pure dumb luck.
Others were not nearly so fortunate. More than four million people lost power in Texas. Hundreds of thousands of other Americans — mainly in the South, where such weather has historically been an anomaly — soon found themselves in the same boat. Pipes froze. Roadways were lethal. Makeshift attempts to keep warm turned deadly. Vaccine distribution came to a halt.
Weather-related disasters used to be called acts of God: events that are rare, unforeseen and above all nobody's fault. You don't blame people living in trailers for the tornado that turned their homes into twisted wreckage. You don't blame drowning people for the flooded river. An act of God might engender a crisis of faith, but in the old days it didn't cause a crisis of community. If you were untouched by disaster, you felt lucky, and you rolled up your sleeves to help the ones who weren't.
You certainly didn't tell suffering people in the midst of a deadly crisis that they had brought their suffering on themselves.
"Hey, Texas!" the novelist Stephen King wrote in a tweet that has been liked or shared by nearly 100,000 people. "Keep voting for officials who don't believe in climate change and supported privatization of the power grid!" He failed to mention the 300,000 citizens of hyper-liberal Portland, Ore., who also lost power in the storm.
Liberals, of course, weren't the only ones playing the blame game in the media last week. In Texas, electricity comes primarily from fossil fuels, but that didn't stop the governor, Greg Abbott, from peddling the lie that power outages in Texas were the fault of, get this, renewable energy. Never mind that the frozen wind turbines in his state represent only a small fraction of the energy lost to failures in natural gas production during the freeze. Or that there are ways to keep turbines from freezing in the first place.
This whole conversation was playing out while people were freezing to death in their homes and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning in their cars. While people were burning their belongings to keep warm and frantically trying to find backup power for oxygen-dependent family members. And none of it had anything to do with their voting record.
I'm amazed that I have to keep saying this, but not all Southerners believe the lies about climate change trotted out by Republican politicians enslaved to the fossil-fuel industry. Southern Republicans tell their constituents many, many lies, and plenty of people believe them. But not all of us. Nowhere near all of us. In the 2020 presidential election, 5,259,126 Texans voted for Joe Biden. That's more than 46 percent of voters in the state, and it's a fairly safe bet that those folks believe in climate change.
But does it even matter? Does how someone votes determine his or her worth as a human being? Absolutely not. It doesn't take a degree in ethics to understand that people don't deserve to die just because they made the mistake of trusting greedy, power-mad liars to tell them the truth.
Predictably, the Texas politicians who deny the reality of climate change and the utility executives who mismanaged the Texas power grid weren't the ones who suffered the most in last week's winter storms. And the people who were hardest hit — residents of minority neighborhoods — sure couldn't jet off to Cancún with Ted Cruz to escape the cold. "Let them eat snow," indeed.
There will be investigations into the full array of reasons for the power failures, and Texas officials may even pull themselves together enough to make a plan for mitigating the damage from future extreme weather events. But at this point there is no stopping the weather calamities themselves.
We don't know for a fact that these particular storms were a result of an unstable climate, though there is science to support that theory. What we do know is that extreme weather is no longer remarkable. The once-in-100-years floods of old — like the 100-year hurricanes and the 100-year forest fires and the 100-year winter storms — are happening far more often now, and their frequency will continue to rise.
These are not acts of God. These are acts of human behavior, the erratic weather patterns of a climate we have incinerated. And as they always do, the poor and the disenfranchised will suffer the most from the damage we've done.
In this context, the impulse to take a cheap shot at Southerners on Twitter isn't remotely as dangerous as the impulse to deny climate change itself, but it matters. Every form of prejudice matters, perhaps especially so when the people who keep pointing out the splinter in someone else's eye are trying to see around a plank in their own.
Where climate-related weather disasters are concerned, none of us is innocent. We all created this emergency. With our gasoline engines and our chemically fertilized crops and our factory farms and our addiction to plastic and paper towels, we're all guilty. And if we have so far escaped the worst ravages of that unstable climate, we need to admit that it's not because of how we vote or who we are or what we believe. It's just luck. Just pure dumb luck. And it's time to roll up our sleeves.
Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/opinion/texas-storm-politics.html?smid=em-share
Friday, February 19, 2021
Unsustainable
"Unsustainable development is rapidly degrading Earth's capacity to sustain human well-being" (from the latest UN report). That's it in a nutshell, isn't it?
(https://twitter.com/Raymodraco/status/1362753424341745664?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/Raymodraco/status/1362753424341745664?s=02)
the forgotten 1948 book that shaped the modern environmental movement
"If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageous, no one is going to do it for us."
Empowering wisdom from the forgotten 1948 book that shaped the ethos of the modern environmental movement https://t.co/jcbXcNJgy3
(https://twitter.com/brainpickings/status/1362594005331107840?s=02)
Thursday, February 18, 2021
The living world and us
Thursday Thanks to some of the many books that have taught me to think and think again about humanity's relationship with the rest of the living world. What would you add?... https://t.co/6A9LaAVrqP
(https://twitter.com/KateRaworth/status/1362408654318821377?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/KateRaworth/status/1362408654318821377?s=02)
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
best Climate Change books
Well done @HopeJahren! "The Story of More" has been featured in the list of best Climate Change books of all time! https://t.co/T8Gi6Qaeag
(https://twitter.com/bookauthority/status/1362035179200663552?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/bookauthority/status/1362035179200663552?s=02)
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
Gates behind the curve
First things first — much respect to Bill Gates for his membership in the select club of ultrabillionaires not actively attempting to flee Earth and colonize Mars. His affection for his home planet and the people on it shines through clearly in this new book, as does his proud and usually endearing geekiness. The book's illustrations include photos of him inspecting industrial facilities, like a fertilizer distribution plant in Tanzania; definitely the happiest picture is of him and his son grinning identical grins outside an Icelandic geothermal power station. "Rory and I used to visit power plants for fun," he writes, "just to learn how they worked."
And this new volume could not be more timely — it emerges after a year that saw the costliest slew of weather disasters in history, and that despite a cooling La Niña current in the Pacific managed to set the mark for record global temperature. As everyone can attest who watched the blazes of Australia and California, or the hurricanes with odd Greek names crashing through the gulf, we are in dire need of solutions to the greatest crisis our species has yet faced.
It is a disappointment, then, to report that this book turns out to be a little underwhelming. Gates — who must have easy access to the greatest experts the world can provide — is surprisingly behind the curve on the geeky parts, and he's worse at interpreting the deeper and more critical aspects of the global warming dilemma. Since he confesses that he completely missed the climate challenge until 2006, when he met with some scientists almost two decades after the problem emerged (previously "I had assumed there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster"), it's perhaps not surprising that he's still catching up. And yet, his miscalculations are important, because they are widely shared...
Monday, February 15, 2021
Bill Gates, geek-environmentalist
To really help solve the climate crisis, @BillGates needs to be a better geek--interested in nuclear and geothermal power, but also congressional and economic power. It's all linked together, and it can't be solved in isolation. (My review of his new book)
https://t.co/ecUxC5WaUR
(https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1361316308198055938?s=02)
https://t.co/ecUxC5WaUR
(https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1361316308198055938?s=02)
Sunday, February 14, 2021
Why humanity can’t be trusted to repair its own environmental damage
Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/11/kolbert-white-sky/
Monday, February 8, 2021
A Happiness of Bluebirds
Margaret Renkl finds her bird:
This year isn't living up to my hopes, so I am learning to hope in a new way.
I don't laugh much anymore. I am grieving a mismanaged pandemic that has taken too many of us and driven too many others to despair. I am grieving the assaults on American democracy by my fellow Americans. I am grieving the brutal news of the environment, which worsens with every new study. When a suicide bomber blew up a historic section of this town on Christmas morning, it felt entirely of a piece with a terrible, endless year. Surely, I thought, 2021 would be better.
But 2021 has not been better. The U.S. Capitol was invaded by U.S. citizens provoked by a U.S. president. Pandemic deaths are approaching half a million. The Doomsday Clock remains set at 100 seconds from disaster. My dog died. It all adds up to a sorrow that is both unimaginably vast and far too close to home.
I have faith in the promise of spring, but right now spring feels like just another cold concept, like the concept of herd immunity and the concept of reasonable Republicans. I know such things exist, but these days that knowledge feels more like a theory than a conviction...
