Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

the retreat into doomy ersatz pre-norman "englishness" is kind of a non-sequitir for me, we might as well say "global warming isn't going to go away, we're all doomed, so i'm going to play-act the wandering tribes of israel." i mean, good on him if that's his thing, but it doesn't seem like a particularly universal or compelling response to environmental calamity.

that said, i recognize my own despair in his and i'm not going to attack him for sort of retreating into himself.

it's not supposed to be a practical response though, half their argument seems to be that there is little of much consequence to be done in the face of impending catastrophe. and i don't think it's necessarily about retreating into some historical englishness either, afaiu it's more of a letting-go of anthropocentrism and using naturistic quasi-mythological cultural practices to do this. it is a bit twattish though.

i didn't write "practical"--I wrote "universal or compelling"

also it just makes me think that this dude can't think of any response that isn't an species of lifestylism, even as he decries lifestylism.

what they do sounds very much bound up with having a strong sense of place, so i guess the specific content isn't intended to be of universal appeal

yeah. but why then is it being covered in the NYT as though he's some kind of seer?

i should repeat my main thought which is that what this guy and his cadre have come up with in response to global catastrophe seems like replacing one fantasy with another. and above all it just seems like a non-sequitir.

it is all a bit survivalist lord summerisle

why is his pessimism so wan and so shit? even disgregarding the assumption that there is no possible instrumental response to life in a drowning world (unproven, largely and the uk given its latitude and means is not going to be among the primary victims) then millenarianism should be a lot more dionysian or compelling than his twee blood and soil dogshit

The state government of Rhineland-Palatinate has published a booklet titled Nature Conservation vs Rightwing Extremism in an effort to assist organic farmers who may encounter rightwing extremists. Gudrun Heinrich of the University of Rostock has published a study, Brown Ecologists, in reference to both the current movement and the Nazi Brownshirts. The politically extreme rightwing environmental magazine Umwelt und Aktiv (Environment and Active), is believed to receive support from Germany's far-right National Democratic party (NPD).[13] Der Spiegel has covered the “organic brown fellowship” (“Braune Bio-Kameradschaft”),[14] and Süddeutsche Zeitung has published an article on and the “infiltration [Unterwanderung] of organic farming by rightwing extremists,[15] noting the lineage to Nazi doctrines of Aryan supremacy and ecological harmony.

I am often suspicious that in hard times these new-age narcissistic types with their wicker sculpture dogshit would be about the third in line to break nazi, after the farmers and 80% of the population of course.

“Climate Change War” Is Not a Metaphor: The U.S. military is preparing for conflict, retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley says in an interview.

The New Abolitionism: Averting planetary disaster will mean forcing fossil fuel companies to give up at least http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism0 trillion in wealth

Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.

The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.

It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political issue to slavery, because there’s nothing in American history that is slavery’s proper analogue. So before anyone misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules. The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the political economy of slavery and the political economy of fossil fuel.

More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must confront the fact that the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.

ugh link fail, sorry:

http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism

also,

In fact, in certain climate and investment circles, people have begun to talk about “stranded assets”—that is, the risk that either national or global carbon-pricing regimes will make the extraction of some of the current reserves uneconomical. Recently, shareholders pushed ExxonMobil to start reporting on its exposure to the risk of stranded assets, which was a crucial first step, though the report itself was best summarized by McKibben as saying, basically, “We plan on overheating the planet, we don’t think any government will stop us, we dare you to try.”

That is the current stance of the fossil fuel companies: “It’s our property, and we’re gonna extract, sell and burn all of it. What are you gonna do about it?”

Those people you see getting arrested outside the White House protesting Keystone XL, showing up at shareholder meetings and sitting in on campuses to get their schools to divest are doing something about it. They are attacking the one weak link in the chain of doom that is our fossil fuel economy.

something to keep in mind for well-intentioned believers in science who thinks that opposing keystone xl is pointless.

Not pointless. But just as ineffectual as supply-side approaches to curtailing drug addiction. It makes activists feel good about doing something, when more plausibly effective solutions, like: "make carbon taxes palatable to Republicans" have gone largely ignored. I suspect a congressional coalition for a revenue neutral carbon tax (ie, matched with income tax reductions) would have been very possible earlier in the 2000s (before the tea-party no nothings arrived), and will be possible again in the future as climate change outcomes mount.

Without pipelines, the petroleum will move by rail, even if that means more spills, booms, and leaving the grain harvest to rot. There's also some peculiar naivete regarding the carbon intensity of the Keystone crudes. Hint: all crudes with finding, development, and lifting costs in the $60-80/bbl range (whether from deep offshore, shale fracking, or mining/steaming of bitumen) have huge and comparable embedded energy inputs. Ie, pretty much all oil discovered in North America since 2000 or so is comparably 'dirty'.

