1.Is Naomi Klein approach discussed in Chapter 2
under “Growing the Caring Economy,
Shrinking the Careless One,” an achievable one?
Has she complicated the resolution by weaving in elements of a change to
the economic system which while they might be true would be a show stopper for
anyone who might listen to a rational presentation on the changing climate?
2.Who
decides who sacrifices in the “selective degrowth”? With only 29.1% of
registered Tennesseans voting in the midterm elections in 2014, what is the reality that
legislators will consider any meaningful legislation to address climate change?
How many of you are currently register to vote?
Growing
the Caring Economy, Shrinking the Careless One
Don Enss
In chapter two, as I
read Klein’s section “Growing the Caring Economy, Shrinking the Careless One,”
I thought about her approach and how effective it would be with the average
person throughout the world. Many may be experiencing discomfort right now in
varying degrees and those in California and Louisiana to a greater degree with
the recent fires and flooding but here in Tennessee, there is a sense that fall
and football are in the air and soon our attention will be diverted from any
discussion about climate change and certainly if it is introduced not just as a
threat to human survival necessitating a change but one which will require us
to be more conservative and do with less, it will not fly.
I know what she saying
is valid, but how you market it to get citizens’s buy-in is where we may
disagree. If you tell me that you have a
little intermittent pain in your tooth and I tell you that if you don’t have an
immediate dental checkup that your tooth will deteriorate and you will need to
have a root canal and suffer extreme pain, you’ll think about it, but if the pain
subsides, you’ll put it off. All of the
suggested frightening outcome might be true, but I’ll be more successful if I
focus on getting you to the dentist without dwelling on the horror story. Then
once you’ve seen the dentist and the x-rays come back positive, then you will
buy into the proposed treatment and maybe avoid a root canal.
We had that opportunity
back in 1988 and we let it slip away. Then 79% of Americans knew about the
greenhouse effect; that was the time to strike.
Now, those individuals who heard that message are twenty-eight years
older today and many of them don’t see where they have experienced that drastic
of a change. Maybe the winters are a little warmer, but that’s welcomed and the
summers a little hotter, but we have air conditioning so how do you get a
buy-in to alter one’s lifestyle.
I think you have to
start with education and granted we may not have a lot of time, but since Naomi
Klein published her book and held her seminar, how much have we read or heard
about climate change in Tennessee. Conservatives control the majority of radio
talk shows and are very prominent in our state and federal legislatures
controlling one or both chambers so any discussion of climate change legislation
is dead on arrival. I believe that the solution is the social media through a
rational approach focused on first getting buy-in to the problem and then
manageable solutions to begin addressing it. It may not be the best approach,
but right now it would be better than nothing.
I may feel differently
at the conclusion of our course, but based on what I’ve read, that’s where I am
now.
1.What
explains “individuals’ belief about global warming more powerfully than any
other individual characteristic.”?
2.What
is it always easier to deny than to allow our worldview to be shattered?
3.What
is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore
conservatives?
4.According to Klein, “without a doubt,”
what “is neoliberalism’s single most damaging legacy.”?
Chapter 2:
1.“Rather
than compete for the best, most effective supports for green energy, the
biggest emitters in the world are rushing to the WTO to do what?
2.“If
the climate movement had a birthday,” what would it be and why?
3.According
to Robyn Eckersley, what was “the pivotal moment that set the shape of the
relationship between the climate and trade regimes?
“Rather than
pretending that we can solve the climate crisis without rocking the economic
boat,” what does Anderson and Bows-Larkin argue should be done?
Check out the WuMO comic strip for August 27, 2016. How appropriate and timely to our discussion about climate change attitudes. I tried to post the image below, but if it didn't work, then you should be able to see it by clicking on the link below and going to August 27, 2016.
1. What percentage of climate scientists have concluded that anthropogenic climate change is real?
2. What is the Heartland Institute devoted to?
3. What was Upton Sinclair's famous observation?
4. What is "green fascism"?
5. Who did Al Gore proclaim to have "the best green energy program" in North America?
6. What three "policy pillars" are incompatible with bringing emissions to safe levels?
7. What accounting system has created a distorted picture of the drivers of global emissions?
8. What logic, "even more entrenched than free trade," must be confronted if we're to have a chance of achieving lower emissions in time?
