I thought some of you could use some optimism while sweltering. I should probably be writing more on resources and the latest in climate solutions, but at the moment, my desire to be online and/or write is much like a combustion engine running on fumes and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But I did think the barrage of weather-related doom could use a bit of context.
As I posted last night on Cole’s rightfully worried post:
“There are some bad actors who would happily fan the flames of doomism, because it takes those who would be the most engaged, those who would be on the front lines, and it puts them on the sidelines…
And so, what I call the inactivists, the forces of inaction — polluters, and those who promote their agenda— they’ve turned to these other tactics, and one of them, ironically, is doomism. There are some bad actors who would happily fan the flames of doomism, because it takes those who would be the most engaged, those who would be on the front lines, and it puts them on the sidelines. That is something I’ve really been fighting against.
Look, the reality is, if the science told me that we are f’ed, and there’s nothing we can do about it, I would have to be truthful about that. But the fact is, we can very much do something about it. You’ve got on the one hand, all these people saying it’s too late, we can’t stop the meltdown, we have to plan for the end of human civilization.
Yet, on the policy front, we’re on the verge of truly meaningful climate action here.” Michael Mann, author The New Climate War.
So I’ve curated a few articles and one video to reflect some facts on doomerism. (This is a quick hit of things I had bookmarked already)
And as I also said last night on the thread, there are actually a lot of practical and immediate solutions that are being developed, researched, and implemented. We are not in some hopeless situation without the tools to solve it. But it will take action – and being all doom and gloom leaves us feeling defeated and less likely to take that action. Let’s not do that, okay?
This heatwave is a climate omen. But it’s not too late to change course
The warming of the planet – including the most up-to-date data for 2023 – is entirely consistent with what climate modelers warned decades ago
The climate crisis – and yes, it is now a crisis – is endangering us now, where we live. Whether it’s the recurrent episodes of hazardous air quality in the east coast cities some of us call home from windblown Canadian wildfire smoke or the toll sadly now being measured in human lives from deadly nearby floods, we are witnessing the devastating and dangerous consequences of unabated human-caused warming. That is a fact.
Indeed, as you “doomscroll” on whatever social media platform you prefer these days, you might see selective images and graphs that would lead you to think Earth’s climate is spinning out of control, in a runaway feedback loop of irreversible tipping points leading us down an inescapable planetary death spiral.
But that’s not what’s happening.
The average warming of the planet – including the most up-to-date measurements for 2023 – is entirely consistent with what climate modelers warned decades ago would happen if we continued with the business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. Yes, there are alarming data coming in, from record-shattering loss of winter sea ice in the southern hemisphere to off-the-charts warmth in the North Atlantic with hot tub-grade waters off the Florida coast. We’ve also seen the hottest week on record for the planet as a whole this month. We can attribute blame to a combination of ongoing human-caused warming, an incipient major El Niño event and the vagaries of natural variability….
…Yes, we have failed to prevent dangerous climate change. It is here. What remains to be seen is just how bad we’re willing to let it get. A window of opportunity remains for averting a catastrophic 1.5C/2.7F warming of the planet, beyond which we’ll see far worse consequences than anything we’ve seen so far. But that window is closing and we’re not making enough progress.
We cannot afford to give in to despair. Better to channel our energy into action, as there’s so much work to be done to prevent this crisis from escalating into a catastrophe. If the extremes of this summer fill you with fears of imminent and inevitable climate collapse, remember, it’s not game over. It’s game on. Read the article in its entirety here.
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The Best Climate Science You’ve Never Heard Of
By Mark Hertsgaard, Saleemul Huq andMichael E. Mann
(note: this is the original full version of our recent Washington Post op-ed, based on a recent press briefing involving the authors, sponsored by Scientific American and Covering Climate Now)
One of the biggest obstacles to avoiding global climate breakdown is that so many people think there’s nothing we can do about it.
They point out that record-breaking heat waves, fires, and storms are already devastating communities and economies throughout the world. And they’ve long been told that temperatures will keep rising for decades to come, no matter how many solar panels replace oil derricks or how many meat-eaters go vegetarian. No wonder they think we’re doomed.
