My wife, who is far from being the cynic of the family (that would be me), often concludes that humanity is a failed experiment. It is not an assessment with which I disagree.
I often find myself pondering why and how we have reached our current perilous, likely terminal, state. While there are many obvious factors, perhaps one of the biggest is that there are far too many people today. Beyond the physical pressures that our population puts on our planet, there is a breakdown of any sense of community with the larger world. Perhaps in earlier times, hunters and gatherers found it much easier to feel a kinship and responsibility for each other. Even today, we behave toward our immediate community, family and friends, far differently than we do with those with whom we have no immediate connection.
And with that loss of connection comes increasingly selfish behaviour, and self-regard often becomes our default position. If Covid has taught us nothing else, it is that large numbers put their personal freedom and comfort over the safety of others. Hence the outrage over mask mandates, vaccinations, etc. The same, I suspect, is reflected in our attitudes toward climate-change mitigation. While some can see the larger picture, others can only see the cost of gas, carbon taxes, etc. that elicit reflexive, often violent, reactions.
There is a letter in today's Star that got me thinking about the above. It expresses a perspective that succinctly puts all of us in our place.
Microbes may have swarmed Mars, Oct. 11
So French scientists have concluded that Mars may have harboured an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms …. Sadly, they say, these microbes may have themselves altered the atmosphere and triggered a Martian ice age, leading to their demise. These French scientists have further concluded that simple life like microbes might actually commonly cause their own demise.
I look at what is going on in our world today: climate change caused by humans; senseless destruction caused by the Putins of the world; the toxic environment created by politicians like Trump, Poilievre, Smith et al.
My non-scientific conclusion is that humans are no smarter than single-celled microscopic organisms.
Despite the often-brave posturing we hear about rebuilding after natural disasters, perhaps it is time to lose the hubris and realize that yes, even North America is subject to the devastations wrought by climate change. The American hubris of exceptionalism will not protect them from the fury of nature that has visited so many other regions of the world.
It must be a sobering and, one hopes, humbling, realization.
The following is from Ft. Meyers, Florida, brought to you by Hurricane Ian.
I have to confess that I am not following the Cop26 Glasgow Summit very closely. My suspicion is that all the hot air being vented there will only aggravate our climate crisis.
From my cynical perspective, two editorial cartoons by the redoubtable Michael de Adder capture precisely the tenor of the times:
Sorry to disappoint you, but it is not Might Mouse who will save the day, if only we listen. It is Barney Frankie the dinosaur, with a timely message regarding our pending extinction.
I have to confess, the following left me, not with any sense of optimism but rather deep despair. Is our last best hope to avert climate disaster an animated reptile whose warning, despite its juvenile nature, is addressed to adults?
The infantilization of our species continues apace.
Ever resistant to climate change mitigation measures, 'Democrat' Joe Manchin has succeeded in scuttling most of Joe Biden's ambitious plans for the environment. It now appears Biden will reduce his $3.5 trillion plan to a $2 trillion one, sacrificing vital components that would be immensely beneficial to the environment.
A key holdout on Biden’s proposals, conservative Sen. Joe Manchin from coal-state West Virginia, has made clear he opposes the president's initial Clean Energy Performance Plan, which would have the government impose penalties on electric utilities that fail to meet clean energy benchmarks and provide financial rewards to those that do — in line with Biden’s goal of achieving 80% “clean electricity” by 2030.
One might think that Manchin's obstructionism comes from the fact that he represents a coal-mining state. However, in a short video writer Don Winslow produced for Twitter, it is evident that the truth is more sinister than that.
is blocking Joe Biden's agenda.
We found so much vile and provable corruption in Manchin's life and his families life that we could not fit it all into one video. So this is just Part 1.
These revelations of massive conflicts of interests perhaps will come as no surprise to seasoned political observers for whom the endemic corruption of U.S. politics is a given. That being said, it is outrageous that egregious greed can stop initiatives that the entire world could benefit from.
No, I am not one of those who begrudge rich people their pleasures and pursuits. Content in my own life, I harbour no ill-will toward those who are better off than me.
I do become bothered, however, when those pursuits both distract us from, and add to, the existential crises our world faces. In that, the billionaires have much to answer for.
Take the recent 'groundbreaking' flights of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos into near-space and the breathless reporting that followed it.