DQ:
Is it possible to reason with, and persuade, ideologists who are convinced that "climate change is a plot to steal American freedom"? 32 What's the best way to persuade those who've not made up their minds?
If it's "always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered," 37 how do we change that and raise a generation of reality-based humans?
Are you more chastened or heartened by the phenomenon of rapid shifts in public opinion (as, for instance, about the reality of climate change)?
If climate deniers and climate progressives are both intransigently committed to their positions, are we doomed? Or, "may the best side win"?
Is "free trade" a good idea in principle, but not in our world of corporate globalism? What kind of globalism would be good in practice?
Should climate progressives consider themselves at war with the fossil fuel industry? Do you support Klein's "heavy-duty interventions"? 39
Does the climate crisis "demand collective action on an unprecedented scale, and a dramatic reining in of market forces"? 41
Is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged irrelevant? 44
Is white male privilege one of the root causes of the climate crisis? 46
Are economic geologists deluded? 46
How do we overcome the "empathy-exterminating mind-set"? 48
How do we create a public-spirited insurance industry? 50
Why shouldn't we expect more altruism and generosity on a much warmer planet? 53
How can we avoid "green fascism"? 54
Is nuclear technology inherently objectionable because it reinforces our sense of mastery over nature? 57
Would it work, in the short term, to "pitch climate action as a way to protect America's high-consumerist way of life"? 58
Are we "not worth saving"? 62
Is it wrong to say "climate is not about left and right but "right and wrong"? 63
How do we get local governments to defend their emission-reducing activities and not "cave in early, not wanting to to appear anti-free trade"? 71 How do we get the WTO to apply and enforce trade agreements in a way not harmful to local green initiatives?
How do weholdcountries responsible for the pollution they create beyond their own borders? 79
Is there anything good to be said about "reflexive political centrism"? 83
Al Gore: hero or villain? 85
COMMENT: "Many degrowth and economic justice thinkers also call for the introduction of a basic income, as a recognition that the system cannot provide jobs for everyone and that it is counterproductive to force people to work in jobs that simply fuel consumption... 'While making people work shitty jobs to 'earn' a living has always been spiteful, it's now starting to seem suicidal.'" 94
I found this story in Saturday's edition of our local paper, The Daily News Journal. It describes the effects of a warmer climate on our vegetable crops and flowers and ultimately on us as climate conditions continue to deteriorate. Climate change deniers will point to the benefits of the warmer weather for bermuda grass and Zoysia, I don't know about you but right now neither are on my menu of things to eat.
August 25 Introduction questions – This Changes Everything.
Don Enss
Introduction:
1.How can you already see the early stages of the climate change process? 2.Why did the Copenhagen summit cause such great despair? 3.When historians look back on the past quarter century of international negotiations, what will be the two defining processes? 4.What are the three policy pillars of this era? Essay
Is gloomy picture of our climate real – if so what can anyone do?
Don Enss
In the introduction, Naomi Klein paints a pretty gloomy picture of what is happening to our climate and for individuals who have been following this issue for many years going back to acid-rain destruction of segments of the Black Forest in Germany the images are powerful. https://newint.org/features/1988/06/05/dying/ . Unfortunately, we sometimes become anesthetized to the images and accept that it’s just part of life and that there isn’t much any one of us can do and we know what she is saying is probably true, but we look around our immediate environment and we don’t see it, so we don’t engage.
People living in Baton Rouge and other parts of Louisiana may be a little more receptive to explanations about global climate change, but unfortunately, too many of them have been inundated by messages from certain groups whose focus is to discredit the scientific basis and support for it and rather than questioning the source, they simply accept it because it is coming from a source that they trust and any rational argument that challenges that trust is discarded.
Several years ago, I traveled to New Orleans Louisiana to see what I could learn about an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting. These meetings are not open to the public, but are open to corporate lobbyists and representatives who sit down with legislators from all fifty states to draft legislation. I got there early enough in the morning before anyone arrived to see who some of the major contributors were. This was right after the BP oil spill and BP was the top contributor. Can you guess why? Also, contributing was the Heartland Institute.