But climate science actually doesn’t say this. On the contrary, the best climate science you’ve probably never heard of suggests that humanity can still limit the damage to a fraction of the worst projections if—and, we admit, this is a big if—governments, businesses, and all of us take strong action starting now.
The science we’re referencing is included in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report, issued last August. But first, some context.
For many years, the scientific rule of thumb was that a sizable amount of temperature rise was indeed locked into the earth’s climate system. Scientists believed—and told policymakers and journalists, who told the public—that even if humanity hypothetically halted all heat trapping emissions overnight, carbon dioxide’s long lifetime in the atmosphere combined with the sluggish thermal properties of the oceans would nevertheless keep global surface temperatures rising for 30 to 40 more years. Since shifting to a zero-carbon global economy would take at least a decade or two, temperatures were bound to keep rising for at least another half century.
But guided by subsequent research, scientists dramatically revised that lag time estimate down to as little as 3 to 5 years. The updated finding is included in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group I, that made headlines last August. Indeed, it underlies the widely-now used concept of a “carbon budget”. It allows us to specify (with some uncertainty range) the maximum amount of carbon that we can still burn if we are to keep global surface warming below the critical level of 1.5C (3F).
Most importantly, it tells us that if humanity slashes emissions to zero, global temperatures will stop rising almost immediately.
To its credit, Scientific American did discuss this updated science in a short article last October. But why isn’t this reason for cautious optimism more widely known?
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Two of the co-authors of this article are climate scientists, while the other is a veteran journalist.We can collectively attest that scientists aren’t always the best natural communicators, journalists and scientists typically don’t speak the same language, and much gets lost in translation. Add to that the concerted headwind of a fossil fuel industry-funded disinformation campaign, and you have the makings of a substantial breakdown in communication.
That’s a shame, because this revised timeline implies a paradigm shift in how humanity can respond the to the climate emergency. The implications fall into three categories—the three P’s of psychology, politics, and policies.
Psychology is arguably the most important, for it makes possible the rest. Knowing that global temperature rise can be stopped almost immediately means that humanity is not doomed after all. We can still save our civilization, at least most of it, if we take rapid, forceful action. This knowledge can banish the sense of inevitability that paralyzes people and instead inspire them towards greater resolve and activity.
This psychological shift can in turn transform the politics of climate change, for it can entice more people to join the fight—or to stay in the fight rather than succumbing to despair… Continue reading here
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We need the right kind of climate optimism
Climate pessimism dooms us to a terrible future. Complacent optimism is no better.
By
We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. There’s nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf.
With leading activists like Roger Hallam, co-founder of the popular climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion, telling young people that they “face annihilation,” it’s no surprise so many of them feel terrified. In a large recent international survey on youth attitudes toward climate change, more than half said that “humanity is doomed” and three-quarters said the future is frightening. Young people have good reasons to worry about our ability to tackle climate change, but this level of despair should be alarming to anyone who cares about the well-being of future generations — which is, after all, what the climate movement is all about.
As the lead researcher for Our World in Data, an organization that aims to make data on the world’s biggest problems accessible and understandable, I’ve written extensively on the reasons to be optimistic about the future. The prices of solar and wind power, as well as of batteries for storing low-carbon energy, have all plunged. Global deforestation peaked decades ago and has been slowly declining. Sales of new gas and diesel cars are now falling. Coal is starting to die in many countries. Government commitments are getting closer to limiting global warming to 2°C. Deaths from natural disasters — despite what news about climate change-related fires and hurricanes might appear to suggest — are a fraction of what they used to be. The list goes on.
But here, I don’t want to talk about whether pessimism is accurate. I want to focus on whether it’s useful. People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they’re exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change. Continue reading here….
