The other day, after I filled up my bottle with bulk olive oil at my local natural foods store and brought it up to the checkout, I got into a bit of conversation with the checker/buyer — when I sighed that I wished I could get the California olive oil in bulk, he asked "Oh — do you like the taste better?" I said no, I prefer not to get my food shipped from halfway across the planet. His reply was "Oh, that carbon footprint thing… I guess it's a matter of your priorities — for me it's all about the taste... I guess I'm part of the problem, huh?" I really couldn't think of a way to answer without being incredibly rude, but of course what I was thinking was "I have a hard time prioritizing slightly better-tasting olive oil over a habitable planet…"
Then two days ago, in an SF Chronicle article about siting huge wind and solar energy plants in pristine southern California deserts, a spokesman for the developer of one of the projects was quoted saying "Those who sincerely care about the birds and the wildlife know that climate change is their greatest threat… and if you want to mitigate climate change while keeping the lights on [my emphasis], responsibly sited wind and solar power is your best answer." Of course, we could never consider just turning off some of those lights! This attitude is so pervasive — we can't even think of changing the way we live, so we must pave over pristine deserts to build more "energy capacity" (however "renewable" it may be). If we were seriously sacrificing and paring down to just what is absolutely necessary to survive, then it might — just barely might — be defensible to think about building energy plants in the desert… But as long as we are using energy to power Las Vegas and pro sports night games (among many other quintessentially nonessential pursuits), even considering this should be beyond the pale. Unfortunately, in our society, this thinking is the norm — there is no greater good than keeping those lights on, keeping up our lifestyles... and preserving life on the planet just has to take a backseat.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Obama's climate speech
Well, I seem to have been pretty well MIA from this blog for the last couple of months — that's what comes of teaching (and dashing between) two schools while trying to look for a new position, I guess… Oh well, now that it's summer break, I should be able to catch up a bit — perhaps even throw some more details onto my big three issues (eating meat, flying, buying stuff)… And I figure that when the so-called leader of the free world finally gets around to recognizing the global warming emergency with more than just a couple of sentences in a state of the union speech, it's as good a time as any for me to jump back in (even if I'm already about a week late — I'm afraid I'm a pretty slow and painstaking writer).
By now I've read plenty of mainstream environmental organizations praising the speech for actually describing the problem in fairly accurate scientific terms, for dissing the deniers ("the Flat Earth Society") for shouting out the divestment movement (just by speaking the word "divest" exactly once)… And it's true that the opening and closing included some beautiful language about the crisis we face.
BUT… the President also boasted — three times (!) — about how we are producing more oil than ever ("produced more oil than we have in 15 years"… "even as we're producing more domestic oil"…), and more natural gas "than anybody else." I guess he at least knew better than to brag about producing coal… but in a speech ostensibly about the climate emergency, this is unconscionable.
He twice referenced that China has passed the US as the world's largest emitter, and made congratulatory mentions of how much the US has "reduced" emissions. Of course, saying that China is the world's largest emitter works only if you start with three givens: 1. you are counting total emissions, not emissions per capita; 2. you are counting the carbon being emitted right now, not cumulatively — even though it is cumulative emissions that matter to the climate (and by that standard, it will take China or anyone else a very long time to catch up); and (and this is the big one) 3. you are counting emissions from the production end, not the consumption end. A big proportion of China's emissions comes from manufacturing for the American market — they are burning all that coal just to make all the stuff that we incessantly shop for...in other words, a huge part of the reason we can boast that "no country on earth has reduced its total carbon pollution by as much as the United States of America" is that we have off-shored our emissions, right along with all those manufacturing jobs going to low-wage countries! Not exactly something to be proud of.
Another theme, revisited four times, was economic growth — "there's no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth." The growth economy is a huge topic that I will take up in another post, but this focus on growth, at the very least, betrays complete ignorance of the extent and scope of the problem. At worst, it betrays something more like indifference — a mindset that nothing (not even a habitable planet) is more important than a growth economy, keeping Wall Street happy while the common people (not to mention the natural world) are left to deal with the crisis the best we can…
As to the Climate Action Plan itself, it could be called a decent start (and could have actually been a decent start, 40 years ago) — but again, the tiny baby steps approach betrays either ignorance of or indifference to the urgency of the situation. The plan prominently recommits to cutting US emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 (which is only a 4% cut from 1990 levels). As a local columnist said, "Here's the bigger issue: Emitting less carbon dioxide isn't a solution to climate change. It beats increases, but by using fossil fuels at all, we're adding to rather than subtracting from the problem. It takes hundreds of years for CO2 to fully leave the atmosphere, and we're already at dangerously high levels." I can't say it better, but maybe a little shorter: the climate doesn't care how fast we put that carbon up in the atmosphere, it only cares about the total amount — so slowing down the rate at which we spew it out does nothing!