Regarding that 10 trillion quote, generally, it isn't the total future revenue stream that matters for the value of the carbon reservoirs, but the discounted present value of future net profits, which is a lot less. The top 4 U.S. coal producers responsible for over 50% of production have a combined market cap of just $7.9 billion. The government could just buy the shareholders' stake of the US coal industry at market prices for perhaps around 16 billion, if it wanted. Even lifetime pensions for all existing coal mining employees would be dirt cheap compared to the environmental extenalities of coal mining or costs of eventually scrubbing the carbon from the atmosphere.

What we in the U.S. have little control over is the national oil companies, which control 75% of global oil production and 90% of reserves. Even Exxon-Mobil is becoming an engineering firm contracting for the real asset holders.

"make carbon taxes palatable to Republicans"

--how would you do this if so many of them refuse to believe that climate change is happening?

(or think it is god's work?)

The government could just buy the shareholders' stake of the US coal industry at market prices for perhaps around 16 billion, if it wanted. Even lifetime pensions for all existing coal mining employees would be dirt cheap compared to the environmental externalities of coal mining or costs of eventually scrubbing the carbon from the atmosphere.

This kind of thinking is U&K. If the government owned these industries, it could ramp them down on its own schedule and not have to fight with investors. Fox News would howl it down, but it's a direction we haven't tried, yet. \

A much bigger cost would be abandoning the oil/coal infrastructure we have and replacing it with functional, but fossil-fuel-less, equivalents.

xp:

Pre-2008, there were a lot of Republican thought leaders (McCain, GWB's economic advisor Mankiw) that voiced climate concerns and were open to carbon taxes, so long as they didn't violate their principle of limited government. If there was to be a carbon tax, they' have to come home with something for their constituents in return. The post-2008 prominence of Tea Party primary challenges with heavy funding by the Kochs etc makes touching the issue politically dangerous for them now, even for those who privately agree with climate concerns.

Pushing carbon emissions credit trading instead (based on the EU example, pretty ineffectual, but at least Goldman Sachs et al. would have benefited) during that period just seems a horrible lost opportunity.

yeah that stuff always seemed like it would make only a token difference (at best)--it also trusts that market mechanisms will behave predictably far too much.

'Stranded Asset Risk' is big news right now, I am doing some work for an industry body who are bricking it about SAR. It's a big lever to pull because these industries (fossil fuels, electricity, etc.) have 20-30-40 year capital recovery periods, often baked into the regulatory framework, and they are almost universally dependant on rising consumption. Falling energy consumption, changes in consumption patterns and distributed generation are disrupting these models. For once regulatory stagnation is helping us because no-one can decide what to do about this, in the sector i'm working with pretty much any pricing change short of general taxation to fund the assets incentivises people to use the assets less.

I'm trying to come up with some policy recommendations to deal with SAR and I really want to conclude 20,000 words of report with 'Write it down, shut it down, go to the beach'

So much wisdom in ten words.

'Write it down, shut it down, go to the beach'

wow, how lovely to see Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp team up with Michael Bloomberg to write this NYT op-ed:

The Right Way to Develop Shale Gas:

So here’s a reality check. The shale gas boom is indeed lowering energy costs, creating new jobs, boosting domestic manufacturing and delivering some measurable environmental benefits as well. Unlike coal, natural gas produces minuscule amounts of such toxic air pollutants as sulfur dioxide and mercury when burned — so the transition from coal- to natural-gas-fired electricity generation is improving overall air quality, which improves public health. There’s also a potential climate benefit, since natural-gas-fired plants emit roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal-fired ones.

jesus fucking christ. bloomberg's certainly no surprise but it's really sad to see krupp sign onto this bullshit. natural gas is better for the climate - IF you use the rosiest of assumptions about methane leakage from fracking. joe romm has a typically subtle summary of the most recent research on methane leakage - By The Time Natural Gas Has A Net Climate Benefit You’ll Likely Be Dead And The Climate Ruined.

http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-chap2-climate.pdf

Box: Societal System Failures During Extreme Events
23 We have already seen multiple system failures during an extreme weather event in the U.S., as
24 Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans (Lister 2005). Infrastructure and evacuation failures
25 and collapse of critical response services during a storm is one example. Another example is a
26 loss of electrical power during a heat wave (Anderson and Bell 2012). Air conditioning has
27 helped reduce illness and death due to extreme heat (Ostro et al. 2010), but if power is lost,
28 everyone is vulnerable. By their nature, such events can exceed our capacity to respond (Hess et
29 al. 2012). In succession, these events severely deplete our reserves from the personal to the
30 national scale, but disproportionately affect the most vulnerable populations (Shonkoff et al.
31 2011).

dear amurika, yer on yer own. luv, yur gov

32 GOTO APOCALYPSE
33 END

Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans as Antarctic Ice Melts

The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.

The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.

