The news I see on climate change, specifically global warming, is consistently bad. It always seems to come in in the “worse than expected” category. The information typically is presented as a range of possibilities, but we never see the range improve. What this means is that we regularly learn that we have less time than we hoped to solve the problem and we’re quickly approaching the point where the problem can no longer be solved.
The following is typical of the kind of gut punch I’ve grown accustomed to:
“We had had some hopes that, with last year’s COVID scenario, perhaps the lack of travel [and] the lack of industry might act as a little bit of a brake,” [Randall] Cerveny, [ a climate scientist at Arizona State University] says. “But what we’re seeing is, frankly, it has not.”
Yeah, even a year hunkered down in quarantine wasn’t enough to buck the trend of bad news on climate. Truthfully, it’s probably too early to know if lower emissions in 2020 helped in any way, but I suspect that tinkering around the edges will be no substitute for thoroughly rethinking how we power and organize the world.
I get pissed off when I watch a Dutch court order Shell to show more haste in cutting its carbon emissions only to see Shell appeal the decision. I’m glad that ExxonMobil just suffered the indignity of having two climate activists thrust onto their board of directors. That seems like a great way of dealing with these bastards’ greedy intransigence. Maybe it’s a sign of things to come.
We can’t just wait around hoping something will change. Things will change, but not for the better. So, anyone who comes up with a novel idea for prodding us out of our complacency is going to get my applause and appreciation.
There is a post on yesterday’s Balloon Juice that interpreted these developments and the EV market as a turning point. 10-15 years ago I would have agreed. But I don’t see the world coming together on climate change as it did for the ozone hole. It’s geoengineering or nothing now.
Adapting something I wrote and shared with some co-workers about climate change a couple of weeks ago.
It seems like we’ve been talking around this problem for a long time. James Burke did a fantastic special about this back in 1989 called After the Warming (part1, part2) and in some ways Connections is also about this if you think about some of its conclusions (Ep 10 Yesterday, Tomorrow and You). The pandemic seems to have exposed some serious fractures in our ability to act collectively (though maybe they’ve never been that good to begin with) but also showed that our rapid pace of technological change may be sitting on solutions that haven’t been able to gain traction because free markets aren’t magic. I guess I still have some faith that we’ll be able to weather global climate change through technological innovation but I also feel like my choice of career (software engineer working in games/games adjacent fields) hasn’t necessarily been driving towards that goal. The obvious long term solution is some kind of hand waving about:
And it’s at this point where I generally throw up my hands, realize this problem requires government scale collective action and go back to work. 🙂
A co-worker pointed out that I didn’t really talk about food in the above bits which got me thinking about that as well.
Food is a challenging problem as well. I like food, and a wide variety of it. And I’m not a vegetarian. So my impacts here are probably larger than they should be. I’m hopeful that things like warehouse vegetable growing (Plenty) or lab grown meat will turn food production into a subset of the energy problem in the long run, but in the short run I’m honestly not sure what we can do. Our mechanized petroleum fueled farm productivity has been great in allowing a smaller percentage of the world to be involved in food production (and to some degree this is the basis of modern society… see Connections Ep 1 The Trigger Effect). But that approach is just really hard on the planet in terms of water usage and things of that nature. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to turn essentially a place with a desert climate (CA central valley) into one of the major agricultural producers of the world? So there are all these challenges of available arable land, water availability (especially in the face of climate change induced droughts), distribution costs (fuel, time (leading to compromises on the type/quality of foods), and economic impact because running a large mechanized farm is expensive and thus hard do get into and if you aren’t producing things that way at scale you need to sell into a more niche market which the vast majority of the world can’t afford. Food also quickly gets you into questions of global economic equity which is a whole other problem.
It’s been a really long time since I read it so might be misremembering things but Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point, talking about how the reductionist paradigm of problem solving isn’t doing a good job solving our problems anymore and we need to switch to a more holistic/system theory approach to solving problems. Unfortunately I think we’re still stuck in advanced capitalism for the moment:
– Haruki Murakami Dance, Dance, Dance
I’m not a doomsdayer, but, uh…
The next 30 years are already baked into the cake. Ain’t nothing can reverse time to prevent it.
Maybe luck or engineering, or a little of both.
The Great Filter.
Short of a technological solution, I think we’re fucked. If it easy, we can’t mobilize to solve problems anymore. Not even when our lives depend on it. That’s how civilizations often end.
I watched one of those old document shows on WW 1 last night and saw once again the would be heroes headed to war and cheering all the way to their death in the trenches. The world has not been the same since. And then there was 1/6 and the millions of people who have no doubt Trump won the election and were out to prove it. We- humans- are preprogrammed for this baloney. No way to avoid it. It is sad and it is tragic. What now?
There was some recent work suggesting that if we stop burning fossil fuels, CO2 levels can drop relatively quickly–at least initially. But we do have to stop emitting, well, now.