Start at the 9:40 mark of the following to catch Stephanie Ruhle's breathless, (star struck?) interview with the Bezos boys:
Similar gushing interlocutions can be found online following Branson's Virgin Galactic foray, but I hope the above serves to illustrate that this kind of gushing, lionizing coverage serves merely as a bread-and-circuses diversion away from the many problems we face in our terrestrial sphere.
Now, were you to watch earlier in this broadcast, you would hear how Bezos also talks about seeing our planet from above and how fragile it really is. He opines we must do everything we can to protect our world, as if his space trip offered a transcendent experience.
And Branson, after his trip, said he wants to spend the rest of his life helping to solve our many problems here.
Apparently, those problems do not include our biggest threat, climate change.
Despite these intrepid innovators' claim that the greenhouse gas emissions from their excursions are no different from those from a jet flight, the truth is otherwise. First of all, both of their business models call for more and more of these inner-space trips, and as they scale up, the price will come down, making them more accessible to more people. Hence, more trips, more greenhouse gas emissions.
Secondly, the nature of these emissions is different from jet trips. Katherine Gammon explains:
Eloise Marais, an associate professor of physical geography at University College London... studies the impact of fuels and industries on the atmosphere.
The carbon emissions from rockets are small compared with the aircraft industry, she says. But they are increasing at nearly 5.6% a year, and Marais has been running a simulation for a decade, to figure out at what point will they compete with traditional sources we are familiar with.
“For one long-haul plane flight it’s one to three tons of carbon dioxide [per passenger],” says Marais. For one rocket launch it’s 200-300 tonnes of carbon dioxide carrying 4 or so passengers – close on two orders of magnitude more, according to Marais. “So it doesn’t need to grow that much more to compete with other sources.”
But the problem is more than simply the amount of carbon spewed, because
emissions from rockets are emitted right into the upper atmosphere, which means they stay there for a long time: two to three years. Even water injected into the upper atmosphere – where it can form clouds – can have warming impacts, says Marais. “Even something as seemingly innocuous as water can have an impact.”
Closer to the ground, all fuels emit huge amounts of heat, which can add ozone to the troposphere, where it acts like a greenhouse gas and retains heat. In addition to carbon dioxide, fuels like kerosene and methane also produce soot. And in the upper atmosphere, the ozone layer can be destroyed by the combination of elements from burning fuels.
When I was a boy, I imagined a future of endless possibilities. Each liftoff of the Mercury and Apollo missions served only to whet that imagination. But I grew up and saw an increasingly fractured world with no simple remedies.
Perhaps it is now time for these 'boys of space' to do a bit of growing up as well.
This letter-writer in today's print edition of The Toronto Star states what is ultimately a sad truth about us.
Canadians unwilling to make sacrifices for climate change
Toronto Star
Re Western Canada’s heat dome may be Ontario bound.
A climate expert explains what’s next, June 29
The sad fact is that Canadians, like most of the world, will not take any responsibility for climate change if it infringes upon their daily life.
How many Canadians are willing to give up their gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks or pressure their government to ban the building of large, single-detached homes and outlet malls that contribute to global warming and eat up our precious resources?
We may moan and groan about billions of baked clams, but that’s about it. We are a consumerist society and we aren’t willing to change. The world will get hotter and we’ll shrug our shoulders. In the end, our children and grandchildren will be left holding the bag.
Unless you have been living under a rock (or more likely, the cool of your basement), you will know about the weather catastrophe occurring in the West, and, to a slightly lesser degree, in the East. People are dying at an unprecedented rate from the heat, and it is only going to get worse. As well, infrastructure that was built to cooler Canadian standards is buckling.
None of this bodes well for our future. To get a real sense of how dire things are, I would suggest you watch the following video from the beginning. If pressed for time, start at the five-minute mark and watch the two reports that ensue.
At this late stage of things, the only real hope we have is in fortifying our infrastructure from the horrors to come, as the second of the two reports makes clear.
If you have access to the New York Times, there is a piece well-worth reading by Michael Benson. Entitled Watching Earth Burn. it includes photos of our planet taken from three weather satellites in geostationary orbit high above the Equator. These photos attest to the ravages of climate-change induced wild fires plaguing the world, although Benson does not ignore human-caused destruction, as in the ravages of the Amazonian rainforest where, thanks to
the rapacious policies of President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, predatory agricultural, logging and mining interests had set his country ablaze. By late September the already hellish 2019 escalation in deliberately set forest fires had been exceeded by 28 percent, with more than 44,000 outbreaks recorded in the Amazon and Pantanal this year.