But the fatal flaw in the plan — the one which makes it not just too little too late, but actually worse than doing nothing — is its enthusiastic promotion of natural gas (especially fracked natural gas) as a "cleaner-burning" "transition" fuel. Even at best, natural gas is only marginally better than other fossil fuels, only serves to somewhat reduce emissions, when what's needed is to come as close as possible to getting off all fossil fuels, cold turkey, tomorrow… But because of methane leakage at the well, fracked natural gas is actually — please pardon me, but I do feel the need to shout here — WORSE THAN COAL! Methane doesn't hang around in the atmosphere as long as CO2, but over the first 20 years methane is 80 - 105 times more potent as a greenhouse gas (Obama's climate plan calls it 20 times more powerful, but that assumes a 100-year timeframe — and remember, we don't have 100 years!) This means that fracked natural gas is worse for the atmosphere than coal if those "fugitive emissions" are as low as 2%; and the most extensive and credible studies have found up to nearly 8% leakage (other studies have found as much as 17%). Yet this is what Obama is pushing as a way to "reduce our carbon emissions."
And even worse, the plan rests not only upon increasing natural gas production in the US (and exporting that oh-so-dirty fracked gas, which adds even more emissions for transport), but also pushing fracking technology on the rest of the world (through applying "private sector knowhow in countries that transition to natural gas"). This is truly a recipe for disaster… and yes, I am using "pushing" intentionally, because this is also a recipe for keeping the world addicted to fossil fuels — by avoiding any thought of more effective strategies like conservation, or even (perish the thought!) truly changing the way we live our lives...
The plan is at best mistaken — and at worst outright mendacious — on two fronts: first, that natural gas will reduce emissions; and second, that simply reducing emissions is in any way a solution to the emergency we face. I cannot imagine that the President's energy and environment advisors have not informed him about the climate impacts of fracked natural gas — so I'm afraid the only conclusion I can draw is that keeping our economy humming and our energy sector profitable is a higher priority to our leadership than preserving a habitable planet.
I cannot say that this speech was a disappointment, as I did not expect much to begin with; but did I find it to be amazingly frustrating, as the first part really was an eloquent statement of the effects of climate change — and then the rest proceeded to propose policies that will only serve to worsen those effects.
By now I've read plenty of mainstream environmental organizations praising the speech for actually describing the problem in fairly accurate scientific terms, for dissing the deniers ("the Flat Earth Society") for shouting out the divestment movement (just by speaking the word "divest" exactly once)… And it's true that the opening and closing included some beautiful language about the crisis we face.
BUT… the President also boasted — three times (!) — about how we are producing more oil than ever ("produced more oil than we have in 15 years"… "even as we're producing more domestic oil"…), and more natural gas "than anybody else." I guess he at least knew better than to brag about producing coal… but in a speech ostensibly about the climate emergency, this is unconscionable.
He twice referenced that China has passed the US as the world's largest emitter, and made congratulatory mentions of how much the US has "reduced" emissions. Of course, saying that China is the world's largest emitter works only if you start with three givens: 1. you are counting total emissions, not emissions per capita; 2. you are counting the carbon being emitted right now, not cumulatively — even though it is cumulative emissions that matter to the climate (and by that standard, it will take China or anyone else a very long time to catch up); and (and this is the big one) 3. you are counting emissions from the production end, not the consumption end. A big proportion of China's emissions comes from manufacturing for the American market — they are burning all that coal just to make all the stuff that we incessantly shop for...in other words, a huge part of the reason we can boast that "no country on earth has reduced its total carbon pollution by as much as the United States of America" is that we have off-shored our emissions, right along with all those manufacturing jobs going to low-wage countries! Not exactly something to be proud of.
