The Great Pause Week 76: The Goats of Juan Fernandes Island

"The world’s population is now leveling off to 10 billion. There it will stay, do whatever anyone will."

 

image by author after Landscape with a Goat and Two Dogs (1644) by Hendrick Hondius

In 1786, an anonymous “Well-Wisher to Mankind,” later revealed as one Joseph Townsend, published in London A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. In it he described the history of an island named Juan Fernandes in the South Seas. 

In this sequestered spot, John Fernando placed a colony of goats, consisting of one male, attended by his female. This happy couple finding pasture in abundance, could readily obey the first commandment, to increase and multiply, till in process of time they had replenished their little island. 

The inevitable outcome, of course, was that having no natural goat predators on the island, the goats continued to multiply until they had exhausted the food supply and began to starve. Then the colony was reduced in number until a balance was again struck, after which the population rebounded, followed by famine, and the cycle repeated.

When the Spaniards found that the English privateers resorted to this island for provisions, they resolved on the total extirpation of the goats, and for this purpose they put on shore a greyhound dog and bitch. These in their turn increased and multiplied, in proportion to the quantity of food they met with; but in consequence, as the Spaniards had foreseen, the breed of goats diminished. Had they been totally destroyed, the dogs likewise must have perished. But as many of the goats retired to the craggy rocks, where the dogs could never follow them, descending only for short intervals to feed with fear and circumspection in the valleys, few of these, besides the careless and the rash, became a prey; and none but the most watchful, strong, and active of the dogs could get a sufficiency of food. Thus a new kind of balance was established. The weakest of both species were among the first to pay the debt of nature; the most active and vigorous preserved their lives. 

From this Townsend drew the lesson and purpose for his pamphlet: “It is the quantity of food which regulates the numbers of the human species.”

After reading Townsend, the ecologist Garrett Harden asked, 

If all this great earth be no more than the Island of Juan Fernandes, and if we are the goats, how can we live “the good life” without a functional equivalent of the dogs? Must we create and sustain our own dogs? Can we do so, consciously? And if we can, what manner of beast will they be?

Perhaps the beast they be is a novel coronavirus. Like the process of evolution that weans out those dogs lacking sufficient stealth and climbing skill to catch a goat, with each generation, or variant, this virus becomes more fit for purpose. Its purpose is not to exterminate us; the killing is merely a consequence of its breeding scheme. Its purpose is to reproduce.

Our breeding is much slower, as much as two decades between generations, and as we have seen, a virus can evolve many times in the course of a year.

We likely can’t develop immunity for every virus or parasite that comes along. We haven’t yet for Ebola, HIV, or many others, after decades of trying. We should probably be grateful for these beasts, because if it weren’t for them we might have already perished of thirst or starvation, surrounded by multitudes of like kind in parched and famished condition.

Townsend’s conclusion about food regulating population, while embraced by Darwin and Malthus, also drew its critics. Francis Bowen, writing a century later, concluded:

On examining the facts in the case more closely, it will always be found that it is not the excess of population which causes the misery, but the misery which causes the excess of population.

***

Universally the law is, that the numbers of the poor increase most rapidly, of the middle classes more slowly, and of the upper or wealthier ones either not at all, or so slowly as hardly to be perceptible. ‘By a singular anomaly,’ says Alison, a well-informed English writer upon the subject, ‘the rapidity of increase is in the inverse ratio of the means which are afforded of maintaining a family in comfort and independence. It is greatest when these means are least, and least when they are the greatest.’ 

According to Bowen, the goats and dogs on the island would have reproduced most when food and comfort were at their lowest ebb. By crude analogy, Nigeria is expected to surpass China and India to become the most populous country by mid-century, not because it is best positioned of the three to afford it, but in large part because its people are the poorest. 

Bowen’s hypothesis is the foundation of present day sustainable development goals that assume that to curb population we must first raise standards of living.

In the late Hans Rosling’s popular TEDx Talk, “Religions and Babies,” the demographer said it was neither wealth nor poverty that determined population growth after 1960. Neither was it religion or cultural factors. It may have been food and comfort up to a point, but no longer. The world’s population is now leveling off to 10 billion. There it will stay, do whatever anyone will. 

Rosling said that what arrests increase in human population today are four factors: children surviving to reach adulthood, children not needed for work, women getting an education and joining the labor force, and accessible means of family planning. 

We have reached peak child. The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child. And the world population will stop growing. The United Nations Population Division has said it will stop growing at 10 billion. … So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future, for human beings on this planet, you have to plan for 10 billion. 

There is a great deal of worrisome hand-waving in countries like Italy, China, and France about negative population growth and what it will mean for the economy. There it is again, the “e” word we hear whenever we are told schools and businesses must reopen even without mask rules, contact tracing or vaccinations for all students and teachers. The ‘“e” is more important than other values, apparently, such as health, or life. 

China need not worry. It only has to look to Tibet, Nepal or Bhutan. It can find examples of quality of living rising even as economies and populations decline. There is a science to that, as important — more important I would argue — than putting robots on Mars or hailing autonomous Didi Chuxing gyrocopters. 

Goats and the dogs are a stable system. Together they co-evolve to make a better goats and dogs.

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References:

Anon. 1786. London: A Dissertation on the Poor Laws.
Bowen F. 1879. Malthusianism, Darwinism, and Pessimism, North American Review.
Hardin, G. Ed, 1964. Population, Evolution and Birth Control: A Collage of Controversial Readings, San Francisco: Freeman & Co.. 
Rosling H. 2012. “Religions and Babies,” May 22, 2012 TEDx Talk

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 75: Rolling the DICE

"How do you advance climate measures without negative social feedback unwinding the whole proposition?"