And maybe it's enough in February, in these days that are so close to turning warm and bright and green again, when we are so close to being released from the prison of our homes, to think of happiness as neither distant nor grand. Perhaps it would help to remember that even now happiness is only what it has ever been: something that lights before us, immediate and insistent and always fleeting. Not a promise at all but a temporary gift. It lands, and lifts away, and returns again, ever flashing its wings.
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Best books on climate change
Looking for an education on climate change? Check out these books, recommended by experts in renewable technology and clean energy, a @Harvard historian of science, geologists and even ecologically-concerned fiction writers: https://t.co/IOhCV0SYH1
(https://twitter.com/five_books/status/1353847649615687682?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/five_books/status/1353847649615687682?s=02)
Monday, January 25, 2021
Green Cars Make Sense
Electric cars are an even better value than I understood when I first bought one.
Biking and walking are the most ecologically sound ways to get around, of course, and taking public transportation is second best. But if, like my family, you live in a place with a profoundly limited public-transportation system and few pedestrian-friendly streets, driving is a necessary evil. If you have to go somewhere, an electric vehicle is the third-best way to get there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/opinion/electric-cars-climate-change.html?smid=em-share
Sunday, January 24, 2021
KSR Ministry for the Future-Not Science Fiction
Bill McKibben
In Kim Stanley Robinson's anti-dystopian novel, climate change is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global inequality.
December 17, 2020 issue
— The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson
https://a.co/55QB5gB
In Kim Stanley Robinson's anti-dystopian novel, climate change is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global inequality.
December 17, 2020 issue
The prolific science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who is at heart an optimist, opens his newest novel, The Ministry for the Future, with a long set piece as bleak as it is plausible. Somewhere in a small city on the Gangetic Plain in Uttar Pradesh during the summer of 2025, Frank, a young American working for an NGO, wakes up in his room above a clinic to find that an unusually severe pre-monsoon heat wave has grown hotter still and more humid—that the conditions outside are rapidly approaching the limit of human survival. Actually, conditions inside are approaching the same level, because the power has gone out.
Frank manages to get a generator going and opens the doors of the NGO's offices to seven or eight extended families, who cram themselves into the few rooms where creaking air conditioners knock the fatal edge off the heat. But then local thugs take both the generator and the AC unit at gunpoint. The temperature inside and out approaches 108 degrees Fahrenheit; the humidity is 60 percent. People start to die, and their bodies are taken up to the roof and left there. As night falls, Frank goes with some of the survivors to the shallow lake in the center of the city and they submerge themselves in the water, hopeful it will help them survive. It doesn't—the lake water, too, is above body temperature, and as thirsty people drink it,
hot water in one's stomach meant there was no refuge anywhere…. They were being poached….
People were dying faster than ever. There was no coolness to be had. All the children were dead, all the old people were dead. People murmured what should have been screams of grief.
Frank survives, barely, with a lifelong case of PTSD: "Any time he broke a sweat his heart would start racing, and soon enough he would be in the throes of a full-on panic attack." Even a job he gets in the UK in a meat-processing plant with refrigerated rooms is not enough to keep the terror at bay. Nor the guilt, nor the anger, which become plot points of sorts in this sprawling novel. An uncountable number of Indians died in the heat wave he survived—perhaps 20 million. In the book, it marks the effective starting point of humankind's effort to deal realistically with climate change.
And such a heat wave is not unlikely—in fact, it is all but guaranteed. We came pretty close in California in September, when temperatures even in communities near the ocean like San Luis Obispo hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit, albeit at a lower humidity. Over the last few years we've seen record-breaking combinations of heat and humidity in Middle Eastern cities—the heat index has approached 160 degrees Fahrenheit in places like Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and Bandar, Iran. The latest research—some of it published last summer—indicates that such heat waves will become steadily more common. As the decades pass, a belt across India, Pakistan, and the North China Plain will see temperatures past the survival point for days and weeks at a time. The heat wave that killed tens of thousands in Europe in 2003 is only a foretaste.
