[D66] What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?

[A.OUT]

On 08-09-19 18:56, A.OUT wrote:
> What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?
> By
> Jonathan Franzen
> newyorker.com
> 12 min
> View Original
> 
> “There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a
> fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for
> ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to
> get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening
> world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no
> hope, except for us.
> 
> I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in
> global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the
> feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and
> despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward
> reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If
> you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the
> radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures,
> apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of
> millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat
> or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed
> to witness it.
> 
> If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live
> on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping
> that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or
> enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is
> coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.
> 
> Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to
> abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to
> “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate
> change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this
> message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully
> clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years
> as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts
> have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.
> 
> Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact
> that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future.
> Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the
> reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus
> on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still
> basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new
> comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my
> mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or
> thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying:
> one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever.
> Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of
> increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization
> begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and
> maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.
> 
> Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican
> Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is
> entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric.
> The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial
> proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to
> avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan
> renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those
> proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply
> that there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the
> left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed
> allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone
> seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically.
> 
> Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate
> change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of
> control. The consensus among scientists and policy-makers is that we’ll
> pass this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by
> more than two degrees Celsius (maybe a little more, but also maybe a
> little less). The I.P.C.C.—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
> Change—tells us that, to limit the rise to less than two degrees, we not
> only need to reverse the trend of the past three decades. We need to
> approach zero net emissions, globally, in the next three decades.
> 
> This is, to say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust
> the I.P.C.C.’s calculations. New research, described last month in
> Scientific American, demonstrates that climate scientists, far from
> exaggerating the threat of climate change, have underestimated its pace
> and severity. To project the rise in the global mean temperature,
> scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They take a host
> of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say, ten
> thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make
> a “best” prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist
> predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number
> about which she’s very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees.
> The rise might, in fact, be far higher.
> 
> As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future
> scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology
> and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy
> consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy
> have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios
> in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I
> draw from the prescriptions of policy-makers and activists, share
> certain necessary conditions.
> 
> The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting
> countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of
> its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its
> economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions
> from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal
> lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further
> gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold
> of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new
> energy and transportation projects already planned or under
> construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention
> needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country.
> Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep
> pumping oil and driving pickup trucks.
> 
> The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast
> sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without
> lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke
> of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the
> deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American
> subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn
> farmers.
> 
> Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of
> government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe
> curtailment of their familiar lifestyles without revolting. They must
> accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme
> measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as
> fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial
> resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations
> and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by
> hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just
> getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast,
> they have to think about death.
> 
> Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature
> fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios
> through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target
> being met.
> 
> To judge from recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of
> Americans (many of them Republican) are pessimistic about the planet’s
> future, and from the success of a book like David Wallace-Wells’s
> harrowing “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was released this year, I’m
> not alone in having reached this conclusion. But there continues to be a
> reluctance to broadcast it. Some climate activists argue that if we
> publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage
> people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not
> only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little
> progress we have to show for it to date. The activists who make it
> remind me of the religious leaders who fear that, without the promise of
> eternal salvation, people won’t bother to behave well. In my experience,
> nonbelievers are no less loving of their neighbors than believers. And
> so I wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told
> ourselves the truth.
> 
> First of all, even if we can no longer hope to be saved from two degrees
> of warming, there’s still a strong practical and ethical case for
> reducing carbon emissions. In the long run, it probably makes no
> difference how badly we overshoot two degrees; once the point of no
> return is passed, the world will become self-transforming. In the
> shorter term, however, half measures are better than no measures.
> Halfway cutting our emissions would make the immediate effects of
> warming somewhat less severe, and it would somewhat postpone the point
> of no return. The most terrifying thing about climate change is the
> speed at which it’s advancing, the almost monthly shattering of
> temperature records. If collective action resulted in just one fewer
> devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it
> would be a goal worth pursuing.
> 
> In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To
> fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are
> available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very
> well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions
> of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn’t mean
> that they’re meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make.
> During the Protestant Reformation, when “end times” was merely an idea,
> not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question
> was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into
> Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they’re
> good—because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world
> would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet,
> and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that
> it will save me.
> 
> More than that, a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful. If
> you persist in believing that catastrophe can be averted, you commit
> yourself to tackling a problem so immense that it needs to be everyone’s
> overriding priority forever. One result, weirdly, is a kind of
> complacency: by voting for green candidates, riding a bicycle to work,
> avoiding air travel, you might feel that you’ve done everything you can
> for the only thing worth doing. Whereas, if you accept the reality that
> the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening civilization,
> there’s a whole lot more you should be doing.
> 
> Our resources aren’t infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a
> longest-shot gamble, reducing carbon emissions in the hope that it will
> save us, it’s unwise to invest all of them. Every billion dollars spent
> on high-speed trains, which may or may not be suitable for North
> America, is a billion not banked for disaster preparedness, reparations
> to inundated countries, or future humanitarian relief. Every
> renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living ecosystem—the
> “green” energy development now occurring in Kenya’s national parks, the
> giant hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar farms
> in open spaces, rather than in settled areas—erodes the resilience of a
> natural world already fighting for its life. Soil and water depletion,
> overuse of pesticides, the devastation of world fisheries—collective
> will is needed for these problems, too, and, unlike the problem of
> carbon, they’re within our power to solve. As a bonus, many low-tech
> conservation actions (restoring forests, preserving grasslands, eating
> less meat) can reduce our carbon footprint as effectively as massive
> industrial changes.
> 
> All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was
> winnable. Once you accept that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take
> on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a
> directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the
> urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing
> chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than
> in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia
> is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems,
> functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more
> just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate
> action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme
> wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines
> on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration
> policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for
> laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press,
> ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate
> actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the
> natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and
> healthy as we can make it.
> 
> And then there’s the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends
> on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now,
> when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the
> planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I
> might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them
> longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the
> constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to
> come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles
> that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing
> for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love
> specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s
> in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do
> now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really
> meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something
> to love, you have something to hope for.
> 
> In Santa Cruz, where I live, there’s an organization called the Homeless
> Garden Project. On a small working farm at the west end of town, it
> offers employment, training, support, and a sense of community to
> members of the city’s homeless population. It can’t “solve” the problem
> of homelessness, but it’s been changing lives, one at a time, for nearly
> thirty years. Supporting itself in part by selling organic produce, it
> contributes more broadly to a revolution in how we think about people in
> need, the land we depend on, and the natural world around us. In the
> summer, as a member of its C.S.A. program, I enjoy its kale and
> strawberries, and in the fall, because the soil is alive and
> uncontaminated, small migratory birds find sustenance in its furrows.
> 
> There may come a time, sooner than any of us likes to think, when the
> systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down and
> homeless people outnumber people with homes. At that point, traditional
> local farming and strong communities will no longer just be liberal
> buzzwords. Kindness to neighbors and respect for the land—nurturing
> healthy soil, wisely managing water, caring for pollinators—will be
> essential in a crisis and in whatever society survives it. A project
> like the Homeless Garden offers me the hope that the future, while
> undoubtedly worse than the present, might also, in some ways, be better.
> Most of all, though, it gives me hope for today.
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