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james lovelock
Is the Covid-19 Pandemic Mother Nature's Response to Human Transgression?
The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up.
Apr 02, 2020
As the coronavirus sweeps across the planet, leaving death and mayhem in its wake, many theories are being expounded to explain its ferocity. One, widely circulated within right-wing conspiracy circles, is that it originated as a biological weapon developed at a secret Chinese military lab in the city of Wuhan that somehow (perhaps intentionally?) escaped into the civilian population. Although that "theory" has been thoroughly debunked, President Trump and his acolytes continue to call Covid-19 the China Virus, the Wuhan Virus, or even the "Kung Flu," claiming its global spread was the result of an inept and secretive Chinese government response. Scientists, by and large, believe the virus originated in bats and was transmitted to humans by wildlife sold at a Wuhan seafood market. But perhaps there's another far more ominous possibility to consider: that this is one of Mother Nature's ways of resisting humanity's assault on her essential life systems.
Let's be clear: this pandemic is a world-shattering phenomenon of massive proportions. Not only has it infected hundreds of thousands of people across the planet, killing more than 40,000 of them, but it's brought the global economy to a virtual stand-still, potentially crushing millions of businesses, large and small, while putting tens of millions, or possibly hundreds of millions, of people out of work. In the past, disasters of this magnitude have toppled empires, triggered mass rebellions, and caused widespread famine and starvation. This upheaval, too, will produce widespread misery and imperil the survival of numerous governments.
Understandably, our forebears came to view such calamities as manifestations of the fury of gods incensed by human disrespect for and mistreatment of their universe, the natural world. Today, educated people generally dismiss such notions, but scientists have recently been discovering that human impacts on the environment, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are producing feedback loops causing increasingly severe harm to communities across the globe, in the form of extreme storms, persistent droughts, massive wildfires, and recurring heat waves of an ever deadlier sort.
Climate scientists also speak of "singularities," "non-linear events," and "tipping points" -- the sudden and irreversible collapse of vital ecological systems with far-ranging, highly destructive consequences for humanity. Evidence for such tipping points is growing -- for example in the unexpectedly rapid melting of the Arctic icecap. In that context, a question naturally arises: Is the coronavirus a stand-alone event, independent of any other mega-trends, or does it represent some sort of catastrophic tipping point?
It will be some time before scientists can answer that question with any certainty. There are, however, good reasons to believe that this might be the case and, if so, perhaps it's high time humanity reconsiders its relationship with nature.
Humans vs. Nature
It's common to think of human history as an evolutionary process in which broad, long-studied trends like colonialism and post-colonialism have largely shaped human affairs. When sudden disruptions have occurred, they are usually attributed to, say, the collapse of a long-lasting dynasty or the rise of an ambitious new ruler. But the course of human affairs has also been altered -- often in even more dramatic ways -- by natural occurrences, ranging from prolonged droughts to catastrophic volcanic activity to (yes, of course) plagues and pandemics. The ancient Minoan civilization of the eastern Mediterranean, for example, is widely believed to have disintegrated following a powerful volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (now known as Santorini) in the 17th century BCE. Archaeological evidence further suggests that other once-thriving cultures were similarly undermined or even extinguished by natural disasters.
It's hardly surprising that the survivors of such catastrophes often attributed their misfortunes to the anger of various gods over human excesses and depredations. In the ancient world, sacrifices -- even human ones -- were considered a necessity to appease such angry spirits. At the onset of the Trojan War, for example, the Greek goddess Artemis, protectress of wild animals, the wilderness, and the moon, stilled the winds needed to propel the Greek fleet to Troy because Agamemnon, its commander, had killed a sacred deer. To appease her and restore the essential winds, Agamemnon felt obliged -- or so the poet Homer tells us -- to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia (the plot line for many a Greek and modern tragedy).
In more recent times, educated people have generally seen coronavirus-style calamities as either inexplicable acts of God or as explicable, if surprising, natural events. With the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in Europe, moreover, many influential thinkers came to believe that humans could use science and technology to overpower nature and so harness it to the will of humanity. The seventeenth-century French mathematician Rene Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that "we can... render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature."
This outlook undergirded the view, common in the last three centuries, that the Earth was "virgin" territory (especially when it came to the colonial possessions of the major powers) and so fully open to exploitation by human entrepreneurs. This led to the deforestation of vast areas, as well as the extinction or near-extinction of many animals, and in more recent times, to the plunder of underground mineral and energy deposits.
As it happened, though, this planet proved anything but an impotent victim of colonization and exploitation. Human mistreatment of the natural environment has turned out to have distinctly painful boomerang effects. The ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest, for example, is altering Brazil's climate, raising temperatures and reducing rainfall in significant ways, with painful consequences for local farmers and even more distant urban dwellers. (And the release of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, thanks to increasingly massive forest fires, will only increase the pace of climate change globally.) Similarly, the technique of hydraulic fracking, used to extract oil and natural gas trapped in underground shale deposits, can trigger earthquakes that damage aboveground structures and endanger human life. In so many ways like these, Mother Nature strikes back when her vital organs suffer harm.
This interplay between human activity and planetary behavior has led some analysts to rethink our relationship with the natural world. They have reconceptualized the Earth as a complex matrix of living and inorganic systems, all (under normal conditions) interacting to maintain a stable balance. When one component of the larger matrix is damaged or destroyed, the others respond in their unique ways in attempting to restore the natural order of things. Originally propounded by the environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s, this notion has often been described as "the Gaia Hypothesis," after the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life.
Climate Tipping Points
Posing the ultimate threat to planetary health, climate change -- a direct consequence of the human impulse to dump ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially heating the planet to the breaking point -- is guaranteed to generate the most brutal of all such feedback loops. By emitting ever more carbon dioxide and other gases, humans are fundamentally altering planetary chemistry and posing an almost unimaginable threat to natural ecosystems. Climate-change deniers in the Trumpian mode continue to insist that we can keep doing this with no cost to our way of life. It is, however, becoming increasingly apparent that the more we alter the climate, the more the planet will respond in ways guaranteed to endanger human life and prosperity.
The main engine of climate change is the greenhouse effect, as all those greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere entrap ever more radiated solar heat from the Earth's surface, raising temperatures worldwide and so altering global climate patterns. Until now, much of this added heat and carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the planet's oceans, resulting in rising water temperatures and the increased acidification of their waters. This, in turn, has already led to, among other deleterious effects, the mass die-off of coral reefs -- the preferred habitat of many of the fish species on which large numbers of humans rely for their sustenance and livelihoods. Just as consequential, higher ocean temperatures have provided the excess energy that has fueled many of the most destructive hurricanes of recent times, including Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, and Dorian.
A warmer atmosphere can also sustain greater accumulations of moisture, making possible the prolonged downpours and catastrophic flooding being experienced in many parts of the world, including the upper Midwest in the United States. In other areas, rainfall is decreasing and heat waves are becoming more frequent and prolonged, resulting in devastating wildfires of the sort witnessed in the American West in recent years and in Australia this year.
In all such ways, Mother Nature, you might say, is striking back. It is, however, the potential for "non-linear" events and "tipping points" that has some climate scientists especially concerned, fearing that we now live on what might be thought of as an avenging planet. While many climate effects, like prolonged heat waves, will become more pronounced over time, other effects, it is now believed, will occur suddenly, with little warning, and could result in large-scale disruptions in human life (as in this coronavirus moment). You might think of this as Mother Nature saying, "Stop! Do not go past this point or there will be dreadful consequences!"
Scientists are understandably cautious in discussing such possibilities, as they are harder to study than linear events like rising world temperatures. But the concern is there. "Large-scale singular events (also called 'tipping points,' or critical thresholds) are abrupt and drastic changes in physical, ecological, or social systems" brought about by the relentless rise in temperatures, noted the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its comprehensive 2014 assessment of anticipated impacts. Such events, the IPCC pointed out, "pose key risks because of the potential magnitude of the consequences; the rate at which they would occur; and, depending on this rate, the limited ability of society to cope with them."
Six years later, that striking description sounds eerily like the present moment.
Until now, the tipping points of greatest concern to scientists have been the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Those two massive reservoirs of ice contain the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of square miles of water. Should they melt ever more quickly with all that water flowing into neighboring oceans, a sea level rise of 20 feet or more can be expected, inundating many of the world's most populous coastal cities and forcing billions of people to relocate. In its 2014 study, the IPCC predicted that this might occur over several centuries, at least offering plenty of time for humans to adapt, but more recent research indicates that those two ice sheets are melting far more rapidly than previously believed -- and so a sharp increase in sea levels can be expected well before the end of this century with catastrophic consequences for coastal communities.
The IPCC also identified two other possible tipping points with potentially far-reaching consequences: the die-off of the Amazon rain forest and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Both are already under way, reducing the survival prospects of flora and fauna in their respective habitats. As these processes gain momentum, entire ecosystems are likely to be obliterated and many species killed off, with drastic consequences for the humans who rely on them in so many ways (from food to pollination chains) for their survival. But as is always the case in such transformations, other species -- perhaps insects and microorganisms highly dangerous to humans -- could occupy those spaces emptied by extinction.
Climate Change and Pandemics
Back in 2014, the IPCC did not identify human pandemics among potential climate-induced tipping points, but it did provide plenty of evidence that climate change would increase the risk of such catastrophes. This is true for several reasons. First, warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formerly temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures.
Combined with mechanized agriculture and deforestation, climate change is also undermining subsistence farming and indigenous lifestyles in many parts of the world, driving millions of impoverished people to already crowded urban centers, where health facilities are often overburdened and the risk of contagion ever greater. "Virtually all the projected growth in populations will occur in urban agglomerations," the IPCC noted then. Adequate sanitation is lacking in many of these cities, particularly in the densely populated shantytowns that often surround them. "About 150 million people currently live in cities affected by chronic water shortages, and by 2050, unless there are rapid improvements in urban environments, the number will rise to almost a billion."
Such newly settled urban dwellers often retain strong ties to family members still in the countryside who, in turn, may come in contact with wild animals carrying deadly viruses. This appears to have been the origin of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016, which affected tens of thousands of people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Scientists believe that the Ebola virus (like the coronavirus) originated in bats and was then transmitted to gorillas and other wild animals that coexist with people living on the fringes of tropical forests. Somehow, a human or humans contracted the disease from exposure to such creatures and then transmitted it to visitors from the city who, upon their return, infected many others.
