Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

"Our dad could have stopped all this, but he was too busy posting about Cardiacs and YMO on www.ilxor.com" :)

It's fucked up, no-one cares, and I am p much with Silby here, but no reason to beat yourself up about it Frogbs. But yes, it is fucked up.

― lbi's life of limitless european glamour (Le Bateau Ivre)

future generations (i won't say "the children" because like many, i'm not having any) may well blame us, as is their right, but i'm trying to figure out what the hell we could have done to keep this from happening, and i'm drawing a blank. textbook tragedy of the commons, right? humanity has innately self-destructive tendencies - ignorance, tribalism - that are beyond our power to control.

Ryuichi Sakamoto talks a lot about climate change, that was actually what I was posting about son

Individual efforts are understandable but tragically pathetic. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Countries such as France or the UK could vanish overnight and it wouldn't make a significant difference in the long run. Nothing short of a radical overhaul of the way of life of 7 billion people will save us, and that's simply not going to happen. We've fantasised about the apocalypse since the dawn of time, perhaps because we're subconsciously aware of how fucked up we are. None of us will be there to witness it, but for the first time we can at least say with almost complete certainty that the end is nigh, in the grand scheme of things. Of course, the earth itself will overcome it, this blip we call the Anthropocene. Most species won't, though.

what the hell we could have done to keep this from happening

'ronald reagan, lewis f. powell, and charles koch removing president carter's solar panels from the white house roof' is my vote for the scene that should be etched into the gravestone of "human" (or at least american hegemonic) "civilization"

maybe if Inconvenient Truth featured a dynamic and likeable figure like, I dunno, Keanu Reeves, instead of a literal block of wood whose controversial election loss made the whole thing come off as a partisan issue

xposts

leee, thank you so much for saying that, upthread. :) everything feels very futile, in so many different ways. it's really easy to sink into into it. so that really means a lot, especially right now.

speaking of despondency, elizabeth kolbert's latest review for the new yorker is worth reading:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/how-to-write-about-a-vanishing-world

'ronald reagan, lewis f. powell, and charles koch removing president carter's solar panels from the white house roof' is my vote for the scene that should be etched into the gravestone of "human" (or at least american hegemonic) "civilization"

― reggie (qualmsley)

this is what makes me the most furious - the people who have spent the last forty years actively trying to destroy the planet and what passes for "human civilization", and having succeeded, are now shrugging their shoulders like "well, too late to do anything now, gaudeamus igitur motherfuckers". it makes me furious because they're simultaneously right (moralistic views of civilizational collapse are mostly useless, the only real error i can see is the huge number of people, myself included, who were duped into believing that we, as a species, were capable of behaving in our long-term rational self-interest) and tremendously culpable, and i really don't believe anybody is ever going to hold them accountable for what they did. these assholes will die peacefully in their sleep, not screaming in terror like their subjects.

i hope the species dies out entirely. i'm not sure it will happen. i think most of the best people will die and the worst and most ignorant people will survive, blame it on the people they murdered, and perpetuate their mistakes on and on and on.

i mean, fuck it, at least i don't have kids.

I don’t think the species will die out. But out current civilization might end.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/10/10/brian-stone/the-rising-sea/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpSQXcxU4AEk0xN.jpg

my first visit to this thread ... you all are a fun lot. :)

srsly, tho, i'm as depressed as any of you about this, but not nearly as knowledgeable.

just tell me this: my upper-middle-class, American 8-year-old and 6-year-old ... are they going to see horrible things or die a horrible death, or will the really bad stuff happen after they're gone.

(serious question.)

if in the future there will be feasters and feastees, i'm fairly certain which side of that divide middle-class americans will be

but i have a more optimistic view of humanity than sanpaku.

alpine static, i'm not sure that's knowable right now! really, there's a lot of speculation on this thread, and i'm certainly the source of some of it. lots of bad things are going to happen. what exactly those bad things are, when they are going to happen, what the ultimate results are going to be in human terms - who knows? if you're inclined to assume the worst, as i am, "the worst" is, well, unfathomably awful. if you're inclined to assume the best, well, that's still pretty horrible. there's no reassurance anybody can offer but at the same time no real closure in terms of "last call, everyone".