A flurry of carbon pricing bills await the US Congress when it returns from vacation next month. Fifteen now pending are supported by Democrats and 5 of those are also supported by Republicans. 

With 79 co-sponsors, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act ($15/tC from 2021 rising 10%/y+inflation) is the most broadly supported carbon pricing bill in Congress at the moment. Its economy-wide price on carbon would push for net zero by 2050. Ninety percent of USAnians would receive a dividend that would more than offset the higher prices caused by the fees. 

America’s Clean Future Fund Act ($25/tC from 2023 rising 10%/y+inflation) also includes an economy-wide carbon price with 75 percent of revenue returned to households as dividends and the rest invested in clean energy and transition assistance to state and local governments. 

The Climate Action Rebate Act ($15/tC from 2021 rising $15/y+inflation) has a high price trajectory with 70% of revenue returned to households as dividends and the remainder invested in infrastructure, research and development, and transition assistance. 

The Save Our Future Act pairs a carbon price ($54/tC from 2023 rising 6%/y) with a price on other air pollutants. The money from the fee goes as direct payments to US citizens, investments in frontline impact fossil fuel communities, and block grants to states. 

The Market Choice Act ($35/tC from 2023 rising 5% + inflation) is a bipartisan infrastructure bill with a modest carbon price that rebates to fund climate adaptation. 

The Consumers Rebate Act ($25/tC from 2021 rising 10%/y) offers 0.5 to 1 percentage point reduction in individual income tax rates (four lowest brackets only) and after block grants divides 80 percent for “quarterly citizen rebates.” 

The American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act ($52/tC from 2020 rising 6% + inflation) would give tax credits, Social Security beneficiary payments, and $10 billion in block grants. 

The Stemming Warming and Augmenting Pay Act ($30/tC from 2021 rising 5% + inflation + $3/y) would give 70 percent in payroll tax cuts. 

The Raise Wages Cut Carbon Act ($44/tC from 2020 rising 2.5% + inflation) and America Wins Act ($52/tC from 2020 rising 6% + inflation) would only apply to energy sector emissions. 

The Healthy Climate and Family Security Act would auction GHG pollution permits and send 100 percent of revenues in quarterly dividends to most legal residents, equally.

Under all of these bills there are more winners than losers. The vast majority of taxpayers would receive more money than climate solutions will cost them.

The wildfire driving these bills, more than the actual, bipartisan, fires in Western States, may be the incipient trade war. EU and China are planning to extend taxes or carbon fees to Scope 2 (supplier energy use) and Scope 3 (customer) emissions for their domestic companies.

This is going to seriously degrade US exports if the Congress fails to enact its own fee system first. The Save Our Future Act imposes an “Equivalency Fee” on energy-intensive manufactured goods (5% energy cost minimum) but reduces it if the importing partner country imposes “carbon-based fees.” The Market Choice Act imposes a trade tariff based on GHG intensity of the manufacturing sector. The America Wins Act subsidizes fossil fuel and “carbon-intensive goods” exports to counter foreign tariffs and puts a tariff on C-intense imports. The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act and the America’s Clean Future Fund Act make border adjustments for iron, steel, aluminum, cement, glass, pulp, paper, chemicals, and ceramics. While export of fossil fuels would be exempt by the Consumers Rebate Act, a “Carbon Equivalency Fee” would be imposed on “imports of goods containing or produced” using fossil fuels but would exempt trade partners with equivalent measures.

In my first installment of this series I went back to a 1992 paper by W.D. Nordhaus that plunged headlong into the mire of carbon taxation. In Nordhaus’s optimization path, a carbon tax of $5 per ton from 1990, gradually rising to $20 by 2100 would hold Earth to 1.5C above 1900 levels. Later revisions of his “Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy,” or DICE — put the social cost of carbon at about $88 per ton by 2050. The Obama administration’s estimates pegged the sweet spot at $50 a ton, but the Trump administration cut the estimate to as little as $1. Biden estimates roughly match Obama’s, coming in at $51.

In a Nature paper published July 27, Daniel Bressler updated Nordhaus’ DICE model for the social cost of carbon to $258 per ton and another paper scheduled for publication August 24 in PNAS puts the Social Cost of CO2 (SCC) at 24.5% greater when tipping points are incorporated rather than ignored. It is important to note, however, that 25% is just the median estimate, with 50% confidence. The paper’s high-end estimate is 347.8% higher social costs when factoring tipping points like melting permafrost and the slowing Atlantic Current. I described last week how we currently spend more than $1600 per ton paying polluters to pollute. It would seem to me the price to un-pollute the same CO2 should at least equal that.

What it means is, there’s a small-but-not-negligible chance that we are currently underestimating the cost of carbon emissions by as much as 250 percent or more. If that is true, we’re really giving bad policy advice, as in, “market mechanisms” vs. “wartime footing.”

— David Roberts

My own thought exercises in this area go back to the 1980s when I was litigating climate change in court. In that process I interviewed a number of climate scientists who had been ruminating along these lines. I wanted to tease out some of their ideas when I was working on my book, Climate in Crisis, but by 1989 when I sent the final manuscript to the publisher, most proposals for carbon exchanges were still too poorly formed to include. Rather than publish some hazy ideas then emerging from Irish peak-oilers or an obscure K-Street think tank called Global Commons Institute, I decided, with editors Matthew McClure, Rachel Sythe and Barbara Wallace, to limit the discussion to two subchapters in my chapter called “Twenty-One Better Ideas.” Sub 13 was “Establish World Targets:”

The United States has the means to reduce its energy costs by $220 billion per year, above and beyond the $150 already saved by recent improvements. The price for this cost reduction would be an investment of only $50 billion, meaning that the investment could be completely paid off in just 83 days.