Another theme, revisited four times, was economic growth — "there's no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth." The growth economy is a huge topic that I will take up in another post, but this focus on growth, at the very least, betrays complete ignorance of the extent and scope of the problem. At worst, it betrays something more like indifference — a mindset that nothing (not even a habitable planet) is more important than a growth economy, keeping Wall Street happy while the common people (not to mention the natural world) are left to deal with the crisis the best we can…
As to the Climate Action Plan itself, it could be called a decent start (and could have actually been a decent start, 40 years ago) — but again, the tiny baby steps approach betrays either ignorance of or indifference to the urgency of the situation. The plan prominently recommits to cutting US emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 (which is only a 4% cut from 1990 levels). As a local columnist said, "Here's the bigger issue: Emitting less carbon dioxide isn't a solution to climate change. It beats increases, but by using fossil fuels at all, we're adding to rather than subtracting from the problem. It takes hundreds of years for CO2 to fully leave the atmosphere, and we're already at dangerously high levels." I can't say it better, but maybe a little shorter: the climate doesn't care how fast we put that carbon up in the atmosphere, it only cares about the total amount — so slowing down the rate at which we spew it out does nothing!
But the fatal flaw in the plan — the one which makes it not just too little too late, but actually worse than doing nothing — is its enthusiastic promotion of natural gas (especially fracked natural gas) as a "cleaner-burning" "transition" fuel. Even at best, natural gas is only marginally better than other fossil fuels, only serves to somewhat reduce emissions, when what's needed is to come as close as possible to getting off all fossil fuels, cold turkey, tomorrow… But because of methane leakage at the well, fracked natural gas is actually — please pardon me, but I do feel the need to shout here — WORSE THAN COAL! Methane doesn't hang around in the atmosphere as long as CO2, but over the first 20 years methane is 80 - 105 times more potent as a greenhouse gas (Obama's climate plan calls it 20 times more powerful, but that assumes a 100-year timeframe — and remember, we don't have 100 years!) This means that fracked natural gas is worse for the atmosphere than coal if those "fugitive emissions" are as low as 2%; and the most extensive and credible studies have found up to nearly 8% leakage (other studies have found as much as 17%). Yet this is what Obama is pushing as a way to "reduce our carbon emissions."
And even worse, the plan rests not only upon increasing natural gas production in the US (and exporting that oh-so-dirty fracked gas, which adds even more emissions for transport), but also pushing fracking technology on the rest of the world (through applying "private sector knowhow in countries that transition to natural gas"). This is truly a recipe for disaster… and yes, I am using "pushing" intentionally, because this is also a recipe for keeping the world addicted to fossil fuels — by avoiding any thought of more effective strategies like conservation, or even (perish the thought!) truly changing the way we live our lives...
The plan is at best mistaken — and at worst outright mendacious — on two fronts: first, that natural gas will reduce emissions; and second, that simply reducing emissions is in any way a solution to the emergency we face. I cannot imagine that the President's energy and environment advisors have not informed him about the climate impacts of fracked natural gas — so I'm afraid the only conclusion I can draw is that keeping our economy humming and our energy sector profitable is a higher priority to our leadership than preserving a habitable planet.
I cannot say that this speech was a disappointment, as I did not expect much to begin with; but did I find it to be amazingly frustrating, as the first part really was an eloquent statement of the effects of climate change — and then the rest proceeded to propose policies that will only serve to worsen those effects.
Friday, May 10, 2013
"moral authority" and personal choices
I've been thinking more about one of those dichotomies I wrote about a little while back (aaargh! Has it really been over a month since the last time I wrote here?? There's so much I want to write about, and so little time… sigh… a lot, I'm afraid, will wait until summer break) — personal consumption vs. systemic change. Of course, as far as I'm concerned there is no real dichotomy, we absolutely need both — the climate emergency is so urgent we need everything we can do, as fast as we can do it — but there is another aspect to this one, and that is carrying the moral authority to even advocate for changing the systems we live under… or, in other words, simply not opening oneself up to being seen as a hypocrite.
It occurred to me that this is something those in the animal rights community take for granted. Imagine the sneers if animal activists showed up at demonstrations wearing leather shoes and munching cheeseburgers — but it doesn't happen because I have never met any animal rights folks who were not committed ethical vegans (and yes, that does mean eschewing all animal products, including leather and wool). Of course animal activists' main concern is that they do not themselves cause any unnecessary suffering if they can possibly help it (even though individual actions are trivial in the face of the massive suffering of billions of animals); but avoiding hypocrisy is also important to any political movement.