Parent of a 5yo Australian here, and both terrified and desperately seeking hope also

In the long term the future is no doubt going to be something very similar to the post-apocalyptic greenhouse of the Permian extinction, and in such stressed and reduced circumstances humanity might just be one Toba calamity away from being reduced to the thousands again. But in the short term .. who knows? There is only so much worrying you can do and it won't make any difference, just enjoy the now - seems the best option to me.

I would assume that the further you are from the Equator, the lower your chances of being directly affected in the next century. Except as regards the climate refugee crisis, which is easier to stave off when you live on an island or when your Southern neighbours are willing to play the part of the neo-fascist buffer (see Canada and the US). So really, most ILXors and their progeny are unlikely to bear the brunt of the first act of humanity's denouement. Whether it'll hold for long is another matter, though I've little doubt that the wealthiest and most powerful among us will find a way, as they always have, even prior to the industrial revolution and the switch to capitalism.

Alternately:

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He laughs.) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (Pause.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Pause.) Let us not speak of it at all. (Pause. Judiciously.) It is true the population has increased.

We're a long way from the equator, right in bushfire country

We are constitutionally equipped to understand this situation. We are, after all, mortal, and so our very existence is a fight against inevitable demise. We also have experience: The wicked challenges we’ve faced through the ages have often been seemingly insurmountable. The Black Death killed off at least a third of Europein its time. World War II claimed 50 million lives. We won those battles — sort of. We’ve spent our time as Homo sapiens fighting what J.R.R. Tolkien called “the long defeat.”

Historically, we’ve tackled the biggest challenge — that of meaning, and the question of how to live a life — through the concept of “practice,” in the form of religion, cultural tradition or disciplines like yoga or martial arts. Given the stark facts, this approach might be the most useful. Practice has value independent of outcome; it’s a way of life, not a job with a clear payoff. A joyful habit. The right way to live.

Such an approach will require dropping the American focus on destination over journey, and releasing the concepts of “winning” and “winners,” at least in the short term. As the journalist I.F. Stone was said to have explained: “The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.” He added: “You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” Or as Camus put it: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

To save civilization, most of us would need to supplement our standard daily practices — eating, caring for family and community, faith — with a steady push on the big forces that are restraining progress, the most prominent being the fossil fuel industry’s co-option of government, education, science and media. This practice starts with a deep understanding of the problem, so it will mean reading a little about climate science. Our actions must be to scale, so while we undertake individual steps in our lives, like retrofitting light bulbs, we must realize that real progress comes from voting, running for office, marching in protest, writing letters, and uncomfortable but respectful conversations with fathers-in-law. This work must be habitual. Every day some learning and conversation. Every week a call to Congress. Every year a donation to a nonprofit advancing the cause. In other words, a practice.

Maybe this approach doesn’t seem as noble as, say, our memory of the civil rights movement. But that era’s continuous, workmanlike grinding probably didn’t feel all that glorious then, either. With history as our judge, though, it does. And we know what happens when enough people take up a cause as practice: Cultural norms change. Think gay marriage. Think the sharp decline in smoking in the United States.

There should be no shortage of motivation. Solving climate change presents humanity with the opportunity to save civilization from collapse and create aspects of what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community.” The work would endow our lives with some of the oldest and most numinous aspirations of humankind: leading a good life; treating our neighbors well; imbuing our short existence with timeless ideas like grace, dignity, respect, tolerance and love. The climate struggle embodies the essence of what it means to be human, which is that we strive for the divine.

Perhaps the rewards of solving climate change are so compelling, so nurturing and so natural a piece of the human soul that we can’t help but do it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-global-warming.html

I know I often ring this bell in this & related threads, but for those hunting for human hope amid the darkness to come--not utopian sloganeering, but creating space for grief & coping--I've found great comfort in the following work, books & thinkers:

Joanna Macy
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
Gregory A. Cajete
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Rob Burbea

I don’t think the species will die out. But our current civilization might end.