The world could have a 2 percent annual rate of efficiency improvement for the next decade without having to come up with any new technology — we already know how to do it. To sustain a 2 percent improvement rate beyond the year 2000 will require a little more effort and innovation, but that effort, estimated to cost $15 billion, would reduce energy consumption to one-third of present levels over a 50-year period.

Some countries have been achieving this 2-percent target for the past 15 years. The technology is steadily improving. We can make buildings all over the world as efficient as they are in Sweden, industrial factories as efficient as they are in Japan, and automobiles as efficient as the best French and German prototypes, with very little additional capital outlay, and with a rapid pay-back from reduced energy overhead. Why don’t we do it? Up until now, we haven’t considered it all that important.

Sub 14 was “Tax Greenhouse Gases:”

The moment we put a dollar per ton tax on the emission of carbon dioxide, we will see a change in the rate at which industries discharge carbon. It may take a year or two, but everything that can be done to save that dollar, if it costs less than a dollar, will be done. When we reach that point we need to raise it to 2 dollars per ton. Then it needs to go to 3 dollars per ton. … [A] carbon tax of $50 per ton would raise the price of gasoline by seventeen cents per gallon and of electricity by 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. It would cost consumers some $240 per year in the United States and $9 in India. These are not insurmountable sums, especially if they were reached gradually, over the course of several years, And yet, a $50 tax on each ton of CO2 could raise nearly $300 billion annually, more than enough to offset the diverse economic impacts that may accompany the worldwide shift toward sustainability.

There is more in Climate in Crisis, and I recommend it if you can find a remaindered copy on EBay, but at this stage I want everyone to notice the $300 billion. Where does that go? How does it get to those people and companies who will be most harmed by the tax? One way would be to make it an actual tax and let government dispense it. There are many perils in that approach, not the least being negative social feedback that could unwind the whole proposition — or “strangle the baby in the crib,” to use the anti-tax rhetoric of that period. 

Contraction and Convergence

At the Global Commons Institute, the idea of putting these billions to social use and rebranding climate mitigation as a “tax” was batted around until they came up with the idea, c.1989, of “Contraction and Convergence.” Their notion was to reduce overall emissions of greenhouse gases to a safe level (contraction) by leveling emissions per capita to an equal degree for all countries (convergence). The burdens of carbon taxing would fall mainly on the wealthy and profligate consumer countries, which would incentivize rapid decarbonization. C&C proposed to dispense the billions in tax revenues to bring up standards of living in the poorer two-thirds world, a sustainable development “dividend.” The UN formally adopted a version of C&C in the run-up to Kyoto (COP-3) in 1997. 

At Kyoto, the UNFCCC and IPCC pushed the concept as the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” an utterly ham-fisted ad slogan that obscured the whole dividend idea by appealing to moral duty rather than greed. No-one there had worked in advertising, obviously. They acknowledged that individual countries have different capabilities in combating climate change, owing to fossil-powered development, and therefore the obligation to reduce current emissions should fall most heavily on developed countries, on the basis of historical responsibility.

Al Gore was one of the white knights who brokered the final deal, bringing together the African, Indian and Chinese delegations, former Eastern Bloc countries and 36 reluctant overdeveloped (Annex I) countries, the former colonial powers and designated shame-ees. When he got home he was sent to the doghouse. It could have been worse. He might have been sent back to Harvard to study the public relations campaigns of Edward Bernays. 

Faced with a divided and climate-hostile Congress that abhorred a treaty that let China and Russia off the hook for emissions reductions, President Bill Clinton declined to forward the treaty for ratification — a pocket veto of sorts. Canada, Japan, New Zealand Aotearoa and Russia later dropped out. While coal-burning countries like India and China used C&C as an excuse to dig more coal mines and burn Arabian oil, the emissions of Annex I countries also increased 32% by 2010. Kyoto was a poster child for how NOT to write climate laws. 

Cap and Share

My late friend and collaborator Richard Douthwaite explained the drawbacks of C&C to me when we spoke from the same podium on my Irish tours because, while our expertise was different — he the economist and me the permaculturist — we converged on recommendations. “Cap and Share” was his invention. 

Cap and Share provided that emissions allocations be distributed equally to individuals as a common right because the atmosphere was a global commons. As a pragmatic compromise, Richard allowed a convergence period, during which the richer countries would receive higher per capita emissions allowances than poorer countries as they weaned themselves from their high living addictions. A rainy day fund would also be held back for use in countries facing exceptional difficulties, such as for Kiribati to relocate its islanders to higher ground in Australia. The system published by Feasta (the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, which Douthwaite founded), called for global emissions to be capped at their 2005 level and then brought down year by year at a rate fast enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. 

A cap and share report, commissioned by the government of Ireland, proposed every person on Earth receive a carbon certificate representing their share of the emissions budget. They could sell their certificates to their post office or bank which could then re-sell them to oil, coal, gas, cement or steel manufacturers, or other polluters.

The similarity of this scheme to the Alaskan Permanent Fund did not escape Douthwaite and the others at Feasta. Alaska taxes its fossil miners and drillers and writes a royalty check to every resident every year. It is wildly popular and now virtually untouchable by fossil-funded state legislators and governors who would love nothing more than to raid or dissolve it.

There are some obvious flaws in Cap and Share, as there were with Contraction and Convergence. Richard Douthwaite went on to tussle with these for the remainder of his life, in The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet in 1992; Short Circuit in 1996, The Ecology of Money in 1999; and in 2003 he edited Before the Wells Run Dry, a study of the transition to renewable energy in the wake of climate change and peak everything. 

One glaring flaw in C&S was the perverse incentive that a per capita distribution would create to make larger families and increase national populations either by fecundity or immigration. Because population size is an underlying driver of climate change, the effect of paying people or countries to have more children by issuing certificates per capita would be the same as paying them to emit more CO2. 