On a similar note, after a recent anti-Keystone XL protest in San Francisco, someone wrote a letter to the Chronicle decrying the protesters for hypocrisy, as (he said) he watched them get into their gasoline-powered cars and drive away… Now this is pretty hard to believe in any case — if you know anything about the parking situation around SF's civic center, you know it would be well-nigh impossible to follow more than one or two people back to a parking spaces (which would be blocks away in various directions), and anyone coming to protest would have been crazy not to simply hop on BART (so much easier for getting to that part of town, even if principles were not an issue). But still these stories crop up, because the opposition is so intent on finding hypocrisy…
… So why let them? Granted, one person's consumption choices are not going to by themselves save the planet; and granted, no one is perfect (certainly not me)… But while we advocate for the end of industrial capitalism, or whatever systemic change might actually have a chance of making a difference, we need to do the absolute best we can to carry that moral authority in ourselves, to walk our talk. Of course, this is nuanced — while it is possible (though difficult) to completely avoid animal products, it is nearly impossible to live in today's society without burning some fossil fuels. But we can certainly try to at least stop doing the big things: eating meat, flying on airplanes, just being part of the consumer culture. Take a hint from the animal rights folks — you can't effectively protest at the slaughterhouse wearing leather shoes and munching cheeseburgers, and you can't effectively protest the fossil fuel industry by using their products (and that does mean flying cross-country to the protest — and munching cheeseburgers, even artisan, grass-fed ones). And it is incumbent on all of us to do as much as we can to avoid causing suffering by our actions, whether that means being an ethical vegan to avoid causing animal cruelty, or not buying any new stuff because it might, just might, help avoid the extinction of one little species somewhere down the line...
It occurred to me that this is something those in the animal rights community take for granted. Imagine the sneers if animal activists showed up at demonstrations wearing leather shoes and munching cheeseburgers — but it doesn't happen because I have never met any animal rights folks who were not committed ethical vegans (and yes, that does mean eschewing all animal products, including leather and wool). Of course animal activists' main concern is that they do not themselves cause any unnecessary suffering if they can possibly help it (even though individual actions are trivial in the face of the massive suffering of billions of animals); but avoiding hypocrisy is also important to any political movement.
On a similar note, after a recent anti-Keystone XL protest in San Francisco, someone wrote a letter to the Chronicle decrying the protesters for hypocrisy, as (he said) he watched them get into their gasoline-powered cars and drive away… Now this is pretty hard to believe in any case — if you know anything about the parking situation around SF's civic center, you know it would be well-nigh impossible to follow more than one or two people back to a parking spaces (which would be blocks away in various directions), and anyone coming to protest would have been crazy not to simply hop on BART (so much easier for getting to that part of town, even if principles were not an issue). But still these stories crop up, because the opposition is so intent on finding hypocrisy…
… So why let them? Granted, one person's consumption choices are not going to by themselves save the planet; and granted, no one is perfect (certainly not me)… But while we advocate for the end of industrial capitalism, or whatever systemic change might actually have a chance of making a difference, we need to do the absolute best we can to carry that moral authority in ourselves, to walk our talk. Of course, this is nuanced — while it is possible (though difficult) to completely avoid animal products, it is nearly impossible to live in today's society without burning some fossil fuels. But we can certainly try to at least stop doing the big things: eating meat, flying on airplanes, just being part of the consumer culture. Take a hint from the animal rights folks — you can't effectively protest at the slaughterhouse wearing leather shoes and munching cheeseburgers, and you can't effectively protest the fossil fuel industry by using their products (and that does mean flying cross-country to the protest — and munching cheeseburgers, even artisan, grass-fed ones). And it is incumbent on all of us to do as much as we can to avoid causing suffering by our actions, whether that means being an ethical vegan to avoid causing animal cruelty, or not buying any new stuff because it might, just might, help avoid the extinction of one little species somewhere down the line...
Sunday, April 7, 2013
"de-extinction"
Yesterday there was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about researchers involved in some gee-whiz "de-extinction" experiments to clone long- (or not-so-long)-lost species. It mentioned, in breathless terms, that "the possibility of billions of passenger pigeons once again clouding city skies or the sound of thunder from the hooves of woolly mammoths trampling the Arctic's tundra may be speculation no more."
Gosh — I can hardly wait for the spectacle of "woolly mammoths trampling the Arctic tundra" — only to see it melt away beneath their feet! Or perhaps they might share the fate of the gray wolf and other recently "de-listed" species, shot at will as soon as their numbers barely rise above the threshold for endangered status.