The coronavirus appears to have had somewhat similar origins. In recent years, hundreds of millions of once impoverished rural families moved to burgeoning industrial cities in central and coastal China, including places like Wuhan. Although modern in so many respects, with its subways, skyscrapers, and superhighways, Wuhan also retained vestiges of the countryside, including markets selling wild animals still considered by some inhabitants to be normal parts of their diet. Many of those animals were trucked in from semi-rural areas hosting large numbers of bats, the apparent source of both the coronavirus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2013, which also arose in China. Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for bats, like mosquitoes, are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures.
The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case. If so, we had better take heed.
Heeding Mother Nature's Warning
Suppose this interpretation of the Covid-19 pandemic is correct. Suppose that the coronavirus is nature's warning, its way of telling us that we've gone too far and must alter our behavior lest we risk further contamination. What then?
To adapt a phrase from the Cold War era, what humanity may need to do is institute a new policy of "peaceful coexistence" with Mother Nature. This approach would legitimize the continued presence of large numbers of humans on the planet but require that they respect certain limits in their interactions with its ecosphere. We humans could use our talents and technologies to improve life in areas we've long occupied, but infringement elsewhere would be heavily restricted. Natural disasters -- floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, and the like -- would, of course, still occur, but not at a rate exceeding what we experienced in the pre-industrial past.
Implementation of such a strategy would, at the very least, require putting the brakes on climate change as swiftly as possible through the rapid and thorough elimination of human-induced carbon emissions -- something that has, in fact, happened in at least a modest way, and however briefly, thanks to this Covid-19 moment. Deforestation would also have to be halted and the world's remaining wilderness areas preserved as is forever. Any further despoliation of the oceans would have to be stopped, including the dumping of wastes, plastics, engine fuel, and runoff pesticides.
The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up. The only way to avert such a catastrophe and assure ourselves that Earth will not become an avenger planet is to heed Mother Nature's warning and cease the further desecration of essential ecosystems.
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We Need Biodiversity-Based Agriculture to Solve the Climate Crisis
We need to move from oil to soil.
Oct 07, 2019
The Earth is living, and also creates life. Over 4 billion years the Earth has evolved a rich biodiversity -- an abundance of different living organisms and ecosystems -- that can meet all our needs and sustain life.
Through biodiversity and the living functions of the biosphere, the Earth regulates temperature and climate, and has created the conditions for our species to evolve. This is what NASA scientist James Lovelock found in working with Lynn Margulis, who was studying the processes by which living organisms produce and remove gases from the atmosphere. The Earth is a self-regulating living organism, and life on Earth creates conditions for life to be maintained and evolve.
The Gaia Hypothesis, born in the 1970s, was a scientific reawakening to the Living Earth. The Earth fossilized some living carbon, and transformed it into dead carbon, storing it underground. That is where we should have left it.
All the coal, petroleum and natural gas we are burning and extracting to run our contemporary oil-based economy was formed over 600 million years. We are burning up millions of years of nature's work annually. This is why the carbon cycle is broken.
A few centuries of fossil fuel-based civilization have brought our very survival under threat by rupturing the Earth's carbon cycle, disrupting key climate systems and self-regulatory capacity, and pushing diverse species to extinction at 1000 times the normal rate. The connection between biodiversity and climate change is intimate.
While using 75 percent of the total land that is being used for agriculture, industrial agriculture based on fossil fuel-intensive, chemical-intensive monocultures produce only 30 percent of the food we eat, while small, biodiverse farms using 25 percent of the land provide 70 percent of the food.Extinction is a certainty if we continue a little longer on the fossil fuel path. A shift to a biodiversity-based civilization is now a survival imperative.
Take the example of food and agriculture systems. The Earth has roughly 300,000 edible plant species, but the contemporary global human community eats only 200 of them. And, according to the New Scientist, "half our plant-sourced protein and calories come from just three: maize, rice and wheat." Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the soy that is grown is used as food for humans. The rest goes to produce biofuels and animal feed.
Our agriculture system is not primarily a food system, it is an industrial system, and it is not sustainable.
The Amazon rainforests are home to 10 percent of the Earth's biodiversity. Now, the rich forests are being burned for the expansion of GMO soy crops.
The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on land and climate highlights how the climate problem begins with what we do on land.
We have been repeatedly told that monocultures of crops with intensive chemical inputs of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are necessary for feeding the world.
While using 75 percent of the total land that is being used for agriculture, industrial agriculture based on fossil fuel-intensive, chemical-intensive monocultures produce only 30 percent of the food we eat, while small, biodiverse farms using 25 percent of the land provide 70 percent of the food. Industrial agriculture is responsible for 75 percent of the destruction of soil, water and biodiversity of the planet. At this rate, if the share of fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture and industrial food in our diet is increased to 40 percent, we will have a dead planet. There will be no life, no food, on a dead planet.
Besides the carbon dioxide directly emitted from fossil fuel agriculture, nitrous oxide is emitted from nitrogen fertilizers based on fossil fuels, and methane is emitted from factory farms and food waste.
The manufacture of synthetic fertilizer is highly energy-intensive. One kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of 2 liters of diesel. Energy used during fertilizer manufacture was equivalent to 191 billion liters of diesel in 2000 and is projected to rise to 277 billion in 2030. This is a major contributor to climate change, yet largely ignored. One kilogram of phosphate fertilizer requires half a liter of diesel.
Nitrous oxide is 300 times more disruptive for the climate than carbon dioxide. Nitrogen fertilizers are destabilizing the climate, creating dead zones in the oceans and desertifying the soils. In the planetary context, the erosion of biodiversity and the transgression of the nitrogen boundary are serious, though often-overlooked, crises.
Thus, regenerating the planet through biodiversity-based ecological processes has become a survival imperative for the human species and all beings. Central to the transition is a shift from fossil fuels and dead carbon, to living processes based on growing and recycling living carbon renewed and grown as biodiversity.
Organic farming--working with nature--takes excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where it doesn't belong, and puts it back in the soil where it belongs, through photosynthesis. It also increases the water-holding capacity of soil, contributing to resilience in times of more frequent droughts, floods and other climate extremes. Organic farming has the potential of sequestering 52 gigatons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the amount needed to be removed from the atmosphere to keep atmospheric carbon below 350 parts per million, and the average temperature increase of 2 degrees centigrade. We can bridge the emissions gap through ecological biodiversity-intensive agriculture, working with nature.
And the more biodiversity and biomass we grow, the more the plants sequester atmospheric carbon and nitrogen, and reduce both emissions and the stocks of pollutants in the air. Carbon is returned to the soil through plants.
The more we grow biodiversity and biomass on forests and farms, the more organic matter is available to return to the soil, thus reversing the trends toward desertification, which is already a major reason for the displacement and uprooting of people and the creation of refugees in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
Biodiversity-based agriculture is not just a climate solution, it is also a solution to hunger. Approximately 1 billion people are permanently hungry. Biodiversity-intensive, fossil-fuel-free, chemical-free systems produce more nutrition per acre and can feed more people using less land.
To repair the broken carbon cycle, we need to turn to seeds, to the soil and to the sun to increase the living carbon in the plants and in the soil. We need to remember that living carbon gives life, and dead fossil carbon is disrupting living processes. With our care and consciousness we can increase living carbon on the planet, and increase the well-being of all. On the other hand, the more we exploit and use dead carbon, and the more pollution we create, the less we have for the future. Dead carbon must be left underground. This is an ethical obligation and ecological imperative.
This is why the term "decarbonization," which fails to make a distinction between living and dead carbon, is scientifically and ecologically inappropriate. If we decarbonized the economy, we would have no plants, which are living carbon. We would have no life on earth, which creates and is sustained by living carbon. A decarbonized planet would be a dead planet.
We need to recarbonize the world with biodiversity and living carbon. We need to leave dead carbon in the ground. We need to move from oil to soil. We need to urgently move from a fossil fuel-based system to a biodiversity-based ecological civilization. We can plant the seeds of hope, the seeds of the future.
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Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites
We must organize to replace existing structures of power with ones capable of coping with the crisis before us.
Sep 23, 2019
Friday's climate strike by students across the globe will have no more impact than the mass mobilizations by women following the election of Donald Trump or the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the Iraq War. This does not mean these protests should not have taken place. They should have. But such demonstrations need to be grounded in the bitter reality that in the corridors of power we do not count. If we lived in a democracy, which we do not, our aspirations, rights and demands, especially the demand that we confront the climate emergency, would have an impact. We would be able to vote representatives into power in government to carry out change. We would be able to demand environmental justice from the courts. We would be able to divert resources to the elimination of carbon emissions.
Voting, lobbying, petitioning and protesting to induce the ruling elites to respond rationally to the climate catastrophe have proved no more effective than scrofula victims' appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal touch. The familiar tactics employed over the past few decades by environmentalists have been spectacular failures. In 1900 the burning of fossil fuel--mostly coal--produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. That number had risen threefold by 1950. Today the level is 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the last decade the increase in CO2 was 100 to 200 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age. On May 11 the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded 415.26 parts per million of CO2 in the air. It's believed to be the highest concentration since humans evolved. We will embrace a new paradigm for resistance or die.
The ruling elites and the corporations they serve are the principal obstacles to change. They cannot be reformed. And this means revolution, which is what Extinction Rebellion seeks in calling for an "international rebellion" on Oct. 7, when it will attempt to shut down city centers around the globe in acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. Power has to be transferred into our hands. And since the elites won't give up power willingly, we will have to take it through nonviolent action.
Protests can be the beginning of political consciousness. But they can also be empty political theater. They can be used to celebrate our moral probity--advertisements, especially in the age of social media, for ourselves. They can be a boutique activism in which protesters allow themselves to be funneled through police barricades and arrests are politely choreographed, resulting in a few hours in jail and the credentialing of the demonstrators as radicals. They can be used to distance ourselves from a repugnant political figure such as Donald Trump, while leaving us silent and complicit when the same policies are carried out by a supposed progressive such as Barack Obama. This is a game the state has learned to play to its advantage. As long as we do not disrupt the machine, as long as we protest according to their rules, the elites will let us march through the streets of Washington in pussy hats or walk out of school for a day.