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Okay, doomer. Leaving hopelessness behind, young climate activists are flipping the script on climate doom-and-gloom. They not only believe we can still win the fight, they’re working to convince others of the same. Speakers: Allegra Kirkland (moderator), Isaias Hernandez, Kristy Drutman, Alaina Wood This is a conversation from Aspen Ideas: Climate in Miami Beach, Florida. Now in its second year, Aspen Ideas: Climate is co-organized by the Aspen Institute and the City of Miami Beach. In addition to plenary sessions, breakout discussions, announcements, and private roundtables, the event features a tech expo and career fair, a climate solutions showcase, a public arts program, and excursions. Aspen Ideas: Climate takes place March 6–9, 2023. #AspenIdeasClimate
So what can you do? Here are some resources Earthday.org, Rewiring America, Kiss the Ground, Climate Reality/Al Gore
There are many more resources (you can even check back on previous Climate Solution posts for others), but I have to walk the dogs and get my day started.
Let’s all quit doomscrolling and instead tackle climate change, one day at a time. – TaMara
Baud
I feel this way about a host of issues.
Thanks, TaMara.
Urza
Its good to be reminded there is still hope. Easy to get cynical about the future because of climate change.
mainsailset
Rebecca Solnit’s piece resonates in so many ways, highly recommend it.
https://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2023/07/rebecca-solnit-climate-despair-hope
BR
Thanks for sharing this. Me and the other night owls were discussing what we do last night.
My big thing is planting fruit and nut trees everywhere in urban/suburban areas, both in private yards and public rights of way (taking into account harvestability, mess, etc. so that it’s a win-win). My goal is that California should be food and energy independent in five years, and I imagine many other states could get there as well. Many cities could feed nearly everyone with sufficient backyard growing. (And of course this isn’t to the exclusion of activism, etc. but this is where my interests are. I see a fair amount of ineffective activism going on and would rather people plant trees that feed people. If you have effective activism, by all means, go for it.)
BR
I also want to share this blog post by Ada Palmer on “Hopepunk, Optimism, Purity, and Futures of Hard Work” that really hits home:
https://beforewegoblog.com/purity-and-futures-of-hard-work-by-ada-palmer/
Elizabelle
Thank you, TaMara. Applauding
ETA: Watch out, cuz we’re going to want you to do a weekly climate information roundup, like Anne Laurie’s incredible Covid posts.
Brachiator
OT, but related. Saw this breaking story.
I can’t even imagine. They couldn’t run some air conditioning?
Maybe. This is a big problem. It may require a concerted global effort. I don’t see difficult stories about the issue as doomism. The issue is complicated.
Xantar
My personal belief is that climate change will cause the human population to decline drastically (one way or another) and that will reduce emissions enough that we will be able to survive as a species. The question is how bad does it get and how many people will be killed. That’s what is in our control.
Grim? Maybe. But it actually means I think we are very unlikely to go extinct, and that’s worth something.
Old Man Shadow
Thanks. I needed this today. I was just reading about the heat wave and the oceans around Florida maybe hitting 97F today and I was so goddamned depressed about it all.
oldster
Josh Marshall, on Trump’s inauguration in 2017, when much of the progressive left was indulging in doomerism:
“Optimism is not primarily a prediction but an ethic, a philosophy, a way of confronting the world.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-few-thoughts-on-entering-the-trump-era
satby
Great articles and resources TaMara! Thanks.
Lots to read up on.
john b
This sort of doomism (and not Musk), was ultimately why I removed Twitter from my phone 18 months ago or so. I could feel myself getting depressed and losing hope — mostly from nominally lefty folks (or at least those posing as lefty folks) who basically said all those in power were the same and there’s no hope for anything good within capitalism / democracy / our society.
Another Scott
Yesterday we replaced my J’s 2000 Corolla (~ 30 mpg) with a 2015 Prius C (~ 50 mpg). There are lots of things that we can do to reduce our emissions in a real way without spending a fortune (“Paint Australia white!!” “Giant factories with giant fans to suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into rocks!!1”). But people have to be willing to accept good-enough-for-now and available-now solutions that aren’t perfect and aren’t as good as they’ll be in 5-10-20 years.
Thanks TaMara and all.
Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
RaflW
I have believed for quite a wile now that a portion of the root cause of right wing lunacy (here and abroad) is people subconsciously knowing the climate crisis is real, but cognitive-dissonancing it like their lives depend on it.