In taking on heat and glacial melt and fire, Robinson is writing more realistic fiction than most contemporary novelists, for whom the physical world remains a backdrop for more interior stories. We are entering a period when physical forces, and our reaction to them, will drive the drama on planet Earth. We are lucky to have a writer as knowledgeable, as sensible, and as humane as Robinson to act as a guide—he is an essential authority for our time and place, and our deliberations about the future will go better the more widely he is read, for he is offering a deeply informed view on what are quickly becoming the great questions of world politics. The New Yorker once asked if Robinson was "our greatest political novelist," and I think the answer may well be yes. He's not trained as a scientist, but he's so up on the literature that he's usually three or four years ahead of the news, and not just in the US—his sense of the Earth's political currents, including the rise of China and India, runs deep.
Which is interesting, because Robinson first made his mark writing about a different planet. His Mars trilogy, published in the 1990s, won every science-fiction award there is. (Robinson writes long books, and they often come in groups of three.) That story begins at almost the same time as The Ministry for the Future does: a group of a hundred earthlings takes off in 2026 to colonize Mars, as conditions on their home planet begin to deteriorate. It is an epic tale of the technological effort required to "terraform" Mars—to make it habitable for humans by, say, drilling deep holes to release subsurface heat, and exploding nuclear weapons in the permafrost to start producing flowing water. Robinson's scenarios are precisely what NASA engineers were thinking through back then: that it was only a matter of time before we colonized the red planet. But in truth the technology is secondary—his true interest, then and now, is more in political science than in science itself.
The Mars trilogy is really an exercise in asking how humans could, would, and should settle an uninhabited place: how, given a blank slate, we might work out our divisions and create a society that could survive and thrive. With a Mars colony as a setting, Robinson needed to deal with only a scattered few people on an empty world and had room to address questions of human nature, human organization, and human agency that are harder to deal with on the messy, crowded, historically contingent world we actually inhabit. His careful thought in those early novels has paid off in the years since; the conceptual seedlings he nurtured on Mars he has transplanted back on Earth in his more recent work, culminating in The Ministry for the Future, which may serve as his ultimate account of how to set our Earth on a workable course.
Before diving in, however, it's worth noting why Robinson has mostly left space behind. In the decades since the Mars trilogy appeared, the science has made it clearer that we're not going to easily spread out into the cosmos. The visions of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk notwithstanding, even colonizing Mars will be much harder than originally envisioned by the writers of space operas and the NASA planners in the halcyon post-Apollo days—among other things, NASA probes have discovered that the red planet is carpeted in a soil containing toxic perchlorates, so you'd somehow have to decontaminate the planet before you started doing anything grander.
It has also become clear that the distances involved in interstellar travel effectively preclude colonization outside the solar system: everything from the effects of radiation to the lack of genetic diversity in any "ark" that we'd send into space would amount to crippling obstacles. As Robinson has said:
There is no Planet B, and it's very likely that we require the conditions here on earth for our long-term health. When you don't take these new biological discoveries into your imagined future, you are doing bad science fiction.
Indeed, he devoted an entire (and quite lovely) novel, Aurora (2015), to demonstrating why deep space colonization would be impossible. It follows the crew of an interstellar craft as they fail to inhabit a distant planet and then try, against the odds, to return to Earth, with a much-sharpened appreciation for its fragility and beauty.
The real danger of fantasizing about space travel is that it creates a moral hazard: one begins to care less about the fate of our own world. And Robinson very much wants us to focus on this world. In book after book in recent years, he has laid out the path forward for dealing with the existential crisis that climate change has clearly become.
In a trilogy of novels set in the near future in a rapidly heating Washington, D.C.—collected in 2015 in an omnibus edition titled Green Earth—the US government and the National Science Foundation are still focal points for the fight to save the planet. By 2025, in the new novel, it is a UN agency that takes the lead—"the Ministry for the Future," formed in response to the Indian heat wave by the parties to the Paris climate accord. The ministry is located in Zurich, an often overlooked city that Robinson describes with great intimacy and affection, and is headed by Mary Murphy, an Irishwoman—she is, for my money, an accurate and beguiling composite of an actual former UN commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, and Christiana Figueres and Laurence Tubiana, the two diplomats who did more than any others to pull off those Paris talks. (That women have been at the center of climate diplomacy is perhaps less noted than it should be.)
