[D66] Combidoom: The end of the world as we know it - Bill Mckibben

[R.O.]

Meer doom helaas... kunnen we dit jaar niet alvast afsluiten?

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/

The end of the world as we know it
Covid-19 and climate change
By bill mckibben
Enrique Shore/Alamy
July 31, 2020
Read this issue
Climate crisisCoronavirus

Across much of Europe, people have begun to breathe a sigh of relief as 
this summer wears on. In countries such as Italy, hard hit by 
coronavirus, life is slowly returning to something that looks a little 
like normal. They did the work – locked down, paid the price – and now 
they have the luxury of looking across the Atlantic and shaking their 
heads, while they venture out for a drink, or even a vacation.

So it feels almost unfair to say: 2020 is just a dry run. There is going 
to be nothing normal anywhere about the rest of this century. If the 
scientific consensus is even close to correct about global warming – and 
so far the scientists have underestimated its effects at every turn – we 
can look forward to a continual, and accelerating, series of crises that 
will knock us off balance again and again. Sometimes the damage will be 
localized: a hurricane that puts a particular city underwater. But 
increasingly the carnage will be global, just like the pandemic, and its 
effects will multiply. As this spring came to an end, India was 
struggling with Covid-19, like almost everywhere else, but it was also 
dealing with a savage heatwave that took temperatures in Delhi past 48°C 
– and this in a city where many people in non-air-conditioned homes 
couldn’t even open their windows for fear of mosquitoes carrying dengue 
fever, a disease that has already expanded its range dramatically as the 
planet has warmed. In May the south of the country weathered the 
strongest cyclone ever measured in the Bay of Bengal. Meanwhile, in 
early June, a plague of locusts descended across the subcontinent and 
East Africa – a plague triggered by climate-related shifts in rainfall – 
devastating crops and leaving tens of millions facing famine.

These sorts of increasingly commonplace events are happening in a world 
where the global temperature has gone up, on average, around 1°C. At the 
moment, we’re on a trajectory – even if every nation keeps to its 
pledges made in the Paris Agreement – to warm the world at least 3.5°C. 
(The preamble to the accord promised that we’d try to keep temperature 
increases well below 2°C, but the actual commitments that countries made 
told a different story.) Mark Lynas’s new book, Our Final Warning 
(2020), gives us the latest research on time frames: we could see 2°C by 
the 2030s, 3°C by the mid-century and 4°C by 2075. These temperatures 
would create a world totally unlike the one we have known. You’d have to 
go back aeons before our species emerged to have anything comparable. So 
our job, sadly, is not to get back to normal. It is to use the 
abnormality of this moment to try to prepare as best we can – 
practically and emotionally – for the even more disruptive time ahead; 
to prepare in the hope that we can prevent some of it and endure the rest.

Perhaps it is useful to catalogue a few of the lessons these past 
extraordinary months should be teaching us. One is that we live on a 
planet with real physical rules. When you have spent a couple of 
generations (as most Westerners now have) in a world where water comes 
from a tap and food from a store, it is excusable to take the actual 
world for granted. And when you’ve spent the past generation staring 
into a screen where everything is editable and manipulable, it can 
become difficult to take reality very seriously. But the physical world 
is not a backdrop. We can try to wish away physics and chemistry (which 
is what climate deniers have been doing for years), we can try to wish 
away biology (Donald Trump has attempted to do both). But science isn’t 
interested.

A key rule of physical reality is that it moves at its speed, not yours. 
Even political leaders who care about things such as climate change 
routinely insist that they can only go so fast. In his final year in 
office, Barack Obama said that, although he considered climate change to 
be humanity’s greatest problem, “unfortunately, in a democracy, I may 
have to zig and zag occasionally, and take into account very real 
concerns and interests”. His point was as obvious as it is true – 
political reality matters too. In this case, the “very real interests” 
were the oil and gas companies, and during the course of his two terms 
they dramatically ramped up production, taking the US past Russia and 
Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest source of hydrocarbons. (And 
perhaps Obama was less eaten up by this than he’d implied. Last year, to 
a cheering audience in Texas, he boasted: “it went up every year I was 
president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer 
and the biggest gas, that was me, people … say thank you”.) But science 
isn’t interested in political reality either. Climate policy – and 
Covid-19 policy – isn’t like welfare policy or housing policy. When 
actual physical forces are at stake, caution and compromise are your 
enemy, not your friend.