The entire article makes for grim reading, and is a cogent reminder of just how late in the day it is for mitigating the worst of the damage threatening the very existence of our species and countless others with whom we share the earth.
Yet the piece ends on a cautiously optimistic note:
If the war has started and we’re losing, what can we do about it? Or to put it another way, what would I like to see happen over the next year, even if I won’t yet be able to observe it directly from my Olympian perch among the satellites?
Actually, our response to the pandemic already suggests the way forward. Faced with an existential crisis of a scale not seen in living memory, we deployed the planet’s best minds, funded them well and turned them loose on the problem. They in turn were able to draw on a wealth of prior knowledge about how viruses infiltrate our bodies, and three decades of hard-won experience in learning about and finally creating RNA — purpose-built synthetic copies of a natural molecule integral to our genes — devised to prompt an immune response within our cells. This paid off spectacularly. And all this was accomplished in record time — months instead of the previous standard of a decade or more.
We need to follow this immediately with another sustained global effort. Imagine what human ingenuity could produce if unleashed in comparably coordinated, well-funded fashion on the climate crisis. The good news is that, as with the new RNA vaccines, we have significant prior research to draw on. It covers carbon-neutral power production, energy conservation strategies, carbon capture and sequestration, global reforestation and an intercontinental effort to build a high voltage, DC power network 40 percent more efficient than AC and thus able to compensate for the daily fluctuations in wind and solar power systems.
In short, we need an all-hands-on-deck fusion of the Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan, only this time funded by all of the world’s major economies and led by the largest: the United States, the European Union and China.
Time is obviously short, but as I commented on Marie's blog entry about the existential threats we face, human beings seem much more able to respond to acute threats than long-term ones. If we cannoit change that propensity, there really is little basis for hope.
I have reached the point in my life where whatever optimism about the future I might have once held has given way to a searing, even corrosive pessimism. Looking at the world as it is would seem to preclude any other position.
And yet...
There are still those among us with vibrant visions of what could be, what is still possible even at this late date. It is perhaps best represented by what is known as the Green New Deal. One of its chief proponents in the United States is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasion Cortz who, along with Avi Lewis, scripted and narrated a short film of what could be, the idea being to use art to fire the imagination of people. Writes Naomi Klein:
Just as [Molly] Crabapple and I started mulling over the idea of a Green New Deal short film, The Intercept published a piece by Kate Aronoff that was set in the year 2043, after the Green New Deal had come to pass. It told the story of what life was like for a fictionalized “Gina,” who grew up in the world that Green New Deal policies created: “She had a relatively stable childhood. Her parents availed themselves of some of the year of paid family leave they were entitled to, and after that she was dropped off at a free child care program.” After free college, “she spent six months restoring wetlands and another six volunteering at a day care much like the one she had gone to.”
The piece struck a nerve with readers, in large part because it imagined a future tense that wasn’t some version of “Mad Max” warriors battling prowling bands of cannibal warlords. Crabapple and I decided that the film could do something similar to Aronoff’s piece, but this time from Ocasio-Cortez’s vantage point. It would show the world after the Green New Deal she was championing had become a reality.
The following is the film that seeks to dispel the pessimism so many of us feel about the future.
Should you be interested in becoming more informed about the possibilities, I recommend Jeremy Rifkin's book, The Green New Deal, which offers substantial detail on how this brave new world can be accomplished.
As we remain fixated on the immediate, acute crisis that has engulfed the world, it is easy to lose sight of the other crisis that continues to engulf the world:
Last year’s summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600bn tons of ice from Greenland – enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found.
Unlike the retreat of sea ice, the loss of land-based glaciers directly causes the seas to rise, imperiling coastal cities and towns around the world. Scientists have calculated that Greenland’s enormous ice sheet lost an average of 268bn tons of ice between 2002 and 2019 – less than half of what was shed last summer. By contrast, Los Angeles county, which has more than 10 million residents, consumes 1bn tons of water a year.
Glaciers are melting away around the world due to global heating caused by the human-induced climate crisis. Ice is reflective of sunlight so as it retreats the dark surfaces underneath absorb yet more heat, causing a further acceleration in melting.
Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, scientists revealed last year, pushing up previous estimates of global sea level rise and putting 400 million people at risk of flooding every year by the end of the century.
Isabella Velicogna, a professor of Earth system science, has more bad news for us:
More recent research has found that Antarctica, the largest ice sheet on Earth, is also losing mass at a galloping rate, although the latest University of California and Nasa works reveals a nuanced picture.