“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

My wife had a total freakout about this last night, about how there won't be any beaches when our kids are older, literally sobbing about feeling helpless, what kind of world have we brought our kids into etc. I did not feel like I had any adequate words of encouragement :( She wants some answers about what we can personally do and I already feel like we're trying pretty hard it's just so fucking grim.

yeah i ain't gonna have any kids b/c i can barely imagine a future for myself

I read a fair amount of popular science stuff (Discover, Nat'l Geo etc.) and I'm in the middle of the tech industry and sometimes I just feel like jesus christ the shit people waste their time working on instead of like, CIVILIZATION NEEDS SAVING I dunno people's priorities are so fucked up. I have a (soon to be ex)-friend whose returning from China later this year where he was doing construction on a coal plant and I feel like there's no way I can even be around him, I feel like he did the equivalent of murdering a bunch of children

yea it really sucks, so many immense problems in this world that we as individuals are virtually powerless to prevent. i say "virtually" b/c yes there are some individual practices that if done on a large scale might help, but they aren't happening on a large scale. at the institutional/governmental and national levels frankly nobody gives a shit about this. some tepid comments from obama bla bla but what the fuck is that gonna do?

the evil part of me thinks "huh if we just murdered a few million of the right people that would probably solve some of the problem"

humans are terrible at long-range planning, we're born procrastinators. this will be soon be our doom.

i understand the urge to condemn (and i'm certainly prone to doing that at times as well) but it's not a productive way to react. you're not going to change your coal plant construction friend's opinion on anything by being combative and defriending them irl. i understand that's probably not even your intention - you might just feel better personally if you had nothing to do with them and didn't have to have the underlying dread feeling whenever you talk to them. but i feel like the most important that people can do on an individual level is be realistic about the challenges ahead and try to stay energetic and helpful. i was at a conference last week where a younger guy (haha, wow i'm getting older. shit) introduced himself by saying "i used to hate people. i no longer hate people" and then described how he used to really look down on a lot of segments of society for being so willingly ignorant of what's going on, but gradually took a more constructive perspective and got involved in organizations doing good work. i came away thinking that if there are even just a decent proportion of people like him, we're going to figure it out. that doesn't mean there won't be agony and terrible things along the way, but despite how it looks on the surface, there are many, MANY wonderful people who will never give up on this.

I think my wife wants suggestions about what organizations doing good work, as you say, she/we can join. For my part, I already have dedicated my professional life to this and am surrounded by smart, well-intentioned people working hard on these issues but it's just ... ugh we are also accutely aware of the obstacles

i came away thinking that if there are even just a decent proportion of people like him, we're going to figure it out.

there is very little reason to think this IMO.

unless you think "people like him" can convince everyone in the West to make a sudden, irreversible change in their lifestyles AND convince the politicians and business leaders in poorer countries to forgo significant industrial development.

and we'd still be mostly fucked.

i have hope karl's right, but his other point -- "that doesn't mean there won't be agony and terrible things along the way" -- is the real "meat of the coconut." that is, we're probably going to have to come very close to a very-visible, overwhelming crisis before collective-consciousness can possibly shift the way it needs to.

collective consciousness won't be collective anything, we'll be struggling for survival and revert (as we so often do even in times of not-crisis) to clannishness and self-interest

i hope i'm wrong but human history doesn't give us many or any hopeful precedents

our future:

http://images2.alphacoders.com/839/83970.jpg

maybe 20 years, idk.

perhaps this was the wrong thread to come to for encouragement/helpful tips

just keep it bouncy with a chorus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_TKXPPjhRk

another jew weighs in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTRX23EMNk

Karl, does your strategy for being an enthusiastic proponent (as opposed to an accusatory Cassandra) involve avoiding moronic "What global warming?" dead-enders?

i should say my guarded optimism from above ("i came away thinking that if there are even just a decent proportion of people like him, we're going to figure it out.") is probably overstated. i was rushtyping that as i was late for a meeting and it came out sounding like a commercial with ukuleles and a xylophone. by "we're going to figure it out" i don't mean rosy outcome where everything is great, but rather one where we somehow avoid the dark ages, or a dystopic scenario where rich people are literally walling themselves off from the fucked over masses. and by "we're going to" i really meant "we have a better chance of"

so basically, sorry for writing a shitty paragraph. i'll never do it again! (*cue laugh track*)

i still don't know what the best strategy is for dealing with incredibly misinformed people, or people who know better but are lying for short-term political gain. taking a cue from john oliver, i think it would be interesting to stage a series of high-profile "climate change debates" across the country, particularly in red states and rural areas. these debates would be billed in a somewhat generic way - scientists will debate the expected impacts of climate change - which, sadly, would probably lead most people to believe that there would be a climate-denier representing one side of the debate. but in fact, they'd show up and witness an actual debate about climate change - are we on track for the worst-case emissions scenario in the IPCC reports, or are we actually exceeding that? do climate models properly account for feedback loops like the melting of permafrost, or don't they? are we this fucked, or are we THIS fucked?

eh. i'm at a loss.