Stewart Brand (referred to as "'environmental visionary' Stewart Brand") appears to be pushing this idea through his Long Now Foundation. In the article, he is quoted crowing that "re-wilding is storming ahead everywhere." This idea is not "re-wilding" — according to The Rewilding Institute, rewilding involves "restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators.” The features needed for true rewilding are large, strictly protected core reserves; connections between reserves so that animals are able to travel; and, most importantly, the reintroduction and recovery of keystone carnivorous species. None of this is fulfilled in any way by cloning a few extinct animals — to quote cinematographer Lois Crisler, who spent years filming wolves in the Arctic, "animals without wilderness are a closed book.”
This is rather the ultimate vanity project, designed to assuage our consciences for wiping so many species from the face of the earth (It's okay! Look — we can bring them back!) It is the same sort of thinking that justifies keeping endangered species captive in zoos, to "preserve" the species as their habitats disappear — it certainly does those individual animals no good to be held behind bars, but we don't like to think we've destroyed another species so we keep the last few "specimens" breeding in cages for eternity. The article mentioned one recently extinct species, the bucardo or Pyrenian ibex, as being "very close to 'de-extinction' even now" as "many implantations" resulted in the birth of a "living bucardo clone" — which died ten minutes after birth! Again, cloning animals so feeble as to survive just for a short time does no good for those individual animals, and serves only to make us feel a little less monstrous.
Meanwhile, we are busily driving more species into extinction at the rate of one every five minutes, as we slaughter them for bling, exterminate them to keep them away from our endless herds of livestock, or pave over their habitats in our insatiable need for more space for our ever-increasing billions. Before we in our arrogance start to clone sickly versions of species we have exterminated, I think we would do better to figure out how to stop annihilating those that still manage to survive.
Gosh — I can hardly wait for the spectacle of "woolly mammoths trampling the Arctic tundra" — only to see it melt away beneath their feet! Or perhaps they might share the fate of the gray wolf and other recently "de-listed" species, shot at will as soon as their numbers barely rise above the threshold for endangered status.
Stewart Brand (referred to as "'environmental visionary' Stewart Brand") appears to be pushing this idea through his Long Now Foundation. In the article, he is quoted crowing that "re-wilding is storming ahead everywhere." This idea is not "re-wilding" — according to The Rewilding Institute, rewilding involves "restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators.” The features needed for true rewilding are large, strictly protected core reserves; connections between reserves so that animals are able to travel; and, most importantly, the reintroduction and recovery of keystone carnivorous species. None of this is fulfilled in any way by cloning a few extinct animals — to quote cinematographer Lois Crisler, who spent years filming wolves in the Arctic, "animals without wilderness are a closed book.”
This is rather the ultimate vanity project, designed to assuage our consciences for wiping so many species from the face of the earth (It's okay! Look — we can bring them back!) It is the same sort of thinking that justifies keeping endangered species captive in zoos, to "preserve" the species as their habitats disappear — it certainly does those individual animals no good to be held behind bars, but we don't like to think we've destroyed another species so we keep the last few "specimens" breeding in cages for eternity. The article mentioned one recently extinct species, the bucardo or Pyrenian ibex, as being "very close to 'de-extinction' even now" as "many implantations" resulted in the birth of a "living bucardo clone" — which died ten minutes after birth! Again, cloning animals so feeble as to survive just for a short time does no good for those individual animals, and serves only to make us feel a little less monstrous.
Meanwhile, we are busily driving more species into extinction at the rate of one every five minutes, as we slaughter them for bling, exterminate them to keep them away from our endless herds of livestock, or pave over their habitats in our insatiable need for more space for our ever-increasing billions. Before we in our arrogance start to clone sickly versions of species we have exterminated, I think we would do better to figure out how to stop annihilating those that still manage to survive.
Monday, April 1, 2013
the urgency of the problem — either / or vs. both / and
In some of the online forums I peruse from time to time, there is often a lot of "either/or" talk — endless arguments about which of two problems (or solutions) is most pressing, important, necessary, possible…
Population versus consumption is a frequent theme; also renewables versus consumption — that is, whether renewables can supply all of our energy "needs" or whether we need to reduce consumption; a third common dichotomy is systemic change versus personal consumption — "the problem is capitalism… industrial civilization… big oil… big coal… the corporations… the military-industrial complex…"
What all of these "either/or" arguments miss, of course, is that this is a multiplication problem — debating whether population or consumption is more destructive, or whether developing renewables or reducing consumption is more effective, really makes just as much sense as debating whether height or width is more important in finding the area of a rectangle!