When power is threatened, as it was in the sustained protests during the Occupy encampments and at Standing Rock, the ruling elites react very differently. They employ the full weight of the surveillance state to demonize the protesters, arrest and detain the leadership and infiltrate agents provocateurs to carry out violent assaults to justify the use of the police and security forces to shut the protests down.
Preemptive efforts by the security forces to harass and thwart Extinction Rebellion's planned October occupation of city centers, an action designed to negatively affect commerce and bring parts of major cities to a standstill, have already begun. Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, was arrested Sept. 14 and charged with attempting to cause a disruption at Heathrow Airport by using a drone. Hallam has called Heathrow--which climate activists say emits 18 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, more than the total emissions of 118 countries--"a crime against humanity." He and other activists have vowed to halt the airport's plans to build a third runway. Hallam's case will be heard at the Isleworth Crown Court on Oct. 14, meaning he will not be released until after the Oct. 7 protests. In addition, other Extinction Rebellion organizers, including Andrew Medhurst, have been arrested in England, and police have seized their phones and computers.
It does not matter who is the public face of the corporate state. This is not about political personalities. It was Obama, after all, who oversaw a coordinated national effort to eradicate the Occupy encampments and place the water protectors at Standing Rock under siege. Obama's environmental policies, despite his lip service to curbing global warming and his support of the nonbinding Paris climate accord--which the climate scientist James Hansen called a fraud--were appalling. U.S. oil production rose every year he was in office, an increase of 88%. It was the largest domestic increase in oil production in American history. Obama opened offshore drilling to American oil companies as if he were Sarah Palin. "American energy production, you wouldn't always know it, but it went up every year I was president," Obama told an audience at Rice University last year. "And you know that ... suddenly America's like the biggest oil producer ... that was me, people."
Democrats, like Republicans, serve corporate power. They will not end government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not impose carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit overconsumption.
Democrats, like Republicans, serve corporate power. They will not end government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not impose carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit overconsumption. The technologies they invest in--fracking, hybrid cars, genetically modified food--are designed to maintain or expand consumption levels, not reduce them. They will not redirect the trillions of dollars and scientific and technical expertise from the military and corporations toward saving us from environmental catastrophe. The rhetoric and gimmicks they use to placate the public, from carbon credits to wind turbines and solar panels, are, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury.
The creation of ever more complex bureaucratic and technocratic systems in an age of diminishing resources is a characteristic of dying civilizations. Civilizations in their final phase frantically search for new methods of exploitation rather than adapt to a changing environment. They repress and exploit the lower classes with greater and greater ruthlessness to maintain the insatiable appetites among the elites for power, luxury and hedonism. The worse things get, the more the elites retreat into their private enclaves. The more out of touch the elites become, the more catastrophe is assured. This self-defeating process degrades the ecosystem until catastrophic systems collapse.
The ruling elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs, are not equipped to confront the existential problems caused by climate catastrophe. They are trained to maintain, no matter the cost, the systems of global capitalism. They are systems managers. They lack the intellectual capacity and imagination to search for solutions outside the narrow parameters of global capitalism.
Those living in the global south are already suffering and dying from the effects of global warming, for which the wealthy industrialized nations of the global north bear most of the responsibility. The richest 0.54%, or 42 million people across the world, are responsible for more emissions than the poorest half of the global population, or 3.8 billion people. These elites are sacrificing the poorest on the planet first as they work up the social and economic hierarchy to extinguish us all.
We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, our naive belief that with grit and determination we can solve all problems. We have to face the bleakness before us. We live in a world already heavily damaged by global warming, which will inevitably get worse. Refusal to participate in the further destruction of the planet means a rupture with traditional politics. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every nonviolent way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including becoming vegans, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation. And it means waves of sustained civil disobedience until the machine is broken.
The biosphere, including the Amazon rainforest, the oceans and the polar ice caps, is visibly deteriorating. Heat waves are crippling Europe, Australia and the American Southwest. Floods devastate the Midwest. Last week, southeast Texas suffered heavy flooding and deaths when it was hit by the seventh-wettest tropical cyclone in U.S. history, with some areas receiving more than 40 inches of rainfall within three days. Monster hurricanes ravage the Caribbean and the shores of the United States. Wildfires consume the forests of the West Coast. But despite the tangible signs of a climate emergency, the elites continue to assure us we can live as we have always lived.
The mathematical models for the future of the planet have three devastating trajectories: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive. This third scenario, which most scientists admit is unlikely, is dependent on a halt to the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet to destroy the animal agriculture industry--almost as large a contributor to greenhouse gases as the fossil fuel industry--and greening the deserts and restoring rainforests. We know what we have to do if our children are to have a future. The only question left is how do we empower leaders who will save us.
Climate scientists warn that we will soon reach a tipping point when the biosphere becomes so degraded no effort to save the ecosystem will halt runaway climate change. We may already be there. The tipping point, many believe, is a further increase in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius. At that point "feedback loops" will see environmental catastrophes exacerbate each other.
We must embrace a new radicalism. We must carry out sustained civil disobedience to disrupt the machinery of exploitation, even as we prepare for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes ahead. We must alter our lifestyles and consumption to cut our personal carbon footprints. And we must organize to replace existing structures of power with ones capable of coping with the crisis before us.
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Lifeboat Earth
Is China or the Green New Deal the answer to climate change?
Jul 31, 2019
At its best, the earth was once likened to a spaceship that sails through the heavens with a crew working together for the common good. Thanks to climate change, this metaphor no longer works. Our planet is now more like a lifeboat that's sprung a major leak. People onboard are beginning to panic and the clock is ticking.
It is, however, the perfect environment to test out the best way to deal with life-and-death situations.
For such a test, imagine not one but two lifeboats of survivors bobbing in an endless, empty sea. Both contain the same number of people and a limited amount of food. Based on some educated guesses by one knowledgeable crewmember, the boats are at least five days from land, if everyone rows together and they don't veer off course.
"Feckless democrats or reckless authoritarians: Lifeboat Earth doesn't stand much of a chance with such options."
In the first boat, the survivors debate the problem: Should they stay in place and conserve their energy or strike off in search of land? They divide into three committees to address the different aspects of the problem and present their findings, making sure everyone has input. They debate for hours, growing weaker and weaker until they no longer have the energy to do anything and the issue decides itself.
In the second boat, one person takes control, believing he alone has the skill and knowledge to steer the lifeboat toward land. Not everyone agrees, but dissenters are silenced. The others agree that there's no time for more discussion. The new leader imposes rules on who rows and who eats. When someone falls deathly ill, he orders the incapacitated man thrown overboard.
The second lifeboat is moving at a good pace -- but is it going in the right direction?
On Lifeboat Earth, time and resources are similarly limited. According to most climate scientists, the window of opportunity to prevent irrevocable climate change is about a dozen years. Opinion is divided, however, on how to address this problem with the urgency it requires.
The international community has tried, in a roughly democratic fashion, to avoid the apocalypse. In 2015, the countries of the world came together in Paris and negotiated a non-binding climate accord that was a victory for compromise but a failure for shrinking the planet's actual carbon footprint. In a number of countries around the world, democratic elections subsequently brought climate-change deniers like Donald Trump to power, further compromising that accord.
In this way, the planet risks following the first lifeboat scenario: talking ourselves to death.
The second lifeboat option -- think of it as eco-authoritarianism -- seems to better fit the temper of the times. The current climate emergency coincides with a profound disillusionment with the liberal world order. Authoritarianism has become significantly more popular these days, even in otherwise democratic societies like India, Brazil, and the United States
Droves of voters have abandoned mainstream parties across the planet, disillusioned by the way they've supported a version of economic globalization that has wildly enriched the already rich, challenged the middle class, and left the poor at the bottom of thebarrel. Those voters have increasingly turned to right-wing populists who disparage "globalists" and promise swift action on a range of issues from immigration to crime.
Such authoritarians couldn't, of course, be less "eco." Most of them deny that climate change is even a problem and some, like Donald Trump, are working with the giant energy companies to heat the planet faster. They've commandeered the lifeboats, only to steer them ever further from possible rescue.
Feckless democrats or reckless authoritarians: Lifeboat Earth doesn't stand much of a chance with such options.
It's no wonder that China has emerged as a last hope for those frustrated by the torpor of the international community and the delusions of the axis of denial. Hasn't that country, after all, redirected enormous streams of funding into sustainable energy? Wasn't that state's coercive one-child policy a critical way to address overpopulation and, by extension, the consumption of resources? Hasn't China stepped ever more firmly into the international leadership void created by Trump's nationalist retreat? As in the second lifeboat scenario, however, China may not be heading in the right direction.
So there we are: 12 years, leaky lifeboats, and no safe haven in sight.
The Ongoing Tragedy of the Commons
In the early 1970s, after the world's first Earth Day, the lifeboat problem seemed to be on everyone's mind. When an oil crisis hit in 1973, energy suddenly no longer seemed like an inexhaustible resource. Overpopulation was threatening to outstrip food production. Pollution darkened the skies over major cities and industrial effluents befouled the waters. Environmentalists were having a field day exposing the ruthless exploitation of resources at the heart of both the capitalist and the communist systems.
Almost half a century ago, some visionary thinkers were already worrying about climate change. In An Inquiry into the Human Prospect in 1973, political scientist Robert Heilbroner delineated the various environmental challenges facing the world, including "global thermal pollution," before concluding that only a combination of military discipline and religious faith could transform the social order.
Fellow political scientist William Ophuls, writing in 1973, posed the problem even more starkly as "Leviathan or oblivion." Either humanity would opt for a "government with major coercive powers" to preserve the environment or it might as well give up. Several years later, he applied his argument to international relations as well, writing, "The already strong rationale for a world government with enough coercive power over fractious nation states to achieve what reasonable men would regard as the planetary common interest has become overwhelming."
No such world government, of course, ensued. The international authorities that did exist at the time proved to have neither the coercive power nor the will necessary for the task. In 1979, however, scientists from 50 nations did gather in Geneva for the first World Climate Conference to issue a call for action on global warming. Later that year, the leaders of the seven richest countries on the planet actually agreed on the need to reduce carbon emissions (something long forgotten in the twenty-first century). Those 1979 meetings began what Nathaniel Rich describes in his article (and now book) Losing Earth as the decade of missed opportunities in the fight against climate change. In 1989, diplomats from 60 countries finally gathered to pass a binding treaty on the subject. "Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous," Rich writes. "Action had to be taken and the United States would need to lead. It didn't."
