Muddling Our Way to Earth 2.0
Apparently, President Obama missed the climate briefings given to Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. While he was in office he pursued a “drill baby drill” policy to boost US fossil exports. Earlier this year, his daughter Malia, now 25, came to him asking where he stood on the issue.
This is his reply. You be the judge.
My take on this is, first, for a guy who has followed this issue closely since the Copenhagen COP, he is living in a weird reality where a three-degree warming world will flood Bangladesh and cause 100 million migrants, but a 1.45°C warmer world (today’s) won’t. He really needs to look at TV more, or at least surf YouTube for this week’s climate porn. All those scenarios he predicted way out into the future for 3 degrees are already happening. Weekly.
We shouldn’t be too hard on him. Most of us likely cannot conceive of how a society as complex and populous as modern techno-consumer culture could transition within the space of a few years, or perhaps decades, to something capable of surviving Earth 2.0.
Inertia is our greatest enemy.
In a recent vlogcast with Kevin Anderson, Johan Rockström laid out the latest numbers game. You don’t have to watch the full hour, I can single out some of the high points.
Rockström:
What’s the highest mitigation pace we can think of in the world economy? Well, anything above two percent per year of reductions is what we would normally call ‘revolution pace.’ The Green Revolution, with increased food yields of rice and maize, was 2% per year. 2% per year is non-linear. It’s a doubling in one generation. It’s big. 2% per year is a really rapid pace. So we’re increasing emissions today between 1 and 2% per year. [actually, 2.225% from 1955 to 2019 — ed.] Now, to reduce emissions even in the global model runs we have, with optimistic — I mean, overly optimistic — negative emission technologies, assume mitigation pathways, as you know, between 5 and 7% per year. So that is three times revolutionary pace, at the current modeling runs. If you take away negative emission technologies, you would exceed 10% very rapidly. You would be more around 10 to 15%. I would call that… that’s not revolution, that is a complete disruption of the global economy. It’s like a pace that is beyond… I mean then you need to bulldoze down coal-fired plants, basically. You would be in a complete global Marshall Plan. It’s a war zone agenda.
Indeed, when I ran the numbers some years ago, I reached much the same conclusion. To have any hope of preserving stability with a 2-degree increase (nearly a degree more than we are currently experiencing) we would need a negative eleven percent economic (GWP) glide slope each year and, achieving zero, thereafter continue withdrawals of carbon at the same pace, banking carbon underground on millennial time scales as rapidly as humanly possible.
By way of comparison, the global pandemic in 2020–21 reduced fossil emissions by 7 percent. Nearly every country nearly shut down its economy. Many closed their borders for a time. It was not pretty, but it approximated what Rockström called “not revolution … a complete disruption.”
That lasted one year and then we resumed business as usual, increasing emissions by around 2 percent per year.
Our impediments are not physical. They are psychological.
Anderson:
It would be interesting to see other parts of the world looking at this, because, I would have a guess, when we say ‘that’s not feasible’, many people elsewhere in the world are saying ‘well of course it’s feasible, we’ve been doing… we’ve been living like that for years!’
Rockström:
That I agree, too. Definitely. But remember that, you know, again, including negative emission technologies gives us a pace of emission reductions, which is in the order of 5 to 6% per year, which is… so massive, because it has to happen at the global level, that it’s, in itself, a challenge equally big as just scaling the negative emission technologies.
In that earlier post reaching the 11 percent number I described life on the North American Prairie before European settlers arrived. The example I gave was a Sauk-Fox village as recounted by the great chief Black Hawk to a biographer in 1833. I was trying to convey that life can still be good, and in some ways better, without our taken-for-granted addiction to mass-produced consumer goods and the wonders of modernity
Ponder that for a moment. The wonders of modernity we take for granted today likely pale in comparison to what might come to be, given another half-century of progress. We might have cures for every disease, vaccines against every virus, and universal basic standards of living. Would a New Yorker in 1833 even grok what it is like to live in a world where you can reach California in six hours for the price of a day’s labor? Where you can ask a ChatBot a question and it can return an answer from any or all of ten million books, in nearly any language? Where a prick of blood from your finger can reveal your ancestry 50,000 years earlier?
Rather than traverse the years to 1833, I could as easily have described my own childhood in the 1950s and 60s. Although we were by then centuries into mass-produced consumer goods, the total annual emissions of greenhouse gases stood at only 9.4 tons CO2e. I will grant you that is more than 7 times the footprint of Sauk-Fox culture, but it was still only a quarter of what is being emitted today.
Putting ourselves onto a global 11-percent decline slope, we could be back at 1960 levels by 2035. We needn’t be so harsh. Let’s give ourselves to 2045. If the glide slope is 7% we could get back to a 1960 lifestyle by 2045 even if we took until 2025 to ramp up. Suppose we took a 2% glide path of emissions reductions (equal but opposite in sign from our current trajectory)? We do not return to 1960 until 2087. It may be marketable, but is it survivable? Likely not.
But can you persuade people to go back to the future? Could we all become, say, Amish with internet?
Just as I went to press with this week’s post, Dr. Robert Chris, an Associate Professor at the Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair, wrote:
The underlying reason for our failure to confront climate change is that we are in denial about its cause. Current policy assumes it is caused by an excess of [greenhouse gases]. Well, that’s true, but the excess GHGs are caused by a combination of ultra-growth in consumption and the externalisation of the environmental costs of the fossil fuels used to power that consumption. The growth in consumption is caused by a human predilection for instant gratification and the externalisation of environmental costs is caused by a combination of factors but most particularly urban dwellers’ loss of intimacy with nature and capitalism’s voracious capacity to exploit free resources in what Garrett Harding named the Tragedy of the Commons. An adequate response to global warming has to go right down that causal chain. We’ve hardly dealt with its first link.
***
However, it is important to recognise that just because humans have the power of rational thought, it doesn’t follow that their collective decisions will be expressions of such thought. Scientists and engineers are especially steeped in the Cartesian/Baconian Enlightenment thinking of the scientific method. That is not how public policy is fashioned. To understand that, it is necessary to embrace complex adaptive systems theory that explains how self-organising systems progress through their adaptive cycle. Humanity is such a system and while rational thinking is important, it is by no means the determining factor in the emergence of the route we take into the future.
We are confronted by the challenge of selling an unpalatable menu, knowing that what goes down easily doesn’t nourish. To sell broccoli instead of beef will require something more potent than the disruptive innovation of Madison Avenue advertising firms adopting Freudian psychology in the 1960s. It will require a whole human population effort borne of either heroism or panicked horror.
We can take the former course now. We’ll be stuck with the latter soon enough.
Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages, and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are 70 sites in Ukraine and 500 around the region. As you read this, 40 Ukrainian ecovillages and 300 in Europe have given shelter to thousands of adults and children and are receiving up to 1400 persons (around 200 children) each month. We call our project “The Green Road.”
For most of the children refugees, this will be their first experience in ecovillage living. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those who do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.
There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad or you can listen to this NPR Podcast and read these recent articles in Mother Jones and The World. Thank you for your help.
The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.95 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; and incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talents as a species.
As the world enters a new phase of the pandemic, there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — 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. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.
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