My only suggestion to you is get involved and spread the word – you can make a difference!
2. Who (besides politicians) can declare a crisis?
3. What target was agreed on at Copenhagen? What is projected by the World Bank, and by the IEA?
4. What habit of thought rules our era?
5. What kind of shift does Klein consider crucial to addressing "our problem"?
Discussion Questions (DQ)
Look at the Kim Stanley Robinson epigraph at the beginning. Is "comprehensively changing capitalism" more difficult to imagine than the other things he lists? Would it "change everything" for the better, including the climate crisis?
"I love that smell of the emissions," said Sarah Palin. Projecting yourself as sympathetically as you can into Sarah's worldview and playing Devil's Advocate, how do you imagine it might be possible for an intelligent and responsible person to say such a thing?
Some of us will be discouraged by Klein's insistence that we can only prevent or ameliorate a grim future by changing everything rather than some things: it sounds impossible. Are you discouraged, or encouraged, by this sweeping prescription?
What would a "Marshall Plan for the Earth" look like, do you think? What would it take, aside from effective presidential leadership, to enact it? 5
Do you agree that climate change can become "a galvanizing force for humanity"? Under what conditions will that be possible? 7
Do you agree that carbon credits are a "lucrative scam"? 8
Is it immoral to "privatize the commons" and try and "profit from disaster"? 9
Do you see the Occupy and Bernie movements as examples of what Klein means by "reinvigorating democracy from the ground up"? 10
"Our leaders are not looking after us... we are not cared for at the level of our very survival." 12 True? What's the rational response to this absence of care from the top, a rededcation to political engagement or an apolitical retreat from the public sphere?
Do you think adaptation to a 7.2 degree F. warmer world is possible? 13
Will it be possible, in your versin of Ecotopia, for those sectors of the economy that contribute to sustainable living (the makers of solar panels and windmills, the inventors of technologies that do not leave a carbon residue, etc. etc.) to grow without regulation, and make their practitioners wealthy?
Do you agree that the free market cannot possibly cut emissions by 8-10% in any scenario? What if a mass movement demanded it? Isn't supply supposed to respond to demand, in capitalism? 21
Do you think the IEA is right that 2017 will be our last chance to get our emissions under control? 23
Are we helping to kill the world by having kids?
"We need somewhere to run to." 28 Should we set our sites on Proxima Centauri? (We're going to need an ark...)
After talking yesterday about the 10,000 year clock and the investment in our future it symbolizes, I recalled Michael Chabon's essay "The Omega Glory." It concludes,
When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if I turn out, in the end, to be wrong.
That's what I was trying to say, when I said it's intuitive to me that if we care about our children, about the next generation, then it's a small next step to care about the long-term fate of life on Earth and about all generations. That's the bet we take, when we have children. And we do all have children. They're all ours, we're theirs. We're all in this ship together.
Let's introduce ourselves, Fall 2016 Environmental Ethics collaborators.
I invite you all to hit "comment" and reply with your own introductions, and (bearing in mind that this is an open site) your answers to two basic questions: Who are you? Why are you here? (in this course, on this campus, in this state, on this planet...)
I also invite you to tell us whether (and why) you are hopeful, despairing, fatalistic, indifferent, or whatever, with regard to the eventual prospects for life on Earth. My philosophical hero William James said that's our one "really vital question." He also said that "shipwreck" is among our clear possibilities, though his pragmatic philosophy was an attempt to suggest alternatives. Our course is an attempt to decide whether the hopeful alternatives are still realistically possible. If you don't have a response to this question yet, I'll push you to come up with one by the time this semester ends.
Our first class meeting on Tuesday will consist mainly of introductions and a heads-up that this is an unconventional course in ways I hope you'll find delightful, instructive, and rewarding. If you don't like to move, breathe, and converse in the open air on "nice" days, this may not be the course for you. But if you don't especially like the conventional lecture-style academic model in which I talk and you scribble silently in your seats, it may be just what you're looking for.