Here was a vivid early display of that first lifeboat scenario: much talk, no action.
Those early efforts to grapple with climate change were all a response, in different ways, to what ecologist Garrett Hardin had called the "tragedy of the commons." In a famous 1968 essay, he described an age-old problem: herders let their few cattle graze in a common pasture without thinking much about the future; there comes a time, however, when the livestock multiply or more farmers are attracted to the pasture by the rumor of free fodder and, sooner or later, all the grass is eaten, the topsoil blows away, and the field falls into ruin.
To prevent such a scenario, an intervention is obviously necessary. According to enthusiasts for laissez-faire capitalism, the invisible hand of the market should solve the problem, with the field being sold to the highest bidder. Fans of Soviet-style communism argued that nationalizing the property would ultimately protect it. As it turned out, neither capitalism nor communism had much of a track record when it came to protecting that commons. The invisible hand proved not to have a green thumb and neither did the all-too-visible hand of state planning.
Still, in the 1970s, it was commonplace to assume that the two systems would sooner or later converge at some social democratic point on the far horizon. On the environment, in other words, two wrongs would somehow make a right. In their 1974 book Ark II, Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlich proposed adding a "planning branch" to the U.S. government that could address systemic problems like the environmental crisis by developing not only five-year plans, as in the Soviet Union, but 10-year or even 50-year plans as well.
Instead, Americans -- and the rest of the world -- ran screaming in the opposite direction. The debate in the 1970s about the possible use of state power to deal with pressing environmental concerns gave way in the 1980s and 1990s to the mania of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for an unfettered capitalism in which state planning would be a no-no (outside the Pentagon). Meanwhile, increased yields from industrial agriculture, modest environmental reforms by the major powers, and the technological advances that made globalization possible all seemed to diminish the urgency of the environmental crisis (except among environmentalists). Long lines at gas stations were a thing of the past and the air above most cities became clearer, while the world community dodged the bullet of ozone depletion through a rare instance of global cooperation. Spaceship Earth seemed to be motoring along quite well enough, thank you very much.
But there was one niggling detail that even eco-optimists could no longer ignore. Global temperatures were continuing to rise in a dramatic fashion, a problem impermeable to modest policy adjustments, free-market solutions, or even, it seemed, global agreements. Talking about climate change didn't make climate change go away.
And so Leviathan has returned.
"Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being," scientist James Lovelock said in 2010. "I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war." A slew of books in recent years have addressed the question of whether democracy can handle climate change. In Climate Leviathan, political theorists Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright suspected that William Ophuls was prophetic, that a powerful hegemon would "seize command, declare an emergency, and bring order to Earth, all in the name of saving life." In The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith identified the possible solution as a Singaporean one: rule by an enlightened class of technocratic mandarins.
Not everyone, however, was so quick to give up on democracy. Libertarians, liberals, and radicals all rejected the eco-authoritarian option. Libertarians worried about limitations on individual rights. Liberals pointed out that only democracies can hold their leaders accountable for the direction they take, while "real existing authoritarianism" generally can't. Radicals like environmentalist Naomi Klein urged not less but more democracy as climate activists, through pipeline blockades and fracking protests, challenged the nexus of transnational corporations and corrupt governments.
As in the 1970s, however, the international community has continued to prove far too weak to enforce anything, while the effects of climate change in the form of extreme weather, stunning heat waves, increasing inundations, and expanding wildfire seasons make themselves ever more evident.
Meanwhile, the United States, particularly under Donald Trump, is utterly uninterested in leading the way on reducing carbon emissions. So, there's really only one viable candidate for a Climate Leviathan today.
China and Climate Change
Two weeks after the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989, 30 top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party gathered to endorse the government's violent response to protestors. Previously, there had been profound disagreements in the Party over how to deal with the protest movement -- and with the reform process more generally. After the tragedy of June 4th, a new consensus emerged among that country's powerbrokers: China needed one strong leader, a "great helmsman" in the tradition of Mao Zedong who could eliminate factionalism.
Prescribing a solution to China's leadership problems was one thing, filling that prescription something else entirely. The country's post-Tiananmen leaders -- Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao -- were not exactly helmsman material. Within years, China was adrift, without a grand strategy or strong coordination from above.
Then, in 2012, along came Xi Jinping. In the years that followed, on the domestic side, he would promote a "Chinese dream" of economic prosperity and national dignity restored, a kind of Make China Great Again program. In foreign policy, he would unveil a Belt and Road Initiative to build infrastructure by land and sea to grow the economies of China's neighbors, while making Beijing ever more central to markets ever farther afield.
"The Green New Deal isn't just an important policy initiative. It may be the last democratic method of guiding Lifeboat Earth to a safe harbor."Here was a Leviathan in the making: a strong, centralized state no longer hobbled by intra-party disputes, no longer paralyzed by contending public interests or movements in the streets demanding their rights. As the country's president, Xi showed no hesitation about seizing control of the helm of state. After consolidating his power through anticorruption purges, he declared himself leader for life in 2018.
Meanwhile, he continued to redirect vast sums into renewable energy. By 2017, the government was planning to devote $360 billion to it through 2020, creating 13 million new jobs in that sector. China has in these years installed more solar panels and wind power generators than any other country on Earth, approximately three times those of second-place America. It leads in the production and export of most of the key components of a clean-energy future, from wind turbines to electric vehicles. Even more telling is how many renewable energy patents China has registered: 150,000. Number two again is the United States with around 100,000.
So, China has emerged as a seemingly capable Leviathan, combining state planning with a fervent embrace of market forces to fulfill the dreams of the convergence theorists of the 1970s, while creating a strong set of domestic incentives in favor of renewable energy.
Unfortunately, however, the Chinese solution looks like anything but a successful eco-authoritarian way to go, in part because Beijing is using its Belt and Road Initiative to maintain an unsustainable environmental status quo on an increasingly planetary scale. It matters little that Xi Jinping has labeled the massive project green and sustainable. The record so far suggests quite another story. For instance, China is now building or planning to build 300 coal-fired plants abroad as part of its global infrastructure push, even as it cuts down modestly on state contracts for similar plants at home. Beijing, it turns out, also has to deal with its equivalent of the West Virginia coal industry and is rewarding it with international contracts galore.
But coal plants are only the most obvious part of the problem. All the roads that China is building will be filled with motorists and truckers. All its new and refurbished ports will host huge gas-guzzling ships. Some of its projects threaten carbon-absorbing forests and other delicate ecosystems. And then there's China's not-so-hidden desire to use all of this future infrastructure to gain access to raw materials. In Africa alone, China is now investing more than $100 billion a year to get critical minerals. "The effort to secure these resources has spawned its own infrastructure boom that typically involves building large-scale roads, railways, and other infrastructure to transport commodities from interior areas to coastal ports for export," writes journalist Basten Gokkon.
It's not too late, of course, to green that Belt and Road project. Outfits like the Global Green Growth Initiative are working to shrink China's overseas carbon footprint. A couple of years ago, China even issued its own $2.15 billion Green Climate Bond to finance renewables and energy efficiency.
But here's the irony. When it comes to that Belt and Road Initiative, China is actually not Leviathan enough. Although the Party centralized authority in Xi Jinping's hands, those infrastructure projects come from a variety of sources in China, including different government agencies, provinces competing with each other, and the business sector. It's hard enough for the Chinese state, even with a new and more powerful Ministry of Ecology and Environment and a cadre of environmental police officers, to impose stringent standards within the country. More to the point, China has shown little interest or capacity when it comes to imposing them outside its borders.
Mutual Coercion
China is not actually auditioning for the job of eco-authoritarian Climate Leviathan -- not yet, at least -- while the rest of the authoritarians coming to the fore, like Donald Trump or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, all seem fiercely focused on boosting carbon emissions, not limiting them. Meanwhile, it doesn't look like patient negotiations at U.N. conferences are likely to come up with the necessary solutions, much less implement them, before the window of opportunity closes. No wonder Nathaniel Rich and others lament that humanity must now contemplate not just mitigation and adaptation in the face of the global warming crisis but outright failure.
On the horizon, however, is one potentially quite different kind of Climate Leviathan: the Green New Deal, or GND. As of now, it remains more a slogan than a worked-out plan, but it's gaining currency within a Democratic Party competing for power in 2020 and interest in it is growing internationally as well. It might only be a couple of elections -- in a few key countries -- away from political viability.
To achieve the GND's global goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the United States would have to lead the way with its own eco-version of a Belt and Road initiative, a massive infrastructure development project that would involve high-speed rail, the energy retrofitting of buildings, and huge investments in renewable energy (as well as the creation of staggering numbers of jobs). And it would have to do all this without compensating polluting industries with export contracts, as China has done.
Think of it as a potential future Apollo 11-style green moonshot: a focused mobilization of investment, construction, and administrative resolve to achieve what has hitherto been considered impossible.
That last element -- administrative resolve -- could prove the most challenging. The present crew of global right-wing populists are not just climate-change skeptics. Most are also committed to what Steve Bannon, Trump's erstwhile guru, has called the "deconstruction of the administrative state." In other words, they want to reduce the power of government in favor of the power of corporations (and the rich). They want to remove the government's capacity to administer large-scale projects domestically and negotiate international accords that impinge on the sovereignty of the nation-state.
Ultimately, they want to eliminate what Garrett Hardin identified as the only way to avoid the tragedy of the commons: "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon." To push through a Green New Deal in the United States, for instance, a distinctly non-Republican Congress would have to coerce a range of powerful interests (coal companies, oil and gas corporations, auto manufacturers, the Pentagon, and so on) to fall into line. And for any global pact that implements something similar, an international authority like the U.N. would have to coerce recalcitrant or non-compliant countries to do the same.
Something as transformative as the Green New Deal -- a democratically achieved Climate Leviathan -- will not come about because the Democratic Party or Xi Jinping or the U.N. secretary general suddenly realizes that radical change is necessary, nor simply through ordinary parliamentary and congressional procedure. Major change of this sort could only come from a far more basic form of democracy: people in the streets engaged in actions like school strikes and coal mine blockades. This is the kind of pressure that progressive legislators could then use to push through a mutually agreed-upon Green New Deal capable of building a powerful administrative force that might convince or coerce everyone into preserving the global commons.
Coercion: it's not exactly a sexy campaign slogan. But if democracies don't embrace moonshots like the Green New Deal -- along with the administrative apparatus to force powerful interests to comply -- then the increasing political and economic chaos of climate change will usher in yet more authoritarian regimes that offer an entirely different coercive agenda.