No UN ministry, of course, can move world affairs—that waits on the interests of the powers that be. In this case, those interests come in many forms. Some countries, like India, are scared enough to try anything: Delhi launches a fleet of airplanes that ferry sulfur compounds into the atmosphere, where the particles block some incoming solar radiation, a fairly low-tech (and in the real world highly controversial) geoengineering plan to reduce the temperature.
The ministry sponsors other technological tricks, all of which have to be applied on similarly immense scales to have any effect: drilling holes to the base of Antarctic and Greenlandic glaciers to drain the meltwater collecting there so the ice sheets slow their slide into the ocean; dyeing the newly melted Arctic Ocean yellow so that it stops absorbing so much sunlight. Some schemes work better than others, but by themselves they're nowhere near enough, and indeed The Ministry for the Future mostly brushes past them, more concerned with the changes in the world economy and governance that must come.
Such shifts are opposed by entrenched interests like fossil fuel executives and the status quo politicians. And so those interests are targeted by a terror group, the Children of Kali, which arises in India to avenge the victims of the heat wave, and also by a dark-ops wing of the UN ministry itself. These operatives are clever: in one of the more enjoyable interludes in the book, they manage to take over Davos, subjecting the global elite to an endless series of seminars and workshops on global poverty and environmental disruption. Meanwhile, on what will henceforth be known as Crash Day, the terrorists send swarms of drones into the engines of jets around the world, downing them. Some are the private jets of plutocrats, but not all—the deaths of innocent people are real, if limited. As a result, far fewer people are willing to fly, except in the growing fleet of solar-powered dirigibles and airships that slowly circle the Earth.
Similarly, vast, smoke-belching container ships are torpedoed by futuristic "pebble-mob" missiles that can overwhelm defenses by sheer force of numbers. They are replaced by photovoltaic clipper ships that harvest both sun and wind as they make their more stately way across the ocean. (Murphy travels in one from Europe to Florida, making the obvious point to anyone who's lived through the pandemic that as long as you have your laptop you can as easily work from the deck of a boat as from an office.) But again, these technologies—all in various stages of development today—aren't the real salvation.
That lies instead in the various changes that start rippling through societies. Minister Murphy's most important interventions are with the four or five crucial central bankers around the world; they're persuaded not only to tax carbon but to issue a "carbon coin" as a reward for actions that keep oil and gas in the ground or sequester CO2 from the atmosphere. This "carboni" begins to replace the dollar as the underpinning of the global economy, and as that happens, neoliberalism—really capitalism itself—begins to bend a little in its dictates.
"The euthanasia of the rentier class," as Keynes called it, begins; more and more of the uberwealthy find themselves compelled to take a serious haircut, left with tens of millions in place of their billions in increasingly stranded assets. Popular movements break out everywhere—debt strikes by students, and then by the debtor nations of the global south; uprisings in China of migratory workers long denied residence permits in the cities where they work, who take to the streets by the millions and force some basic changes from the Chinese Communist Party:
There was so much going on, such a spasm of revolts occurring spontaneously (if it was spontaneous!) all over the world, that some historians said it was another 1848…. Coincidence? Conspiracy? World spirit, Zeitgeist in action? Who knew? All they knew for sure was that it was happening, things were falling apart.
And when things fall apart, new things can emerge. It is here that Robinson is at his best—he has a head full of all the hopeful experiments on our planet, the ones that run a little counter to the prevailing wisdom. For instance, there's a tidy discourse on the town of Mondragón in Basque country that for decades has seen a successful and fascinating experiment in cooperative control of industry; there's an informed account of the state of Kerala in the south of India, where a low GDP coexists with high quality of life; there's a nod to Modern Monetary Theory and the idea that deficits might not matter, and to Vandana Shiva, an activist and pioneer in organic agriculture who has long argued that local agriculture is significantly healthier for people in developing countries.
Robinson also understands the blockchain technology underlying currencies like bitcoin, and the ways it might stop the wealthy from hiding their cash in the Caymans; he knows what the agronomist Wes Jackson is up to at the Land Institute in Kansas, where they're figuring out how to grow wheat as a perennial, not an annual crop; and he's followed the French law intended to increase carbon in farm soils. He's got a handle on rotational grazing and on wild oyster farming, and on a thousand and one other possibilities. He knows that—pace Margaret Thatcher—there is an alternative to capitalism, or really millions of alternatives, each designed for its own place. If only the system can be moved.