“In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which is very bad news for sea level rise,” Velicogna said.
The research has further illustrated the existential dangers posed by runaway global heating, even as the world’s attention is gripped by the coronavirus crisis. Crucial climate talks are set to be held later this year in Glasgow, although the wave of cancellations triggered by the virus has threatened to undermine this diplomatic effort.
Yes, we are right to be very alarmed by our current pandemic; however, we must bear in mind that the other one is going to ultimately cost countless more lives, and act accordingly.
In these uncertain times, we are all seized by concerns about Corvid-19. The prospect of death invariably focuses the mind, especially in the short-term.
Facilitated by fossil-fuel propaganda and an often uncritical media, it is unfortunately easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, one that we have been warned about for a long time - climate change. The following letter, from the print edition of the Sunday Star, strives to achieve a perspective all would be wise to adopt:
Don’t let deniers frame way we talk about climate crisis
Toronto Star 15 Mar 2020
Unconscionable dithering on climate action and on Indigenous rights has caused immense and wholly needless pain, conflict and disruption for Canadians in recent weeks.
It’s 2020; scientists say we absolutely must transition to safe energy as quickly as humanly possible, just to give humanity a decent chance at a future (not to guarantee a livable future, which is already out of reach).
Despite this, multiple levels of government, and three different self-styled progressive parties, are prepared to trample the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), to force through yet another pipeline on behalf of brazen and unrepentant fossil fuel profiteers. All in the middle of a climate crisis. Worse yet, in a flailing attempt to shore up their transparently myopic stance, fossil interests, and their allies in politics and the media, are blasting out vicious invective to confuse and divide Canadians, with a wilful and criminal disregard for any resulting violence. We need look no further than recent propaganda from fossil fuel companies and their allies, including endorsements of sexual violence against teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, and acts of brutal physical violence against earth protectors.
Moreover, this petro-cabal has gleefully spread outright fabrications to vilify Indigenous protectors and their allies, such as claims of “paid protestors” and epithets like “thug.”
The fossil industry pours huge amounts of cash and effort into convincing the public that “energy” means only fossil fuels, that “jobs” must be fossil fuel jobs, that safe alternatives do not exist, and that regular folks acting out of concern for their children and the planet are funded by foreign interests, hell-bent on destroying all that is good in the world.
We do not need to argue that this is a grossly irresponsible invitation to violence; we can point to several examples where earth protectors, merely repeating science and/or defending UNDRIP, have been threatened, intimidated and attacked by people who have been made angry and confused by fossil propaganda, specifically designed to make us angry, confused and divided.
It’s time that the industry, politicians and the media renounce this dangerous disinformation.
After taking it out of the library twice, I have finally mustered the psychic strength to begin reading Bill McKibben's Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? A grim read, its central thesis is that things are very bad, but it is still not too late to do something about it. That is, if we can muster the will to tackle this massive threat to our existence.
On a related note, the other night, while watching the ongoing perfervid coverage of Covid-19, the coronavirus now sweeping the world, I couldn't help but wonder why, if governments can so quickly mobilize in the face of immediate threat, they can't seem to muster the same resolve and resources to combat the much greater dangers posed by climate change.
Of course, part of the answer lies in the economic treadmill no one wants to exit from, as well as the fact that humans have a great capacity for cognitive dissonance, refusing to acknowledge, despite all of the meteorological evidence to the contrary (floods, droughts, wildfires, intense storms, soaring world temperatures, etc.), the dire peril we are in.
Serendipitously, yesterday I came across a piece by Owen Jones entitled, Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?
More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us.
Despite rising sea levels, Arctic wildfires and increasingly common killer heatwaves, to name but three manifestations of climate change, we still lack a sense of urgency. What if we did finally come to our senses? In Britain, it might look like this:
What would be mentioned in that solemn prime ministerial speech on the steps of No 10, broadcast live across TV networks? All homes and businesses would be insulated, creating jobs, cutting fuel poverty and reducing emissions. Electric car charging points would be installed across the country.
A frequent flyer levy for regular, overwhelmingly affluent air passengers would be introduced.
This would only be the start. Friends of the Earth calls for free bus travel for the under-30s, combined with urgent investment in the bus network. Renewable energy would be doubled, again producing new jobs, clean energy, and reducing deadly air pollution. The government would end all investments of taxpayers’ money in fossil fuel infrastructure and launch a new tree-planting programme to double the size of forests in Britain ...