Another flaw is the possibility of venue shopping if the agreement was not universal, not enforceable, and not equitable. Polluters would merely shop for places they can emit tax-free.

Cap and Dividend

Richard was exploring putting a sunset provision into Cap and Share and closing the venue shopping loophole when Peter Barnes, co-founder of the Working Assets Money Fund and a board member of Greenpeace introduced his Sky Trust concept. His goal was “limiting the amount of carbon that can be put into the atmosphere [by] allowing the free market to set a price on the right to emit carbon; collecting revenue from those who buy those rights; and returning earned revenue” to the commons — a la an Alaskan Permanent Fund for the world. “Sky Trust” was rebranded as “Cap and Dividend” in advance of the 2008 elections in order to raise its profile, but President Obama, advised on climate policy by Hillary Clinton, had a tin ear, choosing instead to pursue an “all of the above” energy independence strategy for the United States, tip of the hat to the Illinois coal unions down in Carbondale.

Cap and Dividend employs a gradually reducing cap on fossil use coupled with a universal benefit that would disproportionately affect people emitting more. Every month the government would send out another dividend check and people that conserve the most or produced the least pollution would get a bigger reward, or at least feel it more, than a person who has to pay higher prices refueling their Hummer or power yacht, or air conditioning their summer house in the Hamptons.

When President Cobblepot took office in 2017, several elder statesmen of the Grand Old Party called upon him to introduce cap and dividend, knowing just how good it would be for business and banking, and at the voting booths. These included former Secretaries of State James Baker and George Shultz and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The President was less interested in actually governing than golfing and his crime family was there to rake the coals at the Treasury (running up negative $4 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthy), so needless to say, anything having to do with climate change was a non-starter. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out of the Oval Office, thank you very much.

In Climate in Crisis in 1990, I wrote:

Every nation needs to put a cost on destruction of forests, topsoil and biological diversity. Every nation needs to make pollution prevention pay. But nations are afraid to act unilaterally, because to do so can place them at a competitive disadvantage. The solution is to establish world targets and provide for fair incentives to move toward them. 

One way to link economic rewards for responsible climate policy would be to tie international rate of monetary exchange to protection of the environment. Nations would receive credit for strict regulation of manufacturing processes and lose credit for wastefulness and pollution. Currencies could receive value for reductions in birth rates, cessations in production of greenhouse gases, and topsoil preservation. They could lose value for use of high sulfur coal, loss of forests, or production of acid rain.

We are living wastefully, but we have been insulated from the consequences because we have begun to spend Earth’s capital as if it were income. We may not notice that we are borrowing from our children. Our children will notice.

As Edward Bernays might have told Al Gore, our evolutionary psychology inclines us away from the word “change.” We avoid pain. We seek reward, whether deserved or not — especially if not deserved. Greed trumps noble sacrifice. To ultimately succeed in reversing climate change we need to overcome normalcy bias, confirmation bias, and simplicity bias. 

I, like most USAnians, will likely notice that dividend check arriving in my mailbox every month. That is how we reverse climate change. The sponsors of the bills listed at the top of this page understand that it is they who will be rewarded.

_________________

References:

Barnes, P. 2001. Who owns the sky? : our common assets and the future of capitalism. Washington, DC: Island Press. ISBN 1–55963–854–0. OCLC 46590035. 

Barnes, P. 2008. Climate Solutions: A Citizen’s Guide. Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN 978–1–60358–005–2.

Barnes, P. 2008. “Testimony of Peter Barnes to the House Ways and Means Committee” (PDF). US House of Representatives. (September 18, 2008)

Deitz, S., J. Rising, T. Stoerk and G. Wagner, 2021.  Economic impacts of tipping points in the climate system. PNAS August 24, 2021 118 (34) e2103081118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103081118

Revkin, A. 2008. “Paying the Cost of Climate Control”. NY Times Dot Earth Blog. 1/2/2008

 

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 The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#GenerationRestoration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

---

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 74: The Cost of Climate Solutions

"We may not have noticed that we are borrowing from our children. Our children have noticed."\

Some of the future occupants of 160 unmarked graves found at Kuper Island School, B.C., operated from 1890 to 1975 by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate

All of the books I have written about climate change — Climate in Crisis, Post-Petroleum Survival Guide, The Biochar Solution, Burn — have had sections on money somewhere towards the conclusion. That is because a real solution requires system change and money is at the heart. 

The best things in life are free
But you can keep them for the birds and bees
Now give me money
That’s what I want

 — Money (That’s What I Want), 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr, Janie Bradford, Motown Records

A paper published in the journal Nature Communications July 29 tried to calculate the present cost of climate change. Unlike earlier attempts, the author, R. Daniel Bressler of Columbia University Center for Environmental Economics and Policy, calculated the numerator first in deaths, not dollars. The denominator is lifestyle. 

One per 3 point 5

The lifetime emissions at 2020 levels of 3.5 North Americans will result in one additional heat-related death in this century, most probably in the global South. The worldwide average is 12.8 modern, carbon-intensive lifestyles to cause that single death.

The new research also shows the stark difference between personal carbon footprints and the kind of change that can be achieved through actions at the scale of government and business. Having calculated that 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere would result in one death during this century, Mr. Bressler said that simply taking one coal-fired power plant offline and replacing it with a zero-emissions alternative for just one year, would result in a “mortality benefit of saving 904 lives” over the century. “That would be a lot more impact than a personal decision,” he said.

 — The New York Times July 29, 2021

One per 3.5 is akin to an average US family having a slave brought into their home from some distant colony. Once that slave has provided the family the lifestyle to which they are accustomed, he/she is quietly disposed of, like a native child at a 20th Century Canadian Residential School.