We'll not go over the syllabus or get bogged down in the nuts and bolts of course mechanics on Day #1, there's plenty of time for those details later. But do peruse the blogsite and syllabus (linked in the right margin) before next class and let me know what's unclear. Meanwhile, read your classmates' intros and post your own.
I'm Dr. Oliver, aka (despite my best efforts to discourage it) "Dr. Phil." I live in Nashville with my wife, Younger Daughter (a HS Senior), a dog (Angel) and a cat (Zeus). Older Daughter is a college Senior in another state.
My office is in James Union Building 300. Office hours are Mondays thru Thursdays 3-4 pm, & by appointment. On nice days office hours will probably be outside, possibly in front of the library (in the "Confucius" alcove, if it's available) or at another designated location. I answer emails during office hours, but not on weekends. Surest way to get a quick response:come in or call during office hours.
I've been at MTSU since the early '00s, teaching philosophy courses on diverse subjects including atheism, childhood, happiness, the environment, the future, and bioethics.
My Ph.D. is from Vanderbilt. I'm originally from Missouri, near St. Louis. I was indoctrinated as a Cardinals fan in early childhood, so I understand something about religious zeal. My undergrad degree is from Mizzou, in Columbia MO. (I wish my schools weren't in the SEC-I don't approve of major collegiate sports culture or football brain injuries, as I'm sure to tell you again.)
My philosophical expertise, such as it is, centers on the American philosophical tradition ofWilliam James and John Dewey. A former student once asked me to respond to aquestionnaire, if you're curious you can learn more about me there.
What you most need to know about me, though, is that I'm a peripatetic and will encourage you all to join me in that philosophical lifestyle as often as possible during discussion time. (If you're not sure what peripatetic means, scan the right sidebar or read the syllabus or ask me. Or look it up.)
I post my thoughts regularly to my blogs Up@dawn and Delight Springs, among others, and to Twitter (@osopher), and am continuing to experiment with podcasting as a classroom tool this semester. Follow me if you want to.
But of course, as Brian Cohen said, you don't have to follow anyone. (Extra credit if you get that reference... and real extra credit if you realize that my "extra credit" is usually rhetorical.) However, if a blog or podcast link turns up with the daily quiz (which will always be posted on this site no later than the night before class), you might find it helpful to read or listen.
Enough about me. Who are you? (Where are you from, where have you been, what do you like, who do you want to become,...?) Why are you here? (On Earth, in Tennessee, at MTSU, in philosophy class)? Hit "comments" below and post your introduction, then read your classmates'... and bear in mind that this is an open site. The world can read it. (The world's probably busy with other stuff, of course - Drumpf and Kardashians and cooking shows and other examples of what passes for "reality" these days.)
"What if global warming isn't only a crisis, what if it's the best chance we're ever going to get to build a better world? 'We could reinvent a different future."
Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change. Inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller This Changes Everything, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond. Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Throughout the film, Klein builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better. The extraordinary detail and richness of the cinematography in THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING provides an epic canvas for this exploration of the greatest challenge of our time. Unlike many films about the climate crisis, this is not a film that tries to scare the audience into action: it aims to empower. Provocative, compelling, and accessible to even the most climate-fatigued viewers, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING will leave you refreshed and inspired, reflecting on the ties between us, the kind of lives we really want, and why the climate crisis is at the centre of it all. Will this film change everything? Absolutely not. But you could, by answering its call to action. YouT
BOOK TRAILER:
A conversation with Naomi Klein:
...To call “This Changes Everything” environmental is to limit Klein’s considerable agenda. “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” On the green left, many share Klein’s sentiments. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, recently lamented that even though “the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.” Klein, Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated zombie ideology.
That philosophy — neoliberalism — promotes a high-consumption, carbon-hungry system. Neoliberalism has encouraged mega-mergers, trade agreements hostile to environmental and labor regulations, and global hypermobility, enabling a corporation like Exxon to make, as McKibben has noted, “more money last year than any company in the history of money.” Their outsize power mangles the democratic process. Yet the carbon giants continue to reap $600 billion in annual subsidies from public coffers, not to speak of a greater subsidy: the right, in Klein’s words, to treat the atmosphere as a “waste dump.”