And it turns out that climate change—as Naomi Klein posited in her great book This Changes Everything—is the tool for moving it, the crisis that finally forces us (because chemistry and physics simply won't be denied, the way morality and justice can be) to deal with our inequality and our unjust history and the whole wretched mess we've managed to make of things in the early twenty-first century. Robinson's scheme is not utopian, it's anti-dystopian, realist to its core: there's still money and still nation-states and still central banks, and change comes from riot and occupation and protest (grahasatya, he calls it, or force peace, in a realpolitik nod to Gandhi)—but "it will be legislation that does it in the end, creating a new legal regime that is fair, just, sustainable, and secure…. The best Plan B will emerge from the multitudes."
In The Ministry for the Future, it all kind of works. Yes, there's a great and savage depression, and ongoing ecological wreckage, especially in the acidified oceans. But by the 2050s the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has begun to drop, and fairly fast—down five parts per million per year, maybe even headed back to the 350 mark that the climate scientist Jim Hansen set as the boundary for some kind of civilizational chance.
Is this possible, outside the confines of fiction?
I think it might be: the emergence, for instance, of Greta Thunberg and a hundred other high school–age leaders, militantly demanding change, seems like it could easily have been a plot point instead of a reality. The youth of the Sunrise Movement and their demand for a sweeping Green New Deal exemplify the kind of change Robinson imagines. The rapid development of cheap renewable energy makes a quick change in that direction technically and economically possible, even at this late date.
But part of me fears that Robinson underestimates not just the staying power of the status quo but also the odds that when things get really bad, we will react really badly. It's possible that a killer heat wave striking India might begin to wake up the conscience of the world; it's also possible that it makes the emergence of the next round of Trumps and Bolsonaros and Modis more likely.
If the Covid pandemic is a kind of early test of our ability to respond to crisis, some parts of the world seem to have passed and others seem to have failed. Can the US achieve the kind of unity that might make it an ally in this greatest of fights? In Robinson's novel, the valiant people of Hong Kong not only hold off Beijing but manage to help change the flavor of its government—at the moment, that river seems to be flowing the other way. And the change that must come must come rapidly: even one more wasted decade may be enough to put us past the point where the momentum of global warming can really be checked.
This is precisely why one hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson's audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination, to remind us that the great questions of our lives are not just about love and relationships, but also about politics and economics.
He ends with another set piece, this one charming. Mary Murphy, retired, has returned to Zurich after a dirigible tour of the planet, which has been increasingly rewilded as populations begin to shrink and human settlements are purposefully taken off the map. From the air the passengers have watched herds on the Serengeti, caribou streaming across a reviving Arctic. She has begun to fall for the gentle and quiet captain of the blimp, and the two of them now go out together to wander the streets of the Swiss city for Fasnacht, the pre-Lenten masquerade. Men with alphorns play Fanfare for the Common Man, a steel drum band offers a Trinidadian tune, some Andean Indians in serapes play the panpipes. Mary looks at this world, which she has done much to save, and she thinks:
That there is no other home for us than here. That we will cope no matter how stupid things get. That all couples are odd couples. That the only catastrophe that can't be undone is extinction. That we can make a good place. That people can take fate in their hands. That there is no such thing as fate.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's anti-dystopian novel, climate change is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global inequality.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/12/17/kim-stanley-robinson-not-science-fiction/
==
KSR on ideology, science & philosophy
"Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts. But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can't be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it's the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader."
==
"We have to create and employ an ideology to be able to function; and we do that work by way of thinking that is prone to any number of systemic and one might even say factual errors. We have never been rational. Maybe science itself is the attempt to be rational. Maybe philosophy too. And of course philosophy is very often proving we can’t think to the bottom of things, can’t get logic to work as a closed system, and so on. And remember also that in all of this discussion so far, we are referring to the normal mind, the sane mind. What happens when, starting as we do from such a shaky original position, sanity is lost, we defer to another discussion. Enough now to say just this: it can get very bad."