The Green New Deal isn't just an important policy initiative. It may be the last democratic method of guiding Lifeboat Earth to a safe harbor.
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James Lovelock at 100
James Lovelock has changed our contemporary perspectives on life on this planet as much as Charles Darwin did for the 19th century
Jul 24, 2019
Forty years ago James Lovelock published his book 'Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth', setting forth his hypothesis that all life on Earth is part of a co-evolved system that maintains the planet as an environment hospitable to abundant life. Today his approach is known as 'Earth System Science', and is central to our understanding of how the planet works. But back in 1979, he already had a warning for us.
"If...man encroaches upon Gaia's functional powers to such an extent that he disables her, he would then wake up one day to find that he had the permanent lifelong job of planetary maintenance engineer...."
"Then at last we should be riding that strange contraption, 'the spaceship Earth', and whatever tamed and domesticated biosphere remained would indeed be our 'life support system'. [We would face] the final choice of permanent enslavement on the prison hulk of the spaceship Earth, or gigadeaths to enable the survivors to restore a Gaian world."
For the past thirty years I have travelled down to Devon every four or five years to interview Jim, but essentially to ask him 'Are we there yet?' The last time I went, he said 'Almost.' But he seemed remarkably cheerful about it, even though 'there,' he believed, would imply the death of around 80 percent of the global population ('gigadeaths') before the end of the century.
There's nothing harsh or cold about Jim, but it would be fair to say that his manner is impish. He's a dedicated contrarian who delights in challenging the accepted wisdom - and is generally proved right in the end. And although he was one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about global warming, he never bangs on about our folly, he never raises his voice, and he never despairs.
Once I asked him if he thought things would ever get so bad that human beings would go extinct. "Oh, I don't think so," he said. "Human beings are tough. There'll always be a few breeding pairs." But, he added, they'd have trouble trying to rebuild a high-energy civilisation, because we have used up all the easily accessible sources of energy building this one.
The Gaian system, that is, which he defines as "a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."
It is a rather god-like perspective, but that probably comes naturally if you have spent your whole life trying to stand back far enough to see the system as a whole. The Gaian system, that is, which he defines as "a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."
In other words, it's all connected. The Earth's temperature, the oxygen content of the atmosphere, all the qualities that make it a welcoming home for abundant life are maintained by the actions and inter-actions of the myriad species of living things. They are the creators as well as the beneficiaries of this remarkably stable status quo.
It sounds a bit New Age--he and American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, who collaborated with him in the earliest thinking on the proposition, took some flak for that from their scientific colleagues--but he wasn't really suggesting that the super-organism he proposed had consciousness or intention. Gaia was from the start a serious scientific hypothesis that could be subjected to rigorous testing.
It has now been elevated into an entirely respectable and widely accepted theory. Indeed, Gaia provides the broader context in which most research in the life sciences, and much chemical, geological, atmospheric and oceanographic research as well, is now done.
Jim Lovelock has changed our contemporary perspectives on life on this planet as much as Charles Darwin did for the 19th century, and like Darwin he has done it as an independent scientist, mostly working on his own and with relatively modest resources. Even more remarkably, he published his first book, and his Gaia hypothesis, when he was already 60.
That was forty years ago, and on Friday he turns 100. But he hardly seems to have aged at all, and to celebrate his birthday he has published a new book (his 10th). It's called 'Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence', and it's just as much off the beaten track as his first book, 'Gaia.'
He's being cheerful again. Yes, we are approaching the 'Singularity', the artificial-intelligence takeover when our robots/computers become autonomous. Yes, after that it is AI, not us, that will lead the dance. But don't panic, because the AI will be fully aware that its platform needs to be a more or less recognisably Gaian planet, and will cooperate with us to preserve it.
In that case, we will no longer be in the driver's seat, but we will probably still be in the vehicle. "Whatever harm we have done to the Earth, we have, just in time, redeemed ourselves by acting simultaneously as parents and midwives to the cyborgs," he writes, and he may be right. He's certainly right a lot more often than he's wrong. Happy birthday, Jim.
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Apocalyptic Capitalism
The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and propaganda on behalf of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over experience.
Dec 07, 2015
The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and propaganda on behalf of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over experience. There are only a few ways left to deal honestly with climate change: sustained civil disobedience that disrupts the machinery of exploitation; preparing for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes that will come from irreversible rising temperatures; and cutting our personal carbon footprints, which means drastically reducing our consumption, particularly of animal products.
"Our civilization," Dr. Richard Oppenlander writes in "Food Choice and Sustainability," "displays a curious instinct when confronted with a problem related to overconsumption--we simply find a way to produce more of what it is we are consuming, instead of limiting or stopping that consumption."
The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism. They act as if the greatest contributor of greenhouse gases--the animal agriculture industry--does not exist. They siphon off trillions of dollars and employ scientific and technical expertise--expertise that should be directed toward preparing for environmental catastrophe and investing in renewable energy--to wage endless wars in the Middle East. What they airily hold out as a distant solution to the crisis--wind turbines and solar panels--is, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. And as the elites mouth platitudes about saving the climate they are shoving still another trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), down our throats. The TPP permits corporations to ignore nonbinding climate accords made at conferences such as the one in Paris, and it allows them, in secret trade tribunals, to defy environmental regulations imposed by individual states.
New technology--fracking, fuel-efficient vehicles or genetically modified food--is not about curbing overconsumption or conserving resources. It is about ensuring that consumption continues at unsustainable levels. Technological innovation, employed to build systems of greater and greater complexity, has fragmented society into cadres of specialists. The expertise of each of these specialists is limited to a small section of the elaborate technological, scientific and bureaucratic machinery that drives corporate capitalism forward--much as in the specialized bureaucratic machinery that defined the genocide carried out by the Nazis. These technocrats are part of the massive, unthinking hive that makes any system work, even a system of death. They lack the intellectual and moral capacity to question the doomsday machine spawned by global capitalism. And they are in control.
Civilizations careening toward collapse create ever more complex structures, and more intricate specialization, to exploit diminishing resources. But eventually the resources are destroyed or exhausted. The systems and technologies designed to exploit these resources become useless. Economists call such a phenomenon the "Jevons paradox." The result is systems collapse.
In the wake of collapses, as evidenced throughout history, societies fragment politically, culturally and socially. They become failed states, bleak and desolate outposts where law and order break down, and there is a mad and often violent scramble for the basic necessities of life. Barbarism reigns.
"Only the strong survive; the weak are victimized, robbed, and killed," the anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in "The Collapse of Complex Societies." "There is fighting for food and fuel. Whatever central authority remains lacks the resources to reimpose order. Bands of pitiful, maimed survivors scavenge among the ruins of grandeur. Grass grows in the streets. There is no higher goal than survival."
The elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs not to solve real problems but to maintain at any cost the systems of global capitalism, profit personally from the assault. They amass inconceivable sums of wealth while their victims, the underclasses around the globe, are thrust into increasing distress from global warming, poverty and societal breakdown. The apparatus of government, seized by this corporate cabal, is hostile to genuine change. It passes laws, as it did for Denton, Texas, afterresidents voted to outlaw fracking in their city, to overturn the ability of local communities to control their own resources. It persecutes dissidents, along with environmental and animal rights activists, who try to halt the insanity. The elites don't work for us. They don't work for the planet. They orchestrate the gaiacide. And they are well paid for it.
The Anthropocene Age--the age of humans, which has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species and the pollution of the soil, air and oceans--is upon us. The pace of destruction is accelerating. Climate scientists say that sea levels, for example, are rising three times faster than predicted and that the Arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. "If carbon dioxide concentrations reach 550 ppm," writes Clive Hamilton in "Requiem for a Species," "after which emissions fell to zero, the global temperature would continue to rise for at least another century." We have already passed 400 parts per million, a figure not seen on earth for 3 million to 5 million years. We are on track to reach at least 550 ppm by 2100.
The breakdown of the planet, many predict, will be nonlinear, meaning that various systems that sustain life--as Tainter chronicles in his study of collapsed civilizations--will disintegrate simultaneously. The infrastructures that distribute food, supply our energy, ensure our security, produce and transport our baffling array of products, and maintain law and order will crumble at once. It won't be much fun: Soaring temperatures. Submerged island states and coastal cities. Mass migrations. Species extinction. Monster storms. Droughts. Famines. Declining crop yields. And a security and surveillance apparatus, along with militarized police, that will employ harsher and harsher methods to cope with the chaos.
We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, and face the bleakness of reality before us. To resist means to acknowledge that we are living in a world already heavily damaged by global warming. It means refusing to participate in the destruction of the planet. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including what we eat, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation.
The animal agriculture industry has, in a staggering act of near total censorship, managed to stifle public discussion about the industry's complicity in global warming. It is barely mentioned in climate summits. Yet livestock and their byproducts, as Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn point out in their book, "The Sustainability Secret," and their documentary,"Cowspiracy," account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are rarely mentioned in climate talks, although those two greenhouse gases are, as the authors point out, respectively, 86 times and 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Cattle, worldwide, they write, produce 150 billion gallons of methane daily. And 65 percent of the nitrous oxide produced by human-related activities is caused by the animal agriculture industry. Water used in fracking, they write, ranges from 70 billion to 140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption, the book notes, ranges from 34 trillion to 76 trillion gallons annually. Raising animals for human consumption takes up to 45 percent of the planet's land. Ninety-one percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and up to 80 percent of global rain forest loss are caused by clearing land for the grazing of livestock and growing feed crops for meat and dairy animals. As more and more rain forest disappears, the planet loses one of its primary means to safely sequester carbon dioxide. The animal agriculture industry is, as Andersen and Kuhn write, also a principal cause of species extinction and the creation of more than 95,000 square miles of nitrogen-flooded dead zones in the oceans.
A person who eats a vegan diet, they point out, a diet free of meat, dairy and eggs, saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, and one animal's life every day.
The animal agriculture industry has pushed through "Ag-Gag" laws in many states that criminalize protests, critiques of the industry, and whistleblowing attempts to bring the public's attention to the staggering destruction wrought on the environment by the business of raising 70 billion land animals every year worldwide to be exploited and consumed by humans. And they have done so, I presume, because defying the animal agriculture industry is as easy as deciding not to put animal products--which have tremendous, scientifically proven health risks--into your mouth.