The current pandemic is the greatest example of this maxim that we have 
seen in our lifetimes. A few places seized immediately on the fight – 
some Asian nations, in particular, and in part because of their 
traumatic experience of SARS. The US, by contrast, got its first 
official case in January, and then wasted February doing nothing at all, 
by which point it not only had to disrupt daily life far more 
profoundly, but also had a mounting pile of dead bodies on its hands. So 
here’s the climate equivalent: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change told us in 2018 that if we as a planet don’t cut emissions in 
half by 2030 then our chances of meeting the Paris temperature targets 
will be slim to none. Before the current crisis hit, the global response 
to this was to burn more carbon than ever before. Now we have a chance. 
If our political system can internalize these two lessons – that reality 
sets its own terms and that speed matters – then we may be able to 
combat climate change. We won’t head it off (that ship has long since 
motored noisily away), but we might peg back the ultimate rise in 
temperature to a place where it merely besieges, rather than overwhelms, 
modernity.

To imagine what dealing with climate change might look like in practice, 
let us begin with one of the obvious features of our new viral world: 
lots and lots of unemployment. In my own country, the United States, 
more people are currently out of work than at any time since the Great 
Depression. In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt figured out how to give 
people jobs in response to this: Americans were requisitioned to erect 
everything from libraries to roads and dams, producing a national 
infrastructure that remains crucial to this day. Now let us consider 
what task we might have at this moment to soak up large quantities of 
labour. The most obvious candidate – by far – is the work of remaking 
our energy system. We need, for instance, to retrofit tens of millions 
of buildings around the world. They have to be far more efficient, and 
the solution to this is already with us: the air source heat pump, which 
transfers heat from outside to inside a contained space, and vice versa. 
We need to build the infrastructure that will let us use muscle power or 
electricity, not petrol, to transport ourselves and our goods: bike 
paths, car chargers, bus rapid transit. We need to turn our soils into 
sponges for carbon, which will mean new cropping techniques (and new 
eating patterns). And we need to replace power plants fired by coal and 
gas with power from sun and wind.

This list was also true a decade ago, after our previous financial 
crisis. But one thing has changed since then: the cost of all these 
technologies has plummeted. Solar power costs a tenth of what it did a 
decade ago. Back then, we barely had utility-scale storage batteries; 
now they’re massive and becoming ever cheaper to produce. Air source 
heat pumps will require an initial upfront expenditure for installation 
– which is why it’s good that there is a seemingly endless amount of 
low-cost capital to put to work. But it’s the best kind of investment 
because, once you’ve got it up and running, it essentially prints money 
for you. The point about renewables is that they’re renewable – for 
free. And this is precisely why the fossil fuel industry has fought so 
hard to keep them at bay.

The other important change is that the fossil fuel industry is less 
powerful than it was a decade ago. Partly that weakness stems from the 
rising utility, and availability, of these new technologies. It is also, 
however, the result of activists’ carefully having targeted the industry 
over the past decade, particularly through the fossil fuel divestment 
campaign that by some margin is the largest anti-corporate effort of its 
kind in history. I’ve been involved in it from the start – we’re now at 
$14 trillion in endowments and portfolios that have signed on; the 
biggest recent win came on the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, on 
April 22, when Oxford University announced that it was selling its 
fossil fuel shares. This activism – and the great investigative 
reporting that has made it clear that these companies knew all about 
global warming back in the late 1970s and 80s, and covered it up – have 
left a stricken industry. Here is America’s leading stock guru, Jim 
Cramer, speaking to his vast television audience back in January, before 
most of us were even thinking about Covid-19: fossil fuel shares, he 
said, were facing a “death knell … they’re just done. We’re starting to 
see divestment all over the world”. Before the winter was out, the asset 
manager Blackrock – the largest box of money on the planet – announced 
that it was changing its investment policies to deal with climate 
change. “Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge 
of a fundamental reshaping of finance”, Blackrock’s CEO Larry Fink wrote 
in his annual letter. “The evidence on climate risk is compelling 
investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.” Even the 
oil companies themselves, particularly in Europe, were already beginning 
to make promises about “net-zero emissions” by 2050 – which sounds 
better than it is but would still have been unthinkable even two years ago.