So much for the invisible hand. As the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson observed, when it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check... (continues, nyt)
==
Review, Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis-
Flannery (An Explorer's Notebook: Essays on Life, History, and Climate, 2014, etc.) argues for renewed optimism in human capabilities to reverse the destabilizing effects of climate change.
For years, the author has been in the forefront of spreading the warning of climate change’s dire consequences to a broad audience. “This book describes in plain terms our climate predicament,” he writes, “but it also brings news of exciting tools in the making that could help us avoid climate disaster.” Flannery sees a decided change in governmental responsibility since the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, which suggested the possibility of international political cooperation, and the marginalization of the deniers, whom he finds “perverse. Even grotesque.” The author makes it abundantly clear where we stand—that we are far from achieving the 2 percent solution to global warming—but that there is also diverse, effective, and innovative activity toward cutting carbon dioxide emissions. This is occurring on the individual front—through digital interconnectedness and direct action such as disinvestment campaigns—and through the adoption of a long-view, “third way” of implementing projects that stimulate natural systems to draw the gas out of the air and oceans at a faster rate than we produce it. Flannery crisply outlines what is now known and conjectured about the human influence on climate change, exploring the long ragweed season, the nutritional degradation of crops, and the acidification of the oceans. There are roadblocks to alternative energy sources—as Ralph Nader noted, “the use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun”—but Flannery also finds that money will drive the wind and solar power sources as they rapidly become more efficient. He also puts fracking under great scrutiny, and he makes an intriguing case for the capture and storage of the byproducts of the damage already done.
A sharp summary of energy potentialities, where the good and the bad reside in human hands, hearts, and minds. Kirkus Reviews
SOMETIMES a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with “Ecotopia,” a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known.
The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.
White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called “recycle bins” sit on trains, along with “hanging ferns and small plants.” A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.
“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. “You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.”
In the ’70s, the book, with a blurb from Ralph Nader, was a hit, selling 400,000 or so copies in the United States, and more worldwide. But by the raging ’80s, the novel, along with the Whole Earth Catalog, seemed like a good candidate for a ’70s time capsule — a dusty curio without much lasting impact.
Yet today, “Ecotopia” is increasingly assigned in college courses on the environment, sociology and urban planning, and its cult following has begun to reach an unlikely readership... (continues)
Robinson presents us with three options of how the future might be, and some concrete ideas for making the third (and best) future come true. And even more brilliantly, this structure subsumes Robinson's entire career. The Mars series functions as an offshoot of Robinson's vision of utopia in Pacific Edge -- I don't want to give away too many plot details, but there are some obviously similar names (just as Tom Bernard persists through the Three Californias). Will we go to Mars and develop a rational and ethical society there? Red Mars and its sequels might help that very thing happen. Will we develop a utopia? Pacific Edge is Robinson's plea for such a future.
I mentioned that Robinson has concrete ideas for creating a utopia. I don't want to do them an injustice by ripping them out of the context of the narrative. But Robinson's most important idea seems to be that we should limit the size of corporations. He also proposes a number of societal changes, some of them dependent on advances in technology (cheap access to a videophone being one of them). Like any work of fiction, the case is stacked in favour of the author's ideas. Would the absence of multinational companies really make the world economic system a fairer structure than it is now? Maybe. It's an attractive idea, and Robinson balances the various elements with skill. He makes the notions seem possible, while making sure that we see how hard they could be to implement. All of this is worked out nicely in the life of our main character. And the book finally rests on the story of Kevin Claiborne, his friends, his loves, and his struggles. The bittersweet ending will stay with me for a long time as a perfect way of encapsulating the underlying ideas of the book, as well as capping off what is a fine story in its own right. James Schellenberg
"How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common," asks Stewart Brand, "instead of difficult and rare?" Or, to put it another way, how does one get people to develop a natural perspective of their present moment that extends beyond a few days in either direction? The Clock of the Long Now describes a potential solution from the Long Now Foundation, a digerati brain trust co-chaired by Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The other chair, computer scientist Daniel Hillis, gave the group their initial premise in a 1995 Wired magazine articledreaming of a "Millennium Clock" that would measure time on a 10,000-year scale; musician Brian Eno gave the concept of the "Long Now" its name. Although there is a lot of discussion of the clock itself--Where to build it? How to design it?--Brand's main theme is about accepting responsibility for the long-term consequences of our actions. "We are not the culmination of history," he warns, "and we are not start-over revolutionaries; we are in the middle of civilization's story.... We don't know what's coming. We do know we're in it together." The Clock of the Long Now is a deceptively short book, written in a friendly, at times conversational, style. It can be read in an afternoon, but just might make you think for a lifetime. Maybe even a few lifetimes. Ron Hogan
“People change the world,” Kolbert writes, and she vividly presents the science and history of the current crisis. Her extensive travels in researching this book, and her insightful treatment of both the history and the science all combine to make “The Sixth Extinction” an invaluable contribution to our understanding of present circumstances, just as the paradigm shift she calls for is sorely needed.