We have little time left. Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species. We may not be able to stop the assault. But we can refuse to abet it. The idols of power and greed, as the biblical prophets warned us, threaten to doom the human race.
Timothy Pachirat recounts in his book, "Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight," an Aug. 5, 2004, story in the Omaha World-Herald. An "old-timer" who lived five miles from the Omaha slaughterhouses recalled the wind carrying the stench of the almost six and a half million cattle, sheep and hogs killed each year in south Omaha. The sickly odor permeated buildings throughout the area.
"It was the smell of money," the old-timer said. "It was the smell of money."
"The Sustainability Secret," a book quoted in this column, has an introduction by Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges and was ghostwritten by Truthdig's books editor, Eunice Wong.
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Democracy Is the Solution
Democracy isn’t a barrier to solving global issues like climate change. It’s humanity’s best hope.
Nov 29, 2014
Shortly after the Copenhagen UN climate talks in 2009 collapsed, James Lovelock, a godfather of modern environmentalism, was asked by Guardian reporter Leo Hickman what should be done in light of the failure. Lovelock issued a call for what can only be described as a climate dictatorship.
Rejecting the idea that a solution to climate change could be achieved in a modern democracy, Lovelock thundered that what was needed instead was "a more authoritative world" where there are "a few people with authority who you trust who are running it."
"What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."
This call for a sort of benevolent dictatorship of science is increasingly being made for a range of problems that we confront globally, from biodiversity loss to antibiotic resistance.
Antibiotic resistance has become such a danger to public health worldwide, and government action has been so indolent and inadequate, that a pair of leading scientists impatient with the situation have called for a new executive global body to assume control of the problem. They want an international organization similar to those currently tasked with navigating our species' response to climate change -- basically an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but for bugs and drugs and with more executive oomph.
Given the magnitude of the danger -- the "apocalyptic" scenario, according to Sally Davies, the UK's chief medical officer, is that within twenty years we will completely run out of effective drugs against routine infections -- it may seem a trivial, even irresponsible, exercise to fret over the democratic ramifications of such a move.
However, considering how often this kind of technocratic proposal is the default response to any new scientific problem of profound import, democrats do need to consider whether other approaches are more desirable.
"So far, the international response has been feeble," wrote Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, the UK's largest medical research charity, and Mark Woolhouse, University of Edinburgh professor of infectious disease epidemiology, in a tubthumping commentary published in the scientific journal Nature in May and presented at a press conference at the Royal Society (giving the proposal the imprimatur of the august scientific body).
The commentary took aim at the World Health Organization in particular, which in April issued its first ever report tracking antimicrobial resistance worldwide, finding "alarming levels" of bacterial resistance. "This serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country," the authors warned.
Despite the acceleration of this universal risk, the UN body responded by simply calling for better surveillance. "The WHO missed the opportunity to provide leadership on what is urgently needed to really make a difference," the authors wrote, acknowledging that surveillance is vital, but radically insufficient.
The growing threat from what are popularly termed "superbugs" is similar to that posed by climate change -- they are "a natural process exacerbated by human activity and the actions of one country can have global ramifications," according to a parallel statement put out by the two authors' organizations.
They are not the only researchers or clinicians that have made the comparison between drug resistance and climate change. Last year, Davies described the situation as a more dangerous risk than terrorism, and a greater threat to humanity than global warming, telling the BBC, "If we don't take action, then we may all be back in an almost nineteenth century environment where infections kill us as a result of routine operations."
So many medical techniques and interventions introduced since the 1940s depend on a foundation of antimicrobial protection. The gains in life expectancy that humanity has experienced over this time depended on many things, but they would have been impossible without antibiotics. Prior to the development of antibiotics, bacterial infections were one of the most common causes of death.
We need to keep discovering new classes of antibiotics because over time, the bugs that are susceptible to the drugs are eradicated. Those with random mutations that make them resistant survive, reproduce, and eventually dominate. This is just evolution.
And yet for almost three decades, there has been a "discovery void." No new class of antibiotics has been developed since the use of lipopeptides in 1987. The reason for this is straightforward: big pharmaceutical companies have refused to engage in research into new families of antibiotic because such drugs are not merely unprofitable, but are antithetical to capitalism's operating principles. The less they are used, the more effective they are.
As these firms readily admit, it makes no sense for them to invest an estimated $870 million per drug approved by regulators on a product that people only use a handful of times in their life, compared to investing the same amount on the development of highly profitable drugs that patients have to take every day for the rest of their lives.
Some governments have begun to partially recognize this market failure. The European Commission has set aside EUR600 million for an "innovative medicines" program endearingly named "New Drugs 4 Bad Bugs." But the scale of investment allotted by governments to this solution remains inadequate.
Hence Farrar and Woolhouse's demand for the establishment of a global, scientific body that's up to the challenge. The new intergovernmental organization would exist to marshal evidence on drug resistance and to encourage policy implementation. Working with national governments and international agencies tasked with implementing its recommendations, it would set strict targets to stem the loss of drug potency and speed up the development of new therapies.
An Intergovernmental Panel on Antimicrobial Resistance would be welcome if it allowed for greater coordination of information sharing, surveillance, and analysis.
But to whom would this scientific policy recommendation body report? What overarching structure would decide what is to be done and then implement those recommendations?
While distinct problems, one has to presume that like climate policy, it would require a copy of the IPCC's twin, the conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The IPCC was established in 1988 by the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization. Four years later, the IPCC played a key role in the creation of its diplomatic corollary, the UNFCCC, a quadrennial space for horse-trading between governments that all but collapsed in 2009 in Copenhagen and which has moved hardly at all since.
We as a species are once again confronted by a difficult issue, with worldwide political and economic implications, and without a global democratic body to address it. And the only option imaginable is a process of technocratic and diplomatic decision-making.
Drug resistance and climate change are hardly the only topics like this. As the IPCC itself proudly declares, the relationship between it and the UNFCCC has become a model for interaction between science and decision makers, and a range of efforts have been mounted in the years since their founding to construct similar assessment and policy processes for other global issues.
In 2012, under the aegis of the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was established, but in partnership with parties signatory to multiple UN conventions, including those covering biological diversity, endangered species, migratory species, plant genetic resources, and wetlands: an "IPCC for biodiversity." And a similar structure is currently being set up to bring together experts and officials into a subsidiary body of the conference of parties to the UN Convention on Combating Drought and Desertification: an "IPCC for deserts and dustbowls."
For some, even the IPCC/UNFCCC is excessively politicized (read: democratic). Johan Rockstrom, the head of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and Will Steffen, director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute are two of the world's leading climate strategists, and are best known for their development with twenty-six other researchers of the Earth-system concept of "planetary boundaries," a framework for understanding "a safe operating space for humanity" -- not just as it relates to climate change, but ocean acidification, pollution, ozone depletion, and others.
Rockstrom and Steffen call for a "global referee" independent of elected governments to ensure humanity does not exceed these boundaries: "Ultimately, there will need to be an institution (or institutions) operating, with authority, above the level of individual countries to ensure that the planetary boundaries are respected. In effect, such an institution, acting on behalf of humanity as a whole."
They suggest the creation of an Earth Atmospheric Trust, "which would treat the atmosphere as a global common property asset managed as a trust for the benefit of current and future generations." But how would the governors of such a trust be picked? Elected by the people of the Earth, or appointed by technocrats?
To be clear: the concern is not over the international aggregation of expertise in a particular topic. Who could oppose such a necessary pooling of knowledge and intellectual resources? Rather, the worry is that we have not properly interrogated this particular IPCC/UNFCCC model nor adequately wrestled with how expertise is imbricated with anti-democratic global governance and its retreat from norms of public accountability, participation, and popular decision-making.
Not all those asking questions about the IPCC and UNFCCC's democratic deficit are climate denialists. Indeed, it is precisely those concerned about the ramifications of anthropogenic global warming who should be most worried about the galloping tendency of elites to remove decision-making from direct democratic control and the realm of political contest.
For Harvard science and technology studies researcher Sheila Jasanoff, there are a number of pertinent questions: what is the demarcation line between scientific and political institutions? How do governments construct what she calls "public reason" -- those forms of evidence and argument used in making state decisions accountable to citizens? Are these new structures apolitical in service of the general interest, or do they provide unacknowledged protections to particular groups whose interests are at odds with the rest of humanity?
Riffing on this idea, German sociologist Silke Beck and her colleagues ask in a recent paper on the structures of the IPCC and the IPBES that we at least explore "the full range of alternative institutional design options as opposed to implementing a one-size-fits-all model of expertise."
"So far," says Beck, whose research focuses on new forms of environmental and science governance, "no debate has ever taken place about the IPCC's relationship to public policy and to its various global 'publics' or about its normative commitments in terms of accountability, political representation, and legitimacy."
In the last two years, there have been talks among stakeholders on the future of the IPCC, but participants in these closed-door meetings are bound by strict confidentiality agreements, and journalists and researchers have been shut out.
In a parallel fashion, great swathes of legislative topic areas such as monetary policy, trade, intellectual property, fisheries, and agricultural subsidies that used to be debated openly in democratic chambers are now drafted, amended, and approved in backroom arenas.
It's what sociologist Colin Crouch calls "post democracy": while the pageantry of general elections proceeds, decision-making takes place not in legislative bodies, but in closed-door, treaty-based negotiations between government leaders or diplomats, advised by experts.
In the case of the European Union, the most advanced technocratic governance space in the world, we can add to the list of topics outside democratic debate: fiscal policy (that is, all spending decisions) and labour market regulation, those core policy areas that, apart from defense and policing, perhaps define most what it is to be a state.
Since the advent of the Eurozone crisis, the European institutions have successfully insulated economic decision-making from electorates and shifted it to the junta of experts of the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice, or even ad hoc self-selecting groups of key players in the European institutional mosaic.
The Eurozone catastrophe was so grave that the EU no longer had time for "political games" or "politicization," as outgoing commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and council president Herman Van Rompuy repeatedly stressed. In other words, they no longer had time for democracy.
It's a common sentiment among elites. The incoming commission chief and ex-head of the Eurogroup of nations using the single currency, Luxembourger Jean-Claude Juncker, notoriously said a few year ago: "Monetary policy is a serious issue. We should discuss this in secret, in the Eurogroup," he told a meeting on economic governance organized by the European Movement, not realizing the meeting was open to journalists. "I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious. I am for secret, dark debates."