Now the pandemic is with us, and it is operating like an x-ray, exposing 
these shifts in power more clearly. And it is also accelerating the 
trends that were already under way. In the first few weeks of lockdown, 
our use of energy dropped fast and, since the price of oil is highly 
marginal, that dropped even faster – in fact, there were days in early 
March when, owing to its storage costs, it carried a negative price. 
This shook the oil companies and their investors anew – fossil fuel 
industry shares fell 40 per cent over the first four months of 2020, 
while renewable energy stocks actually rose by a couple of per cent. It 
seems likely that the trend will continue: analysts have begun to 
predict that 2019 will have been the year of peak oil demand on earth. 
And while our energy usage will pick up as, one hopes, the economy 
recovers, renewables are now cheap enough to cover most of that growth 
in demand.

But speed remains of the essence. And here the pandemic has also been 
instructive. For even with so many of us staying at home, emissions only 
dropped between 10 and 15 per cent. That is, we learnt, during this 
great and grim experiment, that we can largely shut down the airlines 
and keep most people relatively static without having a major impact on 
emissions. Even at the height of lockdown, fossil fuels powered the 
central systems of our lives: buildings, communications and agriculture. 
The carbon has kept pouring out and the records keep being broken. In 
May CO2 monitors on the side of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii recorded 
their annual high at about 418 parts per million, levels that haven’t 
been seen for many millions of years – and up more than two parts per 
million from the year before.

If we are going to make meaningful progress in the decade ahead, likely 
the last decade where we still have some real leverage, it is going to 
have to come with large-scale government-directed action to rewire our 
planet – back, that is, to something resembling the New Deal. It is 
heartening, then, that such plans were already on the table: in the US a 
Green New Deal has been winning increasing support for more than two 
years, becoming a significant part of the Democratic primary campaign. 
(Under Trump, of course, it’s an impossibility, but at the moment he is 
trailing in his re-election bid; and one reason is the unpopularity of 
his stands on the environment – it is the area where pollsters find his 
policies are least popular, even among his supporters.) There are 
European versions too – one seems likely to become a template for the 
continent’s recovery. The same goes for South Korea. With China it is 
too early to tell. But this is going to be the debate: do we use the 
reaction to the crisis we’re in to prepare for the one that’s coming, or 
do we just set up the pins in the bowling alley again?

In the end, I think, our progress will depend on whether we can learn a 
third lesson from our fight with the virus, and also from the equally 
important recent uprising against racial violence and police brutality. 
Reality is real, speed matters – and social solidarity is required. 
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher marked the big turn in Western 
political thinking last century with their belief that markets should be 
trusted to solve most problems, and their disdain for such things as 
society and government. (One of Reagan’s favourite gags was: “The nine 
scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and 
I’m here to help’”.) Over the years this kind of sentiment has broken 
down our societies into angry and polarized places. But Covid-19 has 
been a powerful reminder that, even if we don’t all suffer equally, we 
do all rise or fall together.

The pandemic has required good governance – admittedly, not always 
forthcoming – and it has been vital practice for the kind of solidarity 
we’re all going to require. We haven’t passed with flying colours – in 
the US especially there have been plenty of knuckleheads flouting 
regulations and refusing, on principle, to wear masks, for example. But 
lots of people have been prepared to take seriously their responsibility 
to others by staying at home. Indeed, it was probably a good sign how 
furious many in the UK became when Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, 
Dominic Cummings, broke quarantine and got away with it, because it 
implied that some kind of societal consensus still existed. It was even 
more inspiring to see Americans by their millions marching under the 
Black Lives Matter banner, declaring that it was time to see solidarity 
extend past the racial lines where it has broken down so reliably in the 
past (and heartening, too, to see that most marchers were wearing masks, 
unlike many police). The impending US election is a referendum on 
whether the country can move decisively past its history, and not only 
the sad racial heritage implied by all those Confederate statues. It 
will also be a referendum on the legacies of Reaganism, not to mention 
Trumpism, versus the need for a working polity. And if its citizens 
choose the latter then even the US might finally be able to get down to 
grappling with climate change, something that is essential to the world 
doing likewise.

But of course this solidarity is going to be needed for more than making 
the changes to prevent some of the warming ahead. It’s also going to be 
needed to endure the warming we can no longer prevent – to endure what 
will, in the very best case, be a rising tide of storm, fire and flood. 
The testing of our species has only just begun.

Bill McKibben is a contributing editor to the New Yorker and a founder 
of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org. His latest book is Falter: 
Has the human game begun to play itself out?, 2019