Despite the evidence that humanity is driving mass extinctions, we have been woefully slow to adopt the necessary measures to solve this global environmental challenge. Our response to the mass extinction — as well as to the climate crisis — is still controlled by a hopelessly outdated view of our relationship to our environment.
Fortunately, history is full of examples of our capacity to overcome even the most difficult challenges whenever a controversy is finally resolved into a choice between what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. The anomalies Kolbert identifies are too glaring to ignore. She makes an irrefutable case that what we are doing to cause a sixth mass extinction is clearly wrong. And she makes it clear that doing what is right means accelerating our transition to a more sustainable world. nyt
...If we move quickly enough to meet the goal of 80 percent clean power by 2030, then the world’s carbon dioxide levels would fall below the relative safety of 350 parts per million by the end of the century. The planet would stop heating up, or at least the pace of that heating would slow substantially. That’s as close to winning this war as we could plausibly get. We’d endure lots of damage in the meantime, but not the civilization-scale destruction we currently face. (Even if all of the world’s nations meet the pledges they made in the Paris accord, carbon dioxide is currently on a path to hit 500 or 600 parts per million by century’s end—a path if not to hell, then to someplace with a similar setting on the thermostat.)
To make the Stanford plan work, you would need to build a hell of a lot of factories to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, and wind turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of electric cars and buses. But here again, experts have already begun to crunch the numbers. Tom Solomon, a retired engineer who oversaw the construction of one of the largest factories built in recent years—Intel’s mammoth Rio Rancho semiconductor plant in New Mexico—took Jacobson’s research and calculated how much clean energy America would need to produce by 2050 to completely replace fossil fuels. The answer: 6,448 gigawatts.
“Last year we installed 16 gigawatts of clean power,” Solomon says. “So at that pace, it would take 405 years. Which is kind of too long...” )
Every fall, an international team of scientists announces how much carbon dioxide humanity has dumped into the atmosphere the previous year. This fall, the news wasn’t good. It almost never is. The only time the group reported a drop in emissions was 2009, when the global economy seemed on the verge of collapse. The following year, emissions jumped again, by almost 6 percent.
According to the team’s latest report, in 2013 global emissions rose by 2.3 percent. Contributing to this increase were countries like the United States, which has some of the world’s highest per capita emissions, and also countries like India, which has some of the lowest. “There is no more time,” one of the scientists who worked on the analysis, Glen P. Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, told The New York Times. “It needs to be all hands on deck now.”
A few days after the figures were released, world leaders met in New York to discuss how to deal with the results of this enormous carbon dump. Ban Ki-Moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, had convened the summit to “catalyze climate action” and had asked the leaders to “bring bold announcements.” Once again, the news wasn’t good. It almost never is.
“There is a huge mismatch between the magnitude of the challenge and the response we heard here today,” Graça Machel, Nelson Mandela’s widow, told the summit in the final speech of the gathering. “The scale is much more than we have achieved.” This mismatch, which grows ever more disproportionate year after year, summit after summit, raises questions both about our future and about our character. What explains our collective failure on climate change? Why is it that instead of dealing with the problem, all we seem to do is make it worse?
These questions lie at the center of Naomi Klein’s ambitious new polemic, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. “What is wrong with us?” Klein asks near the start of the book. Her answer turns upside-down the narrative that the country’s largest environmental groups have been telling.