Owen Jones concludes his piece with this:
Coronavirus poses many challenges and threats, but few opportunities. A judicious response to global heating would provide affordable transport, well-insulated homes, skilled green jobs and clean air. Urgent action to prevent a pandemic is of course necessary and pressing. But the climate crisis represents a far graver and deadlier existential threat, and yet the same sense of urgency is absent. Coronavirus shows it can be done – but it needs determination and willpower, which, when it comes to the future of our planet, are desperately lacking.
The pessimist in me says that nothing will change, and the world will continue its headlong plunge into the climatic abyss.
The residual optimist in me, a very faint presence nowadays, hopes I am wrong.
While many bemoan the fate of the Teck Resources Frontier tarsands project as yet another example of restrictive regulatory measures, others, as the following letter from the print edition of the Toronto Star suggests, say its death makes perfect corporate sense.
Free market now realizes carbon reserves best left alone
Re Regulatory process blamed for oilsands mine’s end, Feb. 28
Canadians who haven’t followed B.C. Premier John Horgan, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau down the rabbit hole understand that the collapse of the Teck Frontier proposal is a positive indication that the “free market” is functioning as it should.
Corporations, investors and shareholders are belatedly coming to realize that it is in everyone’s best interest that most of the world’s carbon reserves — include Alberta’s oilsands — be left in the ground.
Only in Wonderland would politicians employ massive taxpayer subsidies to subvert the marketplace and promote uneconomical, climate-destroying fossil-fuel projects; $16 billion to buy and build the Trans Mountain pipelines, plus $6 billion to construct Coastal GasLink.
The truth is, pipelines don’t end at a terminal. Every pipeline is a conduit to the sky, ultimately dumping its carbon into a dangerously overheated atmosphere.
Only by changing the ways that we produce and consume energy can we hope to avert climate catastrophe.
While the world's unease continues to grow over the spread of coronavirus Covid-19, there is a kind of silver lining for that same world. In China, where the bug originated, air pollution is vanishing in its industrial heartland.
Satellites operated by NASA and the European Space Agency have detected significant drops of major airborne pollutants above vast swathes of the country.
Before-and-after images show how nitrogen dioxide levels plummeted in February compared to pre-lockdown January of this year. Nitrogen dioxide is a noxious gas emitted by factories, motor vehicles and fossil fuel-powered electricity generation stations.
The country's strong corona containment measures are largely responsible for this dramatic drop:
Researchers say China’s pollutant levels normally decline in February as factories pause for Lunar New Year celebrations, when the world’s largest annual mass migration occurs. But the usual rebound in pollutant levels did not occur last month, helping to illustrate the vast scale of shutdowns in the world’s second biggest economy.
“This year, the reduction rate is more significant than in past years and it has lasted longer,” Liu said. “I am not surprised because many cities nationwide have taken measures to minimize spread of the virus.”
Although such measures are taking an economic toll, not only in China but throughout the world (cancelled flights, reluctance to 'shop til you drop', stock market corrections, etc.), the natural world is in fact benefiting.
Homeostasis is a self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival.
I can't help but wonder if Covid-19 is part of nature's efforts toward that end.
I posted recently about the Teck tarsands development that is seeking the Trudeau regime's approval. If the government gives its go-ahead to the project, it will destroy whatever remnants remain of Mr. Trudeau's claims to green bona fides, not to mention the incalculable damage such a massive enterprise will do to the world's remaining carbon budget.
In today's print edition of The Star, John Stephenson of Toronto offers his perspective:
World co-operation is required to solve the climate crisis. Co-operation requires trust. How is the world to ever trust Canada if it approves the gigantic new Teck Frontier oilsands mine?
Here is what Bill McKibbon recently wrote about us in the Guardian: “If an alcoholic assured you he was taking his condition very seriously, but also laying in a 40-year store of bourbon, you’d be entitled to doubt his sincerity, or at least to note his confusion. Oil has addled the Canadian ability to do basic math: more does not equal less, and 2066 is not any time soon. An emergency means you act now.”
He concludes: “Trudeau, for all his charms, doesn’t get to have it both ways: if you can’t bring yourself to stop a brand-new tar sands mine then you’re not a climate leader.”
Approving Frontier probably won’t appease Alberta. But it will burn bridges with all environmentalists and the rest of the world. It’s simply not worth it.
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