In 1992, PNAS published a paper by Nobel laureate economist William Nordhaus, “An optimal transition path for controlling greenhouse gases.” Nordhaus was a climate moderate, advocating a graduated carbon tax and abjuring “rigid emissions or climate-stabilization approaches.” His dynamic optimization model, or DICE, factored the social and economic costs of change against his perceived, albeit nearsighted, costs of staying the course. The 1992 paper ran through five scenarios:

• Business as usual meant that no controls would be imposed and humans would simply adapt. 
• Optimization meant that reductions would come by policy changes starting in 1990 and hold warming to 1.5°C. Nordhaus said that could be accomplished with a net economic benefit of $199 billion (1989 dollars) per year. 
• Emissions stabilization to, say, 1990 levels, would come at a cost. While rejected by the US delegation at Rio in June 1992, this would later be adopted at COP-3 in Kyoto in 1996. Nordhaus said stabilization implied reduction of emissions to 8 GtC (29 GtCO2-e), or approximately 75% of present. He said it offered simplicity at the expense of scientific and economic merit.
• Climate stabilization is a more ambitious approach and the one later made law in Paris in 2015. To Nordhaus it required slowing warming by 0.2°C per decade after 1985, capping at 1.5°C from the 1900 benchmark. While he was reasonably accurate on his estimates, Nordhaus considered this approach foolhardy. 
• Geoengineering is what he found to be the most promising, if controversial. He conceded that that it would first need to be proven technically feasible and economically and environmentally benign, but he well understood the discount rate for technological innovation and Moore’s Law. He estimated any climate solutions expenditure less than $4.1 trillion would create a net savings, which is remarkably insightful for 1992. He estimated that spending that much would mean adding less than 1% to the costs of goods in the future (which he termed, “discounted consumption”).

In Nordhaus’s optimization path, the world (coordinated by the UN or some other organization such as the Global Economic Forum) would adopt a carbon tax of $5 per ton from 1990, gradually rising to $20 by 2100. Alternatively, if the world went for the simplistic approach of emissions stabilization, we would need a CO2 tax of $100/ton early in the 21st century, reaching around $800 in the second half, which Nordhaus equated to a tax of $7 per ton of coal and 80 cents per barrel of oil, bringing in about $3 trillion/yr in revenues. 

The Nordhaus model — the “Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy,” or DICE — pegged the social cost of CO2 at about $37 per metric ton. The Obama administration estimated $50 per ton, but the Trump administration cut that to as little as $1. The Biden administration is working on its own social cost of carbon, expected early next year; a preliminary figure released in February roughly matched Obama’s.

Nordhaus updated his model in 2016 and arrived at $31.2 per ton of CO2 for emissions in 2015, with the value rising at 3% per year in real terms to $88/t in 2050. That was for a 2-degree limit that Nordhaus believed could still be attained through negative emissions. Slipping the target to 2.5 degrees meant that social costs would climb to $184 per tCO2. Multiply 42 gigatons times $184 and you have an annual social cost of $7.7 trillion, although I don’t think you would find any Maldive Islanders or residents of Lytton BC willing to put a price on their ancestral homes.

Swiss Re estimates that insured losses from catastrophes in the first half of this year topped $42 billion. Uninsured losses are incalculable.

Daniel Bressler updated Nordhaus’ DICE estimate of the social cost of CO2 to $258 per metric ton. This is not the highest estimate out there. Various international agencies and non-governmental organizations have attempted to calculate the subsidies being paid to fossil industries. According to the International Monetary Fund, the world subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of $6 trillion per year (~$600 per carbon ton). This is what we currently pay the Exxons and Aramcos of the world to pollute, beyond the usual $1000 per ton refiners pay them for their products.

Nordhaus’ benefits side of the equation has also been updated. At the 2020 World Economic Forum it was reported that carbon capture technologies will realize $1 trillion to $3 trillion dollars in market opportunities and another $3 trillion to $5 trillion in broader economic, social and environmental benefits per year by 2030. Nordhaus didn’t think that a $3 trillion benefit would be reached before the end of this century.

In my view, enhanced photosynthesis in combination with carbon conversion to biochar and bio-oils is the best value proposition, can mobilize philanthropy and government incentives in the early stages, and then be driven by the market. Biochar does not require a high peg per carbon ton because it is already profitable and anything that comes its way from selling carbon credits is gravy. It’s a disruptive technology already.

Infanticidal Cults

My own thought exercises in this area began in 1988, while I was working on Climate in Crisis and after I had interviewed a number of climate scientists who had been thinking along similar lines. I will take up that discussion and go through Contraction and Convergence, Cap and Share, Fee and Dividend, and finally the carbon tax legislation now moving through the US Congress when I pick up this thread again in the next installment.

Before I close out this part, let me quote the way I ended my riff on carbon taxes in Climate in Crisis in 1990, more than a decade before Greta Thunberg was born. I wrote:

We are living wastefully, but we have been insulated from the consequences because we have begun to spend Earth’s capital as if it were income. We may not notice that we are borrowing from our children. Our children will notice.

… And so may that slave that every one of our families is holding, praying their death sentence will be overturned. In the Canadian Residential Schools —and make no mistake, the US and Australia had them also — the death penalty was doled out to reluctant or tardy children who would not quickly convert from carbon-balanced lifestyles to climate-altering consumerism. The death penalty for failing to make the reverse conversion is the new normal for the rest of us.

References

Draper, K., 2016. The Biochar Displacement Strategy, Biochar Journal Nov 2016, 

Nordhaus W.D., 1992. An optimal transition path for controlling greenhouse gases. Science 258(5086):1315–1319. 