Our civilization is built and maintained by capital accumulation out of annual surpluses, and the tremendous growth of those surpluses has been based upon exploiting fossil fuels. I take it as a given that the longer our civilization fails to convert to sustainable, non-carbon energy, the more those surpluses will be eroded, eaten up by the damage done to the climate, until those annual surpluses become ever-deeper deficits. The result would probably look much like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, but on a civilizational scale.

From Joanna Macy's address above, some lines I appreciate: "We don't know whether we will succeed in transitioning away from the industrial growth society before it unravels. We live in a time of radical uncertainty. We are alive in this time of potentially epochal transition--as big as the neolithic revolution, as big as the industrial revolution. And people ask me if I'm hopeful? Do you tap David on the shoulder on his way to meet Goliath, Frodo on his way to the mountain, and ask 'excuse me, are you hopeful?' Get out of my way, I've got something to DO."

Maybe it speaks more to my disposition than anything else, but give me the work of hands to reweave the social fabric as we can. I think too of Cory Doctorow's notional "shotgun or potroast" dichotomy of communities in collapse:

The idea is that what differentiates a disaster from a catastrophe is what we do about it, because, disasters, they’re inevitable, right? You could build the world’s best, most stable society, and you’d still have crappy neighbors, and microbes that would mutate into superbugs, and seas that would rise, and meteors that would crash into you. What really cleaves disaster from catastrophe is whether we cooperate when disaster strikes or we turn on each other. Because it’s obvious that you cannot recover from a disaster by fighting with each other.

When the lights go out, the way that they come on again is not because everyone grabbed their bug-out bag and went to the hills to wait for the lights to go back on. It’s because some people actually went into the middle of town and figured what made them go out, and turned them back on. Really, disaster is a challenge to us to find ways to work together, when the normal things that allow us to work together smoothly go away.

What you think people will do in times of disaster is in large part informed by the stories you’ve read and been told. All those lazy novels where the first time the lights go out, it becomes an excuse for everyone to let loose their inner sociopath and turn on each other. Those stories make you convinced that when the lights go out, your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun rather than a covered dish. The logical thing to do, if you think your neighbors are coming to eat you, is to kill them before they get there. And it’s pretty easy to see why that makes it hard to have a nice, graceful recovery from disaster. One of the things I wanted to do with this novel was recount the largely truthful facts about what happens in times of crisis, which is that, usually, most people are good to one another.

That's what always bugged me about the Walking Dead series. Wouldn't people band together to exterminate all of the zombies, rather than turning on each other and murdering the few humans left on the planet?

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/who-is-we-causing-climate-change.html

At times of peril, such as war, pursuing business-as-usual sucks as a response. Every successful nation puts a stop to business as usual in order to coordinate and direct society's resources toward neutralizing the peril. WWII is just the most recent US example.

One reason (among many) why conservatives and nationalists HATE accepting the science of climate change is that it presents humanity with an imperative need to coordinate and direct the resources of every society, in concert, and their visceral hatred of global governance requires them to resist such a response with every fiber of their being.

Wouldn't people band together to exterminate all of the zombies, rather than turning on each other and murdering the few humans left on the planet?

If dwindling/finite resources are worth fighting for, you can bet that people will.

water wars in our lifetime, yes. waterworld in our lifetime, i'm much less convinced.

It's tricky. People cooperate with those they view as being "in the same boat" with them. There's a innate desire to make common cause with other humans, simply because we are ill-equipped for solitary survival and cooperation works to our benefit.

The reach of that beneficial commonality is very elastic. Neighbors almost always will help one another, even when they weren't acquainted before. As that circle extends outward, the bonds of cooperation and sharing weaken. The degree of weakening is asymmetric from one person to another and one society to another, according to one's socialization and according to the amount of resource available to be shared. iow, making friends is very natural to us; same thing with enemies.

Apropos: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-reduction-in-meat-eating-essential-to-avoid-climate-breakdown

I don't think WW2 example is the best example for fighting climate change. I mean wasn't a big element of the pulling together mostly about nationalism and Fordism on steroids? And maybe a bit of a learning curve for models of unrelenting + ruthless manufacturing (albeit with decent pay and happy workers in this case)? I put question mark because I'm just positing this with caution!

thanks upthread as always hoos. that macy is quite a trip. emergent properties in lieu of hope. "To be a human now in this darkness of uncertainty...they're all plugging for us, please feel them...the ancestors, and the future beings. We have great work to do."