"The Ministry for the Future: A Novel" by Kim Stanley Robinson,
88
==
On money as social trust-
"And when definitions of value shifted from talking about interest rates to talking about social trust— when finance and theories of money fell through a trapdoor in daily normality, down into the free fall of philosophy’s bottomless pit— when people began to wonder why money worked at all— wonder why some people were as gods walking this Earth while other people couldn’t find a place to lay their head at night— it turned out there was no very good answer. Certainly no answer at all when it came to investment strategies you could count on. Money was made of social trust. Which meant, in this spasmophilic moment, with everything changing and the ground falling under one’s feet in immense tectonic jolts, that money itself was therefore in limbo. And that was scary. Vast amounts of paper turned to vapor. The banks of the developed Western world were too connected to fail; if one or two of the big ones went down, the rest would shrink in on themselves and wait for the state to reestablish trust before either lending money or even paying what they owed. Why pay a creditor that might be non-existent next week? Best wait and see if they survived to press that debt in court."
377
On technology-
"Doesn’t it follow that technology has been the driving force in history? We are the driving force in history. We make do, and on it goes. All right then. Enough of philosophy, I’m afraid I’m getting confused. Yes. Let’s move on to some specific examples. Have you heard of those drones developed to shoot mangrove seeds into the mud flats, thus seeding hundreds of thousands of new trees in terrain difficult of human access? Very nice, but that same drone could shoot a dart through your head as you walk out your door. So it illustrates my point, if you care to think about it. Our tools are expressions of our intentions, so what we want to do is the key driver. I’ll save that for our next foray into philosophy, which we will certainly schedule soon. Meanwhile, what do you think of these new bioengineered amoebae that are now grown in vats to form our fuel, while also drawing carbon out of the atmosphere? Kind of a next-stage ethanol? Useful."
==
— The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson
https://a.co/55QB5gB
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Amsterdam Is Embracing a Radical New Economic Theory to Help Save the Environment. Could It Also Replace Capitalism?
One evening in December, after a long day working from home, Jennifer Drouin, 30, headed out to buy groceries in central Amsterdam. Once inside, she noticed new price tags. The label by the zucchini said they cost a little more than normal: 6¢ extra per kilo for their carbon footprint, 5¢ for the toll the farming takes on the land, and 4¢ to fairly pay workers. “There are all these extra costs to our daily life that normally no one would pay for, or even be aware of,” she says.
The so-called true-price initiative, operating in the store since late 2020, is one of dozens of schemes that Amsterdammers have introduced in recent months as they reassess the impact of the existing economic system. By some accounts, that system, capitalism, has its origins just a mile from the grocery store. In 1602, in a house on a narrow alley, a merchant began selling shares in the nascent Dutch East India Company. In doing so, he paved the way for the creation of the first stock exchange—and the capitalist global economy that has transformed life on earth. “Now I think we’re one of the first cities in a while to start questioning this system,” Drouin says. “Is it actually making us healthy and happy? What do we want? Is it really just economic growth?”
In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” Laid out by British economist Kate Raworth in a 2017 book, the theory argues that 20th century economic thinking is not equipped to deal with the 21st century reality of a planet teetering on the edge of climate breakdown. Instead of equating a growing GDP with a successful society, our goal should be to fit all of human life into what Raworth calls the “sweet spot” between the “social foundation,” where everyone has what they need to live a good life, and the “environmental ceiling.” By and large, people in rich countries are living above the environmental ceiling. Those in poorer countries often fall below the social foundation. The space in between: that’s the doughnut...
https://time.com/5930093/amsterdam-doughnut-economics/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share-article&utm-term=world_economy
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Impact
Important and hopeful essay from @dwallacewells; movements are starting to have real impact, so let's keep it up!
https://t.co/4bThd7bH23
(https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1351526552039776259?s=02)
https://t.co/4bThd7bH23
(https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1351526552039776259?s=02)
Sunday, January 17, 2021
Wild spaces
All across the American South, people are fighting to save their wild spaces, but such stories rarely make the national news. https://t.co/CdWAEfkWOp
(https://twitter.com/MargaretRenkl/status/1350487628378988554?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/MargaretRenkl/status/1350487628378988554?s=02)
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Sunday, January 10, 2021
Gaia
See the Earth in an entirely new way.
https://t.co/EAPWtnb64J
(https://twitter.com/SecularStudents/status/1348384678391197696?s=02)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)