But beyond that, these dualities betray a misunderstanding of the scale and urgency of the problem. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson has determined that we need to cut our emissions 10% per year — and drop emissions to ZERO within ten years — just to have an outside chance of holding warming to the longstanding target of 2°C (and we know what effects we are already seeing from just 0.8°C, with more in the pipeline from what we've already emitted — the 4-6° we are heading for is nearly unimaginable). So our emissions have to essentially drop off the proverbial cliff — and that is not going to happen by reducing either consumption or population, or by either effecting systemic change or changing our own lifestyles (as if one could happen without the other); and certainly not by developing renewables without radically reducing consumption as well. This is an all-hands-on-deck, do everything we possibly can as fast as we can situation, and it feels as if very few people I run into really, truly get that.
There seems to be an idea out there that if we begin to reduce our emissions somewhat, then things will start to get better... and little awareness of the cumulative nature of the problem — that what matters to the climate system is the total amount of carbon we add to the atmosphere, not how fast we put it up there. David Roberts, writing in Grist, attributes this in part to thinking about global warming the same way we think of other environmental problems like air or water pollution: if we quit putting particulates into the air, the smog dissipates within a few days (witness the dramatic improvement in air quality in LA when city officials instituted traffic controls during the 1984 Olympics); and if a factory stops dumping its wastes into a river, the water will run cleaner pretty quickly as well. But the CO2 we emit stays up there in the atmosphere for up to a century, and carbon emissions accumulate (sort of like lead posioning in your body) — and that is the piece of this that people seem to have trouble getting their heads around. Our habits of thinking are too ingrained, ironically from past successes.
So a lot of concerned, well-meaning folks (including many of my friends and relations) don't really feel the urgency, and continue to go about their lives thinking that something will come along to fix this — after all, we sent a man to the moon, didn't we?...Or debate which of various dual options is the most realistic, with little recognition that the only way to do what really needs to be done — that is, bring emissions down to ZERO, as soon as possible — is to radically reduce both population and consumption, to both develop renewables and reduce consumption; and to (yes) change our capitalist-industrial-corporate system and look to our own wasteful lifestyles that support that system.
More about all three of these in future posts, soon I hope (sorry I am not as prolific as I would like to be, I'm a bit painstaking in my writing)…
Population versus consumption is a frequent theme; also renewables versus consumption — that is, whether renewables can supply all of our energy "needs" or whether we need to reduce consumption; a third common dichotomy is systemic change versus personal consumption — "the problem is capitalism… industrial civilization… big oil… big coal… the corporations… the military-industrial complex…"
What all of these "either/or" arguments miss, of course, is that this is a multiplication problem — debating whether population or consumption is more destructive, or whether developing renewables or reducing consumption is more effective, really makes just as much sense as debating whether height or width is more important in finding the area of a rectangle!
But beyond that, these dualities betray a misunderstanding of the scale and urgency of the problem. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson has determined that we need to cut our emissions 10% per year — and drop emissions to ZERO within ten years — just to have an outside chance of holding warming to the longstanding target of 2°C (and we know what effects we are already seeing from just 0.8°C, with more in the pipeline from what we've already emitted — the 4-6° we are heading for is nearly unimaginable). So our emissions have to essentially drop off the proverbial cliff — and that is not going to happen by reducing either consumption or population, or by either effecting systemic change or changing our own lifestyles (as if one could happen without the other); and certainly not by developing renewables without radically reducing consumption as well. This is an all-hands-on-deck, do everything we possibly can as fast as we can situation, and it feels as if very few people I run into really, truly get that.
There seems to be an idea out there that if we begin to reduce our emissions somewhat, then things will start to get better... and little awareness of the cumulative nature of the problem — that what matters to the climate system is the total amount of carbon we add to the atmosphere, not how fast we put it up there. David Roberts, writing in Grist, attributes this in part to thinking about global warming the same way we think of other environmental problems like air or water pollution: if we quit putting particulates into the air, the smog dissipates within a few days (witness the dramatic improvement in air quality in LA when city officials instituted traffic controls during the 1984 Olympics); and if a factory stops dumping its wastes into a river, the water will run cleaner pretty quickly as well. But the CO2 we emit stays up there in the atmosphere for up to a century, and carbon emissions accumulate (sort of like lead posioning in your body) — and that is the piece of this that people seem to have trouble getting their heads around. Our habits of thinking are too ingrained, ironically from past successes.