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Still No Escape from Killer Chernobyl
Apr 24, 2011
LEIDEN, the Netherlands - The accident could have served as a wake-up call to the whole of humanity. Twenty-five years ago, on Apr. 26 1986, disaster struck at the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear complex in the Ukrainian state of the former Soviet Union.
The accident actually started taking shape in the preceding night, when workers undertook a turbine test that had incompletely been carried out before the nuclear plant became operational. When the test was being carried out, the automatic emergency system was shut down, undermining reactor safety.
During the test also, fuel elements burst, setting off a chain of events which in no time resulted in two powerful explosions. Soon the reactor's meltdown was a fact, and a huge radioactive cloud spread its contaminating effects over a vast area of the Soviet Union and beyond.
A quarter century has lapsed since this accident occurred. Until last month's accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Chernobyl was considered to be the very worst disaster ever to have occurred at a nuclear production facility since the founding of the sector during World War II. Moreover, as recent reports confirm, even today the Chernobyl disaster is far from over.
Hence a retrospective is surely appropriate. The more so since the Japanese authorities have meanwhile rated their Fukushima accident at the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
First, the radioactive fall-out from the Soviet granite-moderated reactor was unprecedentedly large. Officially, the fall-out is stated to have been 50 million of curies of radioactivity. But it probably was at least several times this figure.
Amongst the numerous known and unknown nuclear accidents that historically have occurred, Chernobyl is not the only one to have resulted in a dangerously large fall-out of radioactivity. When storage tanks for high- radioactive waste in 1957 exploded in a nuclear military reprocessing factory in Cheliabinsk, in a remote corner of the Ural mountains, tens of millions of curies of radioactivity also leaked, damaging the health of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens.
Both the fall-out from Chernobyl and that from Cherniabinsk by far exceeded the radioactive fall-out from the U.S.'s dropping of atom bombs on Japan's cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. Besides, since the Chernobyl complex was located close to densely populated parts of the Ukraine and Europe, the radioactive fall-out from the damaged civilian reactor was bound to be very consequential.
Fifty thousand people living in Chernobyl's immediate surroundings had to be evacuated. A vast rural region became uninhabitable. And 15 countries of Europe saw half of their territories contaminated by the radioactive cloud.
As happened in the wake of the recent Fukushima-Daiichi disaster, public authorities everywhere were forced to put restrictions on the sale and import of food, so as to reduce the risk of radiation-induced cancer deaths among their populations.
Initially, the effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe and the widespread anger it aroused put a brake on plans to expand production of nuclear energy, in particular in Europe and the U.S. Yet as 'Chernobyl' started receding from public memory, proponents of nuclear energy once again went on the offensive, claiming the disaster had cost very few lives.
Even a section of well-known European intellectuals worried about climate change have been swayed. The renowned British thinker James Lovelock a few years back surprisingly stated that claims regarding a huge death toll from Chernobyl are 'a powerful lie'.
The only admission institutions representing nuclear interests, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), are willing to make is that the disaster caused an increase in thyroid cancers in children. This, they say, may result in just a few thousand mortalities.
Not even the fact that tens of thousands of young and healthy men who heroically participated in clean- up activities in Chernobyl faced an early death is admitted from this side.
In a more critical report brought out in 2006, the international organisation Greenpeace revealed that the figure for victims of cancer cases due to Chernobyl could top a quarter million, and that nearly a hundred thousand fatal cancers were to be deplored.
Again, in an ambitious study brought out by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009, Russian scientists compared data from severely contaminated, and from less contaminated parts of the former Soviet Union. They concluded that the death toll until end 2004 may be nine to ten times Greenpeace's estimate.
Undoubtedly, vast numbers of fatalities from the 1986 fall-out remain unrecorded or hidden. Yet Chernobyl's tragic effects can easily be seen by those who care. In some areas of the former Soviet Union, less than 20 percent of children are healthy. Numerous babies have been born with deformities or with disturbances of their nervous systems. Genetic disorders were found in every animal species studied by the Russian scientists.
However, it would be wrong to think the after-effects of Chernobyl were limited to the direct consequences of the 1986 fall-out. Towards understanding the implications of a nuclear disaster, it is also necessary to look at the outcome of the clean-up operation undertaken subsequently by the then Soviet authorities.
First, 5,000 tons of materials were dropped from helicopters to re-cover the damaged reactor, at the price of the life the pilots. Then, some 600,000 workers, baptised the 'liquidators', were recruited or forced to rapidly build a sarcophagus of concrete and metal.
This operation carried out over a period of six months was extremely hazardous, and probably resulted in the largest category of radiation-induced illnesses and deaths from the catastrophe. Besides, contrary to what one would expect or hope for - the new outer shell for Chernobyl's melted reactor never functioned as an effective barrier to radiation leakages. It reportedly has been in danger of collapse for years.
Thus, since the nineties discussions have been under way over the building of a new arch. Such an arch would have to be erected in proximity of the former reactor, and will need to be glided towards its destination via rails, in order to reduce risks for humans. Also, the existing sarcophagus and the destroyed reactor will have to be dismantled, with the aid of robots.
As of 2011, a major chunk of the funds required to finance this new operation still has not been collected. Clearly, the mess from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is long, if not ever-lasting. And although Japan's technological capacity today obviously exceeds that of the Soviet Union 25 years back, the clean-up work in Japan is sure to extend over very many decades to come.
What fundamental lessons can we draw from Chernobyl - for Japan and for the world at large? The experience gathered since the meltdown 25 years back appears to validate the views nuclear critics expressed at the time. The disaster fuelled immediate and worldwide resistance - not just against expansion, but against any reliance on nuclear energy. Many hundreds of thousands of people have since participated in protests in Western Europe alone.
One of the central arguments critics cite is that nuclear technology is a form of technology which is so hazardous, so destructive, that humanity would do well to renounce it entirely. Yet since the late nineties, strenuous efforts have been made by proponents of nuclear energy to stage a 'renaissance' and resume the trend of nuclear expansion worldwide.
It is very unfortunate that a section of writers and intellectuals who are vocal against climate change have sought fit to voice the same arguments being used by representatives of the nuclear lobby to defend a nuclear comeback. As a retrospective on the Chernobyl catastrophe easily brings out: one cannot trade one catastrophe against another; one can't exchange a climate catastrophe for a nuclear catastrophe.
On this anniversary we need a sacred pledge in favour of reliance on technologies that are productive, that squarely sustain all forms of life on planet earth.
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The Planet Strikes Back
Why We Underestimate the Earth and Overestimate Ourselves
Apr 14, 2011
In his 2010 book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it's no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of "melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat." Altered as it is from the world in which human civilization was born and thrived, it needs a new name -- so he gave it that extra "a" in "Eaarth."
The Eaarth that McKibben describes is a victim, a casualty of humankind's unrestrained consumption of resources and its heedless emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases. True, this Eaarth will cause pain and suffering to humans as sea levels rise and croplands wither, but as he portrays it, it is essentially a victim of human rapaciousness.
With all due respect to McKibben's vision, let me offer another perspective on his (and our) Eaarth: as a powerful actor in its own right and as an avenger, rather than simply victim.
It's not enough to think of Eaarth as an impotent casualty of humanity's predations. It is also a complex organic system with many potent defenses against alien intervention -- defenses it is already wielding to devastating effect when it comes to human societies. And keep this in mind: we are only at the beginning of this process.
To grasp our present situation, however, it's necessary to distinguish between naturally recurring planetary disturbances and the planetary responses to human intervention. Both need a fresh look, so let's start with what Earth has always been capable of before we turn to the responses of Eaarth, the avenger.
Overestimating Ourselves
Our planet is a complex natural system, and like all such systems, it is continually evolving. As that happens -- as continents drift apart, as mountain ranges rise and fall, as climate patterns shift -- earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons, prolonged droughts, and other natural disturbances recur, even if on an irregular and unpredictable basis.
Our predecessors on the planet were deeply aware of this reality. After all, ancient civilizations were repeatedly shaken, and in some cases shattered, by such disturbances. For example, it is widely believed that the ancient Minoan civilization of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed following a powerful volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (also called Santorini) in the mid-second millennium BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that many other ancient civilizations were weakened or destroyed by intense earthquake activity. In Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, Stanford geophysicist Amos Nur and his co-author Dawn Burgess argue that Troy, Mycenae, ancient Jericho, Tenochtitlan, and the Hittite empire may have fallen in this manner.
Faced with recurring threats of earthquakes and volcanoes, many ancient religions personified the forces of nature as gods and goddesses and called for elaborate human rituals and sacrificial offerings to appease these powerful deities. The ancient Greek sea-god Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans), also called "Earth-Shaker," was thought to cause earthquakes when provoked or angry.
In more recent times, thinkers have tended to scoff at such primitive notions and the gestures that went with them, suggesting instead that science and technology -- the fruits of civilization -- offer more than enough help to allow us to triumph over the Earth's destructive forces. This shift in consciousness has been impressively documented in Clive Ponting's 2007 volume, A New Green History of the World. Quoting from influential thinkers of the post-Medieval world, he shows how Europeans acquired a powerful conviction that humanity should and would rule nature, not the other way around. The seventeenth century French mathematician Rene Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that "we can... render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature."
It's possible that this growing sense of human control over nature was enhanced by a period of a few hundred years in which there may have been less than the usual number of civilization-threatening natural disturbances. Over those centuries, modern Europe and North America, the two centers of the Industrial Revolution, experienced nothing like the Thera eruption of the Minoan era -- or, for that matter, anything akin to the double whammy of the 9.0 earthquake and 50-foot-high tsunami that struck Japan on March 11th. This relative immunity from such perils was the context within which we created a highly complex, technologically sophisticated civilization that largely takes for granted human supremacy over nature on a seemingly quiescent planet.
But is this assessment accurate? Recent events, ranging from the floods that covered 20% of Pakistan and put huge swathes of Australia underwater to the drought-induced fires that burned vast areas of Russia, suggest otherwise. In the past few years, the planet has been struck by a spate of major natural disturbances, including the recent earthquake-tsunami disaster in Japan (and its many powerful aftershocks), the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the February 2010 earthquake in Chile, the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, the March 2011 earthquake in Burma, and the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake-tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in 14 countries, as well as a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in and around Indonesia.