Nordhaus, W.D., 2017. Revisiting the social cost of carbon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(7), pp.1518–1523. 

Schwartz, J., 2021. A Carbon Calculation: How Many Deaths Do Emissions Cause? The New York Times. July 29, 2021, Updated Aug. 5, 2021.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

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The Great Pause Week 73: Descending the Volcano

"Natural climate solutions are waiting, palms outstretched, for the capitalization to get rolling."

MONACO, December 12, 2029. Microsoft founder Bill Gates released to authorities today the engineering study his foundation commissioned following the catastrophic explosion May 8th in this city. The report by consulting firm Explogenics describes second-by-second details of the attack that sank Gates’ nuclear-powered yacht, Earth 300, along with 12 other super yachts within the blast radius, and contaminated a large portion of the Monaco waterfront, which is still cordoned off.

The terrorist suspect apprehended in the immediate aftermath, French national Franz Wilber, confessed to police he was “getting back at Gates” by firing a single bullet into his yacht because he believed the billionaire had implanted microchips in his brain while forced to undergo a compulsory vaccination in 2021. 

According to the engineering study, the event began when Wilber, concealed on a balcony close to the Earth 300’s anchorage, fired a single rifle shot into an open porthole 132 meters from his position. The shot passed through the window and penetrated an insulated cooling duct for the ship’s air conditioning system, coming to rest in ceramic coating surrounding a coolant pipe. The impact created a microcrack in the interior steel pipe and within milliseconds, exposed to the heat and pressure of the liquid sodium coolant circulating though the pipe from the nuclear reactor, propagated a crack that exposed a pinhole aperture to the interior. In contact with moist ambient air, the molten, radioactive sodium underwent a heat-generating explosive reaction, creating a fireball that acted like a pipe bomb inside the steel and ceramic plumbing enclosure that ran the length of the ship. 

The initial reaction though the pinhole served as a trigger for a much larger event, opening up the cracked pipe and exposing the entire molten sodium contents surrounding the reactor core to the moist air. This created the much larger secondary explosion that destroyed the marina and was observed more than twenty miles away. It sent fragments of the reactor core hurtling in all directions, some traveling more than a kilometer. The explosion killed 132 persons immediately, another 418 from radiation sickness in the following weeks, and injured at least 4300. 

Authorities have not said whether they will charge Gates with criminal negligence in bringing the Earth 300 into a crowded port. 

_____

In many of these posts I have referred to Charles Mann’s book, The Wizard and the Prophet, that described the bipolar cultural warfare fueling many of our problems. 

Sebastian Junger’s Tribe is another book I like. It describes in imperfect detail — the kind that begs Michael Pollan to tackle — how our genetic evolution inclines us to form herds and either migrate towards noble goals or be stampeded off a cliff. 

Mann’s prophet tribe is led by his central character William Vogt, although he could have as easily described John Muir, David Brower, or Chief Seattle. William Vogt was one of the original thinkers behind the environmental movement, at one point the director of Planned Parenthood, and a strong proponent of re-wilding. 

Mann means ‘prophet’ in an almost derisive sense — the old man in the sackcloth and sandwich boards railing against the sins of the world. History may well prove Vogt a prophet in the other sense — a man well ahead of his time, accurately forecasting what would later come to be. 

 — The Great Pause Week 38: Corn Science Objectors (12/6/20)

To prophets, billion-year experimental laboratory experiments in evolutionary biology describe an elegantly complex and interconnected universe that supplies all needs. We adolescent two-legged interlopers — bulls in the porcelain shop — disturb that harmony at our peril. We need to learn respect, awe, and a tender touch. 

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann
From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493--an incisive portrait of the two little-known…www.penguinrandomhouse.com

Mann’s wizard tribe contains the inventors, engineers, and dreamers, led by the charismatic Norman Borlaug, who, by intention or consequence, change the world. 

Borlaug was a technophile. He found ready support from the Rockefeller Foundation and many governments for his cornucopian vision of a limitless human prospect. He almost never wanted for funds to carry out large scale projects and was in part responsible for spreading to factories around the world the Haber-Bosch process of making nitrogen, rapidly hybridizing seed into genetic monocultures, and modernizing agriculture to resemble an automotive assembly line. 

Wizards are the grand disturbers around whom a new order must align. There is little in the Anthropocene that remains untouched, from viral transcription to subatomic binding energy; election-warping social media algorithms to cryptocurrency. For Borlaug it was chemical fertilizer and mechanical harvesters.

What seems to become clearer as we pass through to the second year of our Great Pause is that the tribal alignment Mann describes could as easily apply to the divisions between economists and public health guardians. The former go long on Big Pharma. The latter short ICU beds and PPE.

I have nothing against Climeworks raising 100 billion in private capital. As a VC investor friend often says, “There is no competition because so far nobody is putting up real money.” If Climeworks can draw out a small downpayment for a livable future by going to the hottest geothermal geolocation — Iceland, site of Jules Vernes’ Journey to the Center of the Earth — and instead of descending into a volcano to discover the last remaining dinosaurs, pull dollops of CO2 from the carbon-rich volcanic air and pump it back down into those deep subterranean caverns to bond permanently with basalt, I will not argue, even if they suffocate a few dinosaurs in the process.

Nuclear power, however, is another matter, as my Gates yacht scenario illustrates.

Retrofuturism

Last month Vancouver-based General Fusion announced it was on track to supply commercial fusion electricity in the UK. The $300 million dollar prototype, funded by public and private sources, blows smoke rings and then pounds them into plasma by hammering steel pistons onto the tokamak exterior to pulse concussion waves through the interior. Lead engineer Rube Goldberg told CNBC the device will not generate energy when it goes online in 2025, but will “demonstrate the viability of the approach.” By “the approach” General Fusion may mean stringing along taxpayers and investors for yet another decade.