So a lot of concerned, well-meaning folks (including many of my friends and relations) don't really feel the urgency, and continue to go about their lives thinking that something will come along to fix this — after all, we sent a man to the moon, didn't we?...Or debate which of various dual options is the most realistic, with little recognition that the only way to do what really needs to be done — that is, bring emissions down to ZERO, as soon as possible — is to radically reduce both population and consumption, to both develop renewables and reduce consumption; and to (yes) change our capitalist-industrial-corporate system and look to our own wasteful lifestyles that support that system.
More about all three of these in future posts, soon I hope (sorry I am not as prolific as I would like to be, I'm a bit painstaking in my writing)…
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
the dilemma
Last week, we (my husband and I) ran into a couple of friends/acquaintances/colleagues we hadn't seen in a while; and in the course of the usual "so, what have you been up to lately" talk, they told us all about their recent travels to Asia and Europe… And I found myself confronting my usual dilemma in these situations: do I bite my tongue, nod and listen politely (thus implying that I think flying around the world is not incredibly destructive), or do I let myself blurt out something like "do you know how much a flight to Europe actually costs in terms of atmospheric carbon?"
After all, one reason I wrote that long letter (and then started this blog) in the first place was to explain to my friends why I can't share their joy in flying off to distant lands, but tend to sit in uncomfortable silence when talk turns to foreign travel… And another (probably the main) reason was that I do feel the political situation is hopeless, and the only way to turn this thing around is to change people's behavior, persuade others to live as low-carbon as possible, one friend at a time if need be…
But when it comes right down to it, it's very hard to go beyond that uncomfortable silence stage and actually evangelize for a livable planet — not without alienating all of my friends and colleagues, which is not a good way to change anyone's behavior in any case. So when I wrote my letter, I carefully worded it to avoid insulting and driving away those that I sent it to, hoping against hope that it might give someone enough food for thought to begin to change some habits...
I desperately wish for a sane world, a world where travel mavens like Rick Steves (not to mention feedlot operators) were looked on as the social parasites they are, and where hopping on a plane for vacation and all forms of conspicuous consumption were as socially unacceptable as smoking in a roomful of children… But we need a huge shift in perceptions to get there, and in the meantime I guess I'm not a very good evangelist. I wish I knew how to do this better…
After all, one reason I wrote that long letter (and then started this blog) in the first place was to explain to my friends why I can't share their joy in flying off to distant lands, but tend to sit in uncomfortable silence when talk turns to foreign travel… And another (probably the main) reason was that I do feel the political situation is hopeless, and the only way to turn this thing around is to change people's behavior, persuade others to live as low-carbon as possible, one friend at a time if need be…
But when it comes right down to it, it's very hard to go beyond that uncomfortable silence stage and actually evangelize for a livable planet — not without alienating all of my friends and colleagues, which is not a good way to change anyone's behavior in any case. So when I wrote my letter, I carefully worded it to avoid insulting and driving away those that I sent it to, hoping against hope that it might give someone enough food for thought to begin to change some habits...
I desperately wish for a sane world, a world where travel mavens like Rick Steves (not to mention feedlot operators) were looked on as the social parasites they are, and where hopping on a plane for vacation and all forms of conspicuous consumption were as socially unacceptable as smoking in a roomful of children… But we need a huge shift in perceptions to get there, and in the meantime I guess I'm not a very good evangelist. I wish I knew how to do this better…
Sunday, March 10, 2013
another example of the sickness of our society...
This may not be immediately obvious as global warming-related quote, but... In an article after Hugo Chavez' passing, entitled "Little Reaction In Oil Market To Chavez Death," an AP reporter wrote:
"Chavez invested Venezuela's oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world's tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi."
Of course, one can argue how huge a problem it is that Venezuela gets the majority of its wealth from oil in the first place... but when I heard this quote it jumped right out at me as another measure of the sickness of our society — that the Chavez government could be criticized, not for pulling all that oil out of the ground, but for not using the proceeds to build glittering construction projects and tall buildings! This one shocked even me — as Lily Tomlin said, no matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up...
"Chavez invested Venezuela's oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world's tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi."
Of course, one can argue how huge a problem it is that Venezuela gets the majority of its wealth from oil in the first place... but when I heard this quote it jumped right out at me as another measure of the sickness of our society — that the Chavez government could be criticized, not for pulling all that oil out of the ground, but for not using the proceeds to build glittering construction projects and tall buildings! This one shocked even me — as Lily Tomlin said, no matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up...