According to these groups, climate change is a problem that can be tackled without major disruption to the status quo. All that’s needed are some smart policy changes. These will create new job opportunities; the economy will continue to grow; and Americans will be, both ecologically and financially, better off. Standing in the way of progress, so this account continues, is a vociferous minority of Tea Party–backed, Koch brothers–financed climate change deniers. Former president Jimmy Carter recently summed up this line of thinking when he told an audience in Aspen: “I would say the biggest handicap we have right now is some nutcases in our country who don’t believe in global warming.”
Klein doesn’t just disagree with Carter; she sees this line of thinking as a big part of the problem. Climate change can’t be solved within the confines of the status quo, because it’s a product of the status quo... (continues)==Speaking with: Naomi Klein on capitalism and climate change - audio
Happy birthday to Henry David Thoreau! His groundbreaking book Walden, first published in 1854, continues to influence generations of readers and inspire anyone with an open mind and a love of nature. His writings about a simpler life attuned with the natural world are more relevant than ever for the new millennium. As environmentalist Bill McKibben points out here in his introduction to Walden, our propensity for rampant consumerism has a direct impact on our environment. Now, more than ever, Thoreau’s philosophy can serve as a guide not only for climate justice, but also for a more balanced lifestyle.
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The hawk sat on a limb three feet above my head and did not stir as I walked under—that was the first sign.
I’d been off hiking for about a week, a long solo backpack through my home mountains, the Adirondacks of upstate New York. The first few days out I might as well have been back in my room—I strode purposefully along the trail, eyes fixed on focusless middle-distance that you stare at when you drive. My mind chattered happily away—my own little CNN delivering an around-the-clock broadcast of ideas, plans, opinions: What was I going to work on next? Who would win the presidential election? What were some neat things I could buy? My mind was buzzing, following all its usual tracks though I was deep in the woods.
The days wore on. The imposed input lessened—no radio, no paper, no conversation. I could feel the chatter in my head begin to subside. Either the peace of the forest was beginning to penetrate, or the stocks of mental junk food were starting to dwindle; whatever the cause, the buzz turned to hum, and once in a while to quiet.
And so I was not completely surprised when the hawk kept his perch, or a few minutes later when I passed a pair of grazing deer and they merely looked up a moment, didn’t spook. I was still wearing the rustling fluorescent uniform of the modern hiker, but I’d begun, perhaps, to give off fewer, calmer vibrations.
I’d been walking through rain for days; it had long since penetrated my Gore-Tex hide, and so that afternoon when the sun finally came out I made an early camp by the lake. I hung out my clothes in the branches to warm; held my white and wrinkled feet up to the sky to toast; unfolded in the lovely heat like a snake on a stone. Soon a band of merganser chicks, trailing their mother, circled the small cove by which I lay, paying no attention to me. My aura of invisibility lasted all day, soothing one creature after another, until I was feeling part creature myself. Naked, hidden by the fringe of birch leaves, I watched canoeists paddle chattily by, and they seemed nearly to belong to another race. That night I was aware of every second of the endless sunset: the first long rays of the sun as the afternoon turned late, the long twilight, the turn of the sky from blue to blue to blue to—just as it turned black, a heron came stalking through my cove, standing silently and then spearing with a sudden spasm; I couldn’t see her, not really, but I knew where she was. The sky darkened, the stars in this dark place spread across the sky bright and insistent. We were unimaginably small, this heron and I, and extremely right.
I tell this memory—one of my happiest—as a way of plunging into that great sea called Walden. Understanding the whole of this book is a hopeless task. Its writing resembles nothing so much as Scripture; ideas are condensed to epigrams, four or five to a paragraph. Its magic density yields dozens of different readings—psychological, spiritual, literary, political, cultural. To my mind, though, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is most crucial to read Walden as a practical environmentalist’s volume, and to search for Thoreau’s heirs among those trying to change our relation to the planet. We need to understand that when Thoreau sat in the dooryard of his cabin “from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house,” he was offering counsel and example exactly suited for our perilous moment in time... (continues)