(the darkness of the v likely certainties is its own burden for me).

I don't think WW2 example is the best example for fighting climate change.

The best sort of UN examples, like UNICEF, WHO & peacekeeping forces, are too minor to serve as an example of the sort of global unification of policy necessary to combat the root causes of climate change. fwiw, this has never yet been attempted on the necessary scale, other than perhaps the Paris Accords, which still do not reach the necessary throw weight to get the job done.

btw, I didn't cite WWII as a model to follow against climate change, but as an example of shared peril overriding the usual capitalist misallocation of resources and the unfettered grab for profits.

WWII isn't a *good* comparison, but i don't think there's a better one. the requirements here are unprecedented

The only other historical event I’ve seen referenced as a model is the Apollo program (in terms of making a huge investment with a sense of urgency) but WW2 is a better example because the response affected the entire economy

WW2 was also incredibly good for capital. not sure the war on carbon looks like that yet.

that's exactly what I was hamfistedly trying to say!

i feel like "socialism or barbarism" can sound glib to people when its invoked but its stark truth seems more obvious to me by the day

my man

there are opportunities for capital, but there's also an enormous downside for existing interests. WWII largely didn't present that, and where it did, it was forced by violence

which suggests . . .

makes sense to me

https://theoutline.com/post/6388/the-only-individual-action-that-matters-is-voting-for-people-who-care-about-climate-change

i feel like "socialism or barbarism" can sound glib to people when its invoked but its stark truth seems more obvious to me by the day

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver

i feel about this the way w h auden felt about having written "we must love one another or die"

mind you, wwii was very much in our wheelhouse as a species. yes, it was hard for people in america and england to cooperate with those dastardly foreigners in the soviet union, but we were glad to do it for the greater good of killing those other foreigners from germany and japan.

makes sense to me

https://theoutline.com/post/6388/the-only-individual-action-that-matters-is-voting-for-people-who-care-about-climate-change

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Saturday, October 13, 2018 6:09 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hell yeah. This is why I holler often about my pals at Sunrise Movement, who're engaged in an unusual and excitingly broad variety of tactics--from voter registration to door knocking to civil disobedience--to mobilize young people to make climate & fossil fuel money a decisive issue in elections. Their strategy, imo, is brilliant. What I worry about is whether they can do enough in time. A year ago I thought they could. Now I'm not so sure what "enough" and "in time" means anymore.

not so sure what "enough" and "in time" means anymore.

that's ok. this is not a situation with well-marked boundary lines. because it is all about possible futures, it can only be measured in trends and directions. the future itself is not visible.

It occurs to me that there's a point I keep seeing made, as a sort of counterpoint to the "it's all the bad corporation's fault" view: that it's our choices as individuals that drive the production of fossil fuels & factory farming. This view returns our individual choices (to go vegan and drive a VOLT etc) to a position of value over political solutions.

But imo this misunderstands that these particular choices are an artifact of political, market-making choices that the system has made available to us. My grocery trips are vegan and I ride mass transit, and I want more of those things in the world, but I'm much more interested in changing the realm of possibility.

> only-individual-action-that-matters-is-voting-for-people-who-care-about-climate-change

Pretty much why I was an O'Malley enthusiast in 2016. Sanders was the economic justice candidate, Clinton the family issues candidate, O'Malley entered the contest because of climate concerns.

O’Mentum!

Maoists for O'Malley was my favorite meme page of early 2016

omalleymentum is in full swing!