Friday, March 8, 2013
worthwhile conversation...
... I just recently read an conversation between Leanne Simpson, a Canadian First Nations author, poet, and Idle No More activist, and Naomi Klein. Very well worth reading... I especially appreciated the concept of (and coining of the term) "extractivism" — so descriptive of our (western, capitalist) culture. The complete interview is available at Yes! magazine — in the meantime, a few vital passages:
(Leanne) "We’re running out of time. We’re losing the opportunity to turn this thing around. We don’t have time for this massive slow transformation into something that’s sustainable and alternative. I do feel like I’m getting pushed up against the wall... I think that the impetus to act and to change and to transform, for me, exists whether or not this is the end of the world. If a river is threatened, it’s the end of the world for those fish. It’s been the end of the world for somebody all along."
(Leanne) "One of the stories I tell in my book is of working with an elder who’s passed on now, Robin Greene from Shoal Lake in Winnipeg, in an environmental education program with First Nations youth. And we were talking about sustainable development, and I was explaining that term from the Western perspective to the students. And I asked him if there was a similar concept in Anishinaabeg philosophy that would be the same as sustainable development. And he thought for a very long time. And he said no. And I was sort of shocked at the “no” because I was expecting there to be something similar. And he said the concept is backwards. You don’t develop as much as Mother Earth can handle. For us it’s the opposite. You think about how much you can give up to promote more life. Every decision that you make is based on: Do you really need to be doing that?" (my emphasis)
(Leanne) "If I look at my ancestors even 200 years ago... they didn’t rely on material wealth for their well-being and economic stability. They put energy into meaningful and authentic relationships... I think that extended to how they found meaning in life. It was the quality of those relationships—not how much they had, not how much they consumed—that was the basis of their happiness."
(Leanne) "In order to make these changes, in order to make this punctuated transformation, it means lower standards of living, for that 1 percent and for the middle class... And I think in the absence of having a meaningful life outside of capital and outside of material wealth, that’s really scary."
(Naomi) "If you have a rich community life, if your relationships feed you, if you have a meaningful relationship with the natural world, then I think contraction isn’t as terrifying. But if your life is almost exclusively consumption, which I think is what it is for a great many people in this culture, then we need to understand the depth of the threat this crisis represents. That’s why the transformation that we have to make is so profound—we have to relearn how to derive happiness and satisfaction from other things than shopping, or we’re all screwed."
(Leanne) "We’re running out of time. We’re losing the opportunity to turn this thing around. We don’t have time for this massive slow transformation into something that’s sustainable and alternative. I do feel like I’m getting pushed up against the wall... I think that the impetus to act and to change and to transform, for me, exists whether or not this is the end of the world. If a river is threatened, it’s the end of the world for those fish. It’s been the end of the world for somebody all along."
(Leanne) "One of the stories I tell in my book is of working with an elder who’s passed on now, Robin Greene from Shoal Lake in Winnipeg, in an environmental education program with First Nations youth. And we were talking about sustainable development, and I was explaining that term from the Western perspective to the students. And I asked him if there was a similar concept in Anishinaabeg philosophy that would be the same as sustainable development. And he thought for a very long time. And he said no. And I was sort of shocked at the “no” because I was expecting there to be something similar. And he said the concept is backwards. You don’t develop as much as Mother Earth can handle. For us it’s the opposite. You think about how much you can give up to promote more life. Every decision that you make is based on: Do you really need to be doing that?" (my emphasis)
(Leanne) "If I look at my ancestors even 200 years ago... they didn’t rely on material wealth for their well-being and economic stability. They put energy into meaningful and authentic relationships... I think that extended to how they found meaning in life. It was the quality of those relationships—not how much they had, not how much they consumed—that was the basis of their happiness."
(Leanne) "In order to make these changes, in order to make this punctuated transformation, it means lower standards of living, for that 1 percent and for the middle class... And I think in the absence of having a meaningful life outside of capital and outside of material wealth, that’s really scary."
(Naomi) "If you have a rich community life, if your relationships feed you, if you have a meaningful relationship with the natural world, then I think contraction isn’t as terrifying. But if your life is almost exclusively consumption, which I think is what it is for a great many people in this culture, then we need to understand the depth of the threat this crisis represents. That’s why the transformation that we have to make is so profound—we have to relearn how to derive happiness and satisfaction from other things than shopping, or we’re all screwed."
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