If nothing else, these events remind us that the Earth is an ever-evolving natural system; that the past few hundred years are not necessarily predictive of the next few hundred; and that we may, in the last century in particular, have lulled ourselves into a sense of complacency about our planet that is ill-deserved. More important, they suggest that we may -- and I emphasize may -- be returning to an era in which the frequency of the incidence of such events is on the rise.
In this context, the folly and hubris with which we've treated natural forces comes strongly into focus. Take what's happening at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex in northern Japan, where at least four nuclear reactors and their adjoining containment pools for "spent" nuclear fuel remain dangerously out of control. The designers and owners of the plant obviously did not cause the earthquake and tsunami that have created the present peril. This was a result of the planet's natural evolution -- in this case, of the sudden movement of continental plates. But they do bear responsibility for failing to anticipate the potential for catastrophe -- for building a reactor on the site of frequent past tsunamis and assuming that a human-made concrete platform could withstand the worst that nature has to offer. Much has been said about flaws in design at the Fukushima plant and its inadequate backup systems. All this, no doubt, is vital, but the ultimate cause of the disaster was never a simple design flaw. It was hubris: an overestimation of the power of human ingenuity and an underestimation of the power of nature.
What future disasters await us as a result of such hubris? No one, at this point, can say with certainty, but the Fukushima facility is not the only reactor built near active earthquake zones, or at risk from other natural disturbances. And don't just stop with nuclear plants. Consider, for instance, all those oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico at risk from increasingly powerful hurricanes or, if cyclones increase in power and frequency, the deep-sea ones Brazil is planning to construct up to 180 miles off its coast in the Atlantic Ocean. And with recent events in Japan in mind, who knows what damage might be inflicted by a major earthquake in California? After all, California, too, has nuclear plants sited ominously near earthquake faults.
Underestimating Eaarth
Hubris of this sort is, however, only one of the ways in which we invite the planet's ire. Far more dangerous and provocative is our poisoning of the atmosphere with the residues of our resource consumption, especially of fossil fuels. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, total carbon emissions from all forms of energy use had already hit 21.2 billion metric tons by 1990 and are projected to rise ominously to 42.4 billion by 2035, a 100% increase in less than half a century. The more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we dump into the atmosphere, the more we alter the planet's natural climatic systems and damage other vital ecological assets, including oceans, forests, and glaciers. These are all components of the planet's integral makeup, and when damaged in this way, they will trigger defensive feedback mechanisms: rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and increased sea levels, among other reactions.
The notion of the Earth as a complex natural system with multiple feedback loops was first proposed by environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s and propounded in his 1979 book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. (Lovelock appropriated the name of the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, the personification of Mother Earth, for his version of our planet.) In this and other works, Lovelock and his collaborators argue that all biological organisms and their inorganic surroundings on the planet are closely integrated to form a complex and self-regulating system, maintaining the necessary conditions for life -- a concept they termed "the Gaia Hypothesis." When any parts of this system are damaged or altered, they contend, the others respond by attempting to repair, or compensate for, the damage in order to restore the essential balance.
Think of our own bodies when attacked by virulent microorganisms: our temperature rises; we produce more white blood cells and other fluids, sleep a lot, and deploy other defense mechanisms. When successful, our bodies' defenses first neutralize and eventually exterminate the invading germs. This is not a conscious act, but a natural, life-saving process.
Eaarth is now responding to humanity's depredations in a similar way: by warming the atmosphere, taking carbon from the air and depositing it in the ocean, increasing rainfall in some areas and decreasing it elsewhere, and in other ways compensating for the massive atmospheric infusion of harmful human emissions.
But what Eaarth does to protect itself from human intervention is unlikely to prove beneficial for human societies. As the planet warms and glaciers melt, sea levels will rise, inundating coastal areas, destroying cities, and flooding low-lying croplands. Drought will become endemic in many once-productive farming areas, reducing food supplies for hundreds of millions of people. Many plant and animal species that are key to human livelihoods, including various species of trees, food crops, and fish, will prove incapable of adjusting to these climate changes and so cease to exist. Humans may -- and again I emphasize that may -- prove more successful at adapting to the crisis of global warming than such species, but in the process, multitudes are likely to die of starvation, disease, and attendant warfare.
Bill McKibben is right: we no longer live on the "cozy, taken-for-granted" planet formerly known as Earth. We inhabit a new place, already changed dramatically by the intervention of humankind. But we are not acting upon a passive, impotent entity unable to defend itself against human transgression. Sad to say, we will learn to our dismay of the immense powers available to Eaarth, the Avenger.
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There Won't Be a Bailout for the Earth
Nov 26, 2010
Why are the world's governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday's apocalypse. Didn't somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn't it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn't Al Gore get fat, or something?
Alas, the biosphere doesn't read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began. 2010 is the year humanity's emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.
Before the Great Crash of 2008, the people who warned about the injection of huge destabilizing risk into our financial system seemed like arcane, anal bores. Now we all sit in the rubble and wish we had listened. The great ecological crash will be worse, because nature doesn't do bailouts.
That's what Cancun should be about - surveying the startling scientific evidence, and developing an urgent plan to change course. The Antarctic - which locks of 90 percent of the world's ice - has now seen eight of its ice shelves fully or partially collapse. The world's most distinguished climate scientists, after recording like this, say we will face a three to six feet rise in sea level this century. That means the drowning of London, Bangkok, Venice, Cairo and Shanghai, and entire countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives.
And that's just one effect of the way we are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Perhaps the most startling news story of the year passed almost unnoticed. Plant plankton are tiny creatures that live in the oceans and carry out a job you and I depend on to stay alive. They produce half the world's oxygen, and suck up planet-warming carbon dioxide. Yet this year, one of the world's most distinguished scientific journals, Nature, revealed that 40 per cent of them have been killed by the warming of the oceans since 1950. Professor Boris Worm, who co-authored the study, said in shock: "I've been trying to think of a biological change that's bigger than this and I can't think of one." That has been the result of less than one degree of warming. Now we are on course for at least three degrees this century. What will happen?
The scientific debate is not between deniers and those who can prove that releasing massive amounts of warming gases will make the world warmer. Every major scientific academy in the world, and all the peer-reviewed literature, says global warming denialism is a pseudo-science, on a par with Intelligent Design, homeopathy, or the claim that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. One email from one lousy scientist among tens of thousands doesn't dent that. No: the debate is between the scientists who say the damage we are doing is a disaster, and the scientists who say it is catastrophe.
Yet the world's governments are gathering in Cancun with no momentum and very little pressure from their own populations to stop the ecological vandalism. The Copenhagen conference last year collapsed after the most powerful people in the world turned up to flush their own scientists' advice down a very clean Danish toilet. These leaders are sometimes described as "doing nothing about global warming." No doubt that form of words will fill the reporting from Cancun too. But it's false. They're not "doing nothing" - they are allowing their countries' emissions of climate-trashing gases to massively increase. That's not failure to act. It's deciding to act in an incredibly destructive way.
The collapse of Copenhagen has not shocked people into action; it has numbed them into passivity. Last year, we were talking - in theory, at least - about the legally binding cap on the world's carbon emissions, because the world's scientists say this is the only thing that can preserve the climate that has created and sustained human civilization. What are we talking about this year? What's on the table at Cancun, other than sand?
Almost nothing. They will talk about how to help the world's poor "adapt" to the fact we are drying out much of their land and drowning the rest. But everybody is backing off from one of the few concrete agreements at Copenhagen: to give the worst-affected countries $100bn from 2020. Privately, they say this isn't the time - they can come back for it, presumably, when they are on rafts. Oh, and they will talk about how to preserve the rainforests. But a Greenpeace report has just revealed that the last big deal to save the rainforests - with Indonesia - was a scam. The country is in fact planning to demolish most of its rainforest to plant commercial crops, and claim it had been "saved."
Karl Rove - who was George W. Bush's chief spin-doctor - boasted this year: "Climate is gone." He meant it is off the political agenda, but in time, this statement will be more true and more cursed than he realizes.
It's in this context that a new, deeply pessimistic framework for understanding the earth's ecology - and our place in it - has emerged. Many of us know, in outline, the warm, fuzzy Gaia hypothesis, first outlined by James Lovelock. It claims that the Planet Earth functions, in effect, as a single living organism called Gaia. It regulates its own temperature and chemistry to create a comfortable steady state that can sustain life. So coral reefs produced cloud-seeding chemicals which then protect them from ultraviolet radiation. Rainforests transpire water vapour so generate their own rainfall. This process expands outwards. Life protects life.
Now there is a radically different theory that is gaining adherents, ominously named the Medea hypothesis. The paleontologist Professor Peter Ward is an expert in the great extinctions that have happened in the earth's past, and he believes there is a common thread between them. With the exception of the meteor strike that happened 65 million years ago, every extinction was caused by living creatures becoming incredibly successful - and then destroying their own habitats. So, for example, 2.3 billion years ago, plant life spread incredibly rapidly, and as it went it inhaled huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This then caused a rapid plunge in temperature that froze the planet and triggered a mass extinction.
Ward believes nature isn't a nurturing mother like Gaia. No: it is Medea, the figure from Greek mythology who murdered her own children. In this theory, life doesn't preserve itself. It serially destroys itself. It is a looping doomsday machine. This theory adds a postscript to Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest. There is survival of the fittest, until the fittest trash their own habitat, and do not survive at all.
But the plants 2.3 billion years ago weren't smart enough to figure out what they were doing. We are. We can see that if we release enough warming gases we will trigger an irreversible change in the climate and make our own survival much harder. Ward argues that it is not inevitable we will destroy ourselves - because human beings are the first and only species that can consciously develop a Gaian approach. Just as Richard Dawkins famously said we are the first species to be able to rebel against our selfish genes and choose to be kind, we are the first species that can rebel against the Medean rhythm of life. We can choose to preserve the habitat on which we depend. We can choose life.
At Cancun, the real question will be carefully ignored by delegates keen to preserve big business as usual. Do we want to ramp up global warming with filthy fossil fuels, or make the leap to a clean planet fuelled by the sun, the wind and the waves? Right now we are making the wrong choice. But we could change the ending of this story, if we act decisively. Long after our own little stories are forgotten, this choice we make now will still be visible - in the composition of the atmosphere, the swelling of the seas, and the crack and creak of the great Antarctic ice. Do we want to be Gaia, or Medea?
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