Decimal positions were moved, not to increase safety, but to gaslight investigators.

In 1975, physicist Amory Lovins called the nuclear industry a dying dinosaur, but cautioned that its thrashing tail might still be dangerous. Even putting aside the obvious fault-lines with bomb proliferation, costs, and uninsurability, by 1978 there was ample epidemiology to rule out the viability of atomic power as an energy source. 

By that date we had plenty of proof of devastating disease and mortality among radium watch dial painters, Hiroshima survivors, the Tri-State Leukemia victims, the Mancuso study of Hanford plutonium workers, the Bross study of thorium and uranium fuel fabrication workers in Tennessee, the Oak Ridge cancer clusters, the Navajo downwinders, and the mill tailings clusters in Edgemont, South Dakota. That was long before data came in from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, but those were accidents, and you know, accidents happen. 

These other gruesome fatalities were all planned. They were the design basis. In 1981, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stipulated to the United States Supreme Court in Honicker vs. Palladino, and published in the Federal Register the number of routine, design-basis, non-accidental deaths to be expected from then-licensed US power reactors. They set that number at 1.7 million civilians, disproportionately those living closest to the plants. I would say they were low by at least an order of magnitude based on best science, but let’s give them their number.

The industry reacted to the official government number by fielding public relations teams on loan from Big Tobacco. Almost overnight the “biology” terminology used for 40 years to describe ionizing radiation’s effect on the human body — Roentgens, rads and rem — changed to more obscure “physics” terminology — Becquerels, Sieverts and Grays — obsoleting many of the epidemiological studies done before the 1990s. Correlations suddenly seemed to casual readers to be off by orders of magnitude. Decimal positions were moved, not to increase safety, but to gaslight investigators.

No Immediate Danger?
by Rosalie Bertell (1986-01-03) on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. No Immediate…www.amazon.com

Almost forgotten in all this was Dr. Rosalie Bertell’s 1985 book, No Immediate Danger, that provided epidemiological evidence to sustain the proposition that higher ambient nuclear radiation exposure (lifetime exposure has doubled since 1945) reduces the body’s immune capacity, and specifically resistance to radiation exposure — in successive generations. Bertell theorized that nuclear energy’s greatest public health danger — largely being ignored — is that the two curves could cross some time in the future, with generations of immune-compromised individuals being born into a natural global environment sufficiently radioactive that they cannot survive, leading to human extinction.

I already know what our wizard friends would say to this. “Don’t worry,” they would say. “We have CRISPR!” Presumedly we will just genetically engineer humans to remove the damage we’ll cause by building a new generation of small modular thorium reactors cooled by molten salt. The pro-nuke wizards label nuclear opponents concern about radiation “irrational.

Natural Climate Solutions

The greatest irony in all this is that it is so unnecessary. I have previously described in these pages how natural climate solutions with none of the attendant risks of the high tech, high energy, high profit kind are waiting, palms outstretched, for a much smaller amount of capitalization — minuscule compared to fission or fusion — to get rolling. 

If ramped up to a planting rate of 200 million hectares per year (Mha/yr), equivalent to four Spains, in 24 years [climate ecoforestry] would cover 4.8 Gha and be sequestering 14.6 gigatons of carbon per year (GtC/yr) or 2.7 times the current net global emissions. Can we find 4.8 Gha to plant? Yes, and without disturbing existing farms, cities, or having to green the deserts (although that may also be desirable as we restore larger hydrological cycles). The land is there at the margins, and it has been inventoried and cataloged. Climate change is actually expanding the no-longer-commercially-viable land available for these uses.

Because Earth’s oceans balance carbon concentrations with the atmosphere, as carbon is withdrawn from one, the other responds by refilling it. To remove six gigatonnes from the atmosphere and have it stay that way, we have to actually remove twelve.

The model shows that continuing rotational cycles at 200 Mha/yr on the same land would sequester a cumulative 667 GtC (2446 GtCO2-e), the amount of carbon required to bring atmospheric CO2 back to pre-industrial 300 ppm by year 56. By lowering fossil fuel emissions to zero (by 2035? 2050?), 300 ppm could be reached even sooner. If the rate of implementation were raised to 300 Mha/yr, the goal of 300 ppm could be reached in years 35 to 37 from startup.

 — Climate Ecoforestry: Want to leap the social barrier to cool living? Behold: a stargate! (3/5/17) 

Bronson Griscom of Nature Conservancy and a team of 32 international researchers reached similar conclusions in 2017 with their “Natural Climate Solutions” study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. 

The response of the nuclear boosters, confronted with the obvious limiting factors to their ability to scale — not the least of which is massive mortality and morbidity even to the point of near term human extinction — has been to sweep it under the rug so future generations will grow up ignorant until oops! They do it again.
_____________

References

46 Federal Register 39573 (August 4, 1981) 
Griscom, B.W., Adams, J., Ellis, P.W., Houghton, R.A., Lomax, G., Miteva, D.A., Schlesinger, W.H., Shoch, D., Siikamäki, J.V., Smith, P. and Woodbury, P., Natural climate solutions. Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, 114(44), 11645–11650; 2017; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710465114 
Honicker v. Hendrie, et al, 465 F.Supp. 414 (M.D.Tenn.,1979) 
Honicker v. N.R.C., et al, 59o F.2d 1207 (D.C.Cir., 1979) 
Schell, J., The Fate of the Earth (1981)

______________________

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

 

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 72: Homo Gestalt

"The popular meme of returning to the growth patterns of the past still holds sway."

“There are grave doubts at the hugeness of the land, and whether one government can comprehend the whole.” 