― lag∞n, Saturday, May 30, 2015 11:53 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

O'Mentum, surely

― Doctor Casino, Saturday, May 30, 2015 11:55 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoa lets not get carried away here

― lag∞n, Saturday, May 30, 2015 11:57 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

O'mallaria

― Οὖτις, Saturday, May 30, 2015 12:25 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/what-is-donald-trumps-response-to-the-uns-dire-climate-report?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Supreme Court, for its part, appears unlikely to challenge the Administration’s baleful reasoning. Last week, it declined to hear an appeal to a lower-court ruling on hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals that are among the most potent greenhouse gases known. The lower court had struck down an Obama-era rule phasing out HFCs, which are used mostly as refrigerants. The author of the lower-court decision was, by the dystopian logic of our times, Brett Kavanaugh.

https://www.gq.com/story/billionaires-climate-change

As the world faces environmental disaster on a biblical scale, it’s important to remember exactly who brought us here.

This week, the United Nations released a damning report. The short version: We have about 12 years to actually do something to prevent the worst aspects of climate change. That is, not to prevent climate change—we're well past that point—but to prevent the worst, most catastrophic elements of it from wreaking havoc on the world's population. To do that, the governments of Earth need to look seriously at the forces driving it. And an honest assessment of how we got here lays the blame squarely at the feet of the 1 percent.

Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably doing very little to the world's climate. The real impact comes on the industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms of these companies.

There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch brothers, and it would take an absurd amount of space to document all the money and organizations they've scraped together for that purpose. (Investigative reporter Jane Mayer's groundbreaking Dark Money does basically that.) And they have every reason to: In her book, Mayer notes that "Koch Industries alone routinely released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year."

But the scope goes far beyond merely sowing dissent and skepticism. While billionaires and the companies they run have spent years insisting that climate change either doesn't exist or is overblown, they've known the reality of the situation for a long time. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, for example, used to donate to the Seasteading Institute, which aimed to build floating cities in order to counteract rising sea levels. And Exxon Mobil allegedly knew about climate change in 1977, back when it was still just Exxon and about 11 years before climate change became widely talked about. Instead of acting on it, they started a decades-long misinformation campaign. According to Scientific American, Exxon helped create the Global Climate Coalition, which questioned the scientific basis for concern over climate change from the late '80s until 2002, and successfully worked to keep the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol, a move that helped cause India and China, two other massive sources of greenhouse gas, to avoid signing.

Even when Republican lawmakers show flashes of willingness to get something done, they're swiftly swatted down. There are myriad examples, but one example comes via Dark Money, where Mayer describes an incident in April 2010 when Lindsey Graham briefly tried to support a cap-and-trade bill: A political group called American Solutions promptly launched a negative PR campaign against him, and Graham folded after just a few days. American Solutions, it turns out, was backed by billionaires in fossil fuel and other industries, including Trump-loving casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

In recent years, fossil-fuel companies have tried to cast themselves as being on the same side of the general public. Just this month, Exxon pledged $1 million to fight for a carbon tax, a stopgap measure that charges a fee of $40 per ton of carbon produced and increases as production goes up. At a glance, that may seem magnanimous, but the truth is that Exxon can afford the tax. Not only is the oil and gas industry experiencing a serious boom right now, companies know that the only real solutions to climate change will hurt them even more than a measly tax.

That's largely because there is no "free market" incentive to prevent disaster. An economic environment where a company is only considered viable if it's constantly expanding and increasing its production can't be expected to pump its own brakes over something as trivial as pending global catastrophe. Instead, market logic dictates that rather than take the financial hit that comes with cutting profits, it's more reasonable to find a way to make money off the boiling ocean. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the burgeoning climate-change investment industry. According to Bloomberg, investors are looking to make money off of everything from revamped food production to hotels for people fleeing increasingly hurricane-ravaged areas. A top JP Morgan Asset investment strategist advised clients that sea-level rise was so inevitable that there was likely a lot of opportunity for investing in sea-wall construction.

Even today, after literally decades of radical libertarian billionaires fostering disbelief in climate change and skepticism about the government, three out of five Americans believe climate change affects their local community. That number climbs to two-thirds on the coasts. Even the Trump administration now admits that climate change is real, but their response to it is dead-eyed acceptance. If popular support actually influenced public policy, there would have been more decisive action from the U.S. government years ago. But the fossil-fuel industry's interests are too well-insulated by the mountains of cash that have been converted into lobbyists, industry-shilling Republicans and Democrats, and misinformation. To them, the rest of the world is just kindling.