— Henry Adams

As a young man doing solo hikes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire I learned a very important lesson, which may have saved my life more than once. If you lose the trail, don’t plunge ahead hoping to find it again. Retrace your steps until you are back on it.

I remembered that when I was lost in the back alleys of Medellin after midnight. I remembered in dense fog in the Great Smoky Mountains. I remembered it when, being out for a week north of Harpers Ferry during Hurricane Agnes, the rain had pounded my brain to mush, visibility was a blur, and the trail had become a river. I retraced and made it back.

What needs to be done now is very simple. Whether we will choose to do it soon enough to matter is more complicated. Social inertia binds us unnecessarily. We want to continue forward momentum. We don’t want to give up our hard-earned progress.

Ongoing natural disasters in the oldest cities of Netherlands, Belgium and Germany; a heat dome scorching the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia; snow in Brazil; unprecedented forest fires in the Western states and Russian Arctic, making their own weather and darkening distant cities; Antarctica melting away its glaciers; flooding in Maharashtra, Flagstaff and the Zhengzhou subway; ancient rivers running dry — these disasters come at us like a drone swarm, drawing our attention and compelling us to confront demons we have known about but decided to ignore. The closer to us the flames or the waves, the more difficult it is to claim ignorance. The excuses ring so hollow we can no longer bring ourselves to say them aloud.

“It’s not so much that #ClimateChange itself is proceeding faster than expected — the warming is right in line with model predictions from decades ago. Rather, it’s the fact that some of the impacts are greater than scientists predicted.” 

 — Michael E. Mann

Scientists fear climate change may have reached the point of no return
Earth's 'vital signs' are getting worse and there's evidence that many are close or have surpassed 'tipping points' 16…www.dailymail.co.uk

We have known, indisputably since the Club of Rome report in 1972, that civilization was approaching limits to growth and would need to develop a contracting economic paradigm to preserve any gains for the future. Not having done so, many of those gains, and far more, are now being surrendered in very unpleasant ways. Our children are bankrupted before they are born.

Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows | Chelsea Green Publishing
John N. Cooper, for AxisofLogic.com- This is a wonderful book. Originally published in 1972 as Limits to Growth and…www.chelseagreen.com

There are many, perhaps still a majority, who believe that we will pass through this crisis and resume our trajectory towards the stars, our unique human capacity giving us the tools and technologies we will need to prevail, as we always have.

This is hubris. Geoff Lawton once said, ““We have expressions that say, in our language, ‘We are out of order.’ And we are. We are out of order. The orders of scale of size relevant within our design patterning.…” 

We do not lack for ideas, technology or skills to reverse climate change. All those tools have been in our kit for centuries, gathering rust. But we are now well into the time of consequences, as the “natural” disasters in the news merely remind us.

Many, and I include myself, believe that at this late date, the reckoning will be harsh and unforgiving. Humans will depopulate significantly, possibly even to extinction. If we are to survive as a breed, it will be only by radically altering our pattern of habitation of the natural world. We need to return to the ways of now extinct Homo habilis, the able man, and terminate our brief, foolhardy foray into Homo sapiens sapiens, the clever clever man.

There are many examples of indigenous peoples who practiced a steady-state economy over millennia that served all equally well, humans and non-humans alike. Those are successful models we can learn, recover, refashion, but it seems unlikely any large number of us would embark upon them. They are too alien to our popular culture, too heavy a lift.

The energy patterns expressed in the wild are finely tuned towards efficiency. There is no profligacy, because even the faintest amount of wasted effort can doom an individual, species or ecosystem. Contrast “clever” humans tossing energy around like it is infinitely expendable. Shoot some billionaires into space. Make million-dollar stainless-steel vacuum cleaners to serve as artificial trees and suck carbon dioxide from the sky — we can power them by solar cells made in clean rooms from aluminum, copper, silver and gallium, or from 100-meter-high, exotic-alloy, wind generators rotating magnetic cores of neodymium. Clever, but not wise. Powerful but fragile.

Ecovillages, bioregionalism, forest peoples, lake edge peoples, nomads; governance devolved to watersheds; coordinated regenerative practices — these are antifragile memes. Plant trees and mangroves and let them grow. Grow fruit, nuts, alley crops, perennial root crops, bamboo shoots. Coppice and pollard for building materials, furniture, and small fuels. Make biochar and even draw electricity and wood gas from that drawdown process for your lights, refrigeration, air conditioning — modest devices that can be repaired by a blacksmith or tinsmith.

Take baby steps to get there by improving your own efficiency (use less energy, land, and other inputs and make less waste); transition to carbon drawdown alternatives for your most common activities; in every way shrink your own footprint; become responsible. Grow up.

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon: 9780375703713 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
In this genre-bending novel-among the first to have launched sci-fi into the arena of literature-one of the great…www.penguinrandomhouse.com

In his 1952–53 science fiction novel, More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon imagined human evolution progressing in the 20th century to what he called Homo gestalt, created from several individuals with unusual mental abilities. It may be that within five years ubiquitous satellite internet with infinitesimal latency will enable homo gestalt with AI/AR/VR prosthetic devices to extend its fields of perception and computational power.

Alternatively, by biological succession, we can let our innate empathic qualities group us into telepathic clusters of parallel processors. The protagonists in More Than Human struggled to find who they are/were and whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it. That should not be a question, but it has become one now.

The current pandemic may eventually turn out to be a culling of the herd — it is still too early to say and the popular meme of returning to the growth patterns of the past still holds sway — but as our bouts with 2021 weather events should make clear, there are more and greater calamities in the wings. The single biggest change we can make as humans is to stop acting like small warring tribes and go back to being family. We won’t survive by being clever. We need to be able.

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