All the rolling coal people, the bigger and bigger SUV stuff, it’s all related to social movement shit. What are we able to do to encourage the young generations who, from my early X-er perch, appear to be much more communitarian minded and very, very aware of the looming displacements and shifts, what can we do to support them in re-crafting our country?
Minneapolis is trying to embrace being a bike city, but man the pushback is everywhere, even among liberals & democrats. We’re chronically underfunding transit, which creates a destructive feedback loop of reduced ridership over unrealistic and inconvenient schedules.
I’m so envious of dense, walkable, but green and vibrant cities like Amsterdam. Small progress is happening, like getting rid of single family zoning & parking minimums for new appt buildings in Minneapolis. I sometimes make fun of new urbanism, because some of it gets executed badly, but it is a trend that can support living with smaller footprints and encouraging walking distance networks of businesses.
Bigger picture, I think we as a culture need to find ways to let go of the “growth is the leading indicator of community health”, because growth for growth’s sake (in profits, population, or anything) isn’t going to work. It isn’t sustainable.
Jeffro
If people are realistic about where we are re: the climate, that’s not “doomerism”, that’s just being realistic.
You can be realistic about how bad it is, and still throw yourself into the fight, and be more hopeful than not that we’ll turn it around. That’s me. I’m not about to tell folks things are ok or even “not that bad”. They are that bad, and younger folks know it and are motivated to do something about it. So…let’s go!
BR
@Jeffro:
I agree. There is a lot of hopium out there which is useless — “this solar panel research will increase efficiency and it’s going to provide clean energy globally”.
The old saying is good — think globally, act locally.
The other one is good too — the best time to plant a fruit tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.
Fake Irishman
Another great resource on the nuts and bolts of climate change policy is Dave Roberts’ “Volts” sub stack/ podcast. He is very clear-eyes about the challenges we face. However, he is constantly interviewing cool people who are doing amazing work in all aspects of fighting climate change: politics, policy making, R&D, deployment of clean tech and infrastructure. Scholars, authors, entrepreneurs, scientists, state and federal officials, activists, lawyers.
I’d start with his interviews with Political Scientist Leah Stokes and Public Policy guy Jesse Jenkins talking about the Inflation Reduction Act in a series of three podcasts last summer.
We are indeed doing lots of damage, but we have also made extraordinary progress in the last two decades in fighting climate change (and some of that is because folks like us have been putting in the nuts and bolts work in the ground to put good policymakers in place).
way2blue
It’s a predictable & predicted pattern of obstruction. (1) Climate change is a hoax; (2) Global warming is good; (3) It’s just weather, not climate change; (4) it’s too expensive to do anything meaningful; (5) business will suffer if we go green; (6) even if we go green, it’s too late… Dodge ball ad infinitum.
Brachiator
@Xantar:
There is evidence that natural catastrophic events in the past reduced the population of humans to a few thousand. And one of the ironies about learning more about the universe is that we learn more about all the stuff that might wipe out our planet.
Our self awareness leads us to hope that we continue as a species. And we seem to have an individual and collective desire to solve problems and to fix our messes.
That’s about the best we can do. And I can read “doom” stories all day and still say, “okay, how can we fix this?”
We can only do what we can, even if in the end it doesn’t work.
It’s like the joke about the guy who invented a perpetual energy machine, only to be run over by a truck crossing the street on his way to the patent office.
Eyeroller
@Jeffro: From what I’ve seen we’ve already blown the chance to prevent a 1.5C rise. It’s a matter now of trying not to exceed that by much. The data have tended toward the upper end of the IPCC estimates for a decade or so at least.
I agree that doomerism and despair aren’t the answer, but we need to understand that things like our personal tree plantings are not going to help. That’s not even a drop in the ocean.
Fake Irishman
@Another Scott:
exactly right sir. All these imperfect solutions and policies start to add up to real progress. The Paris agreement was a bunch of countries just saying “here’s what we think we can do” with no binding targets and it wasn’t nearly enough. But what happened was that everyone has made progress toward those goals (though not always getting them) and they come back to the table and say “actually, we can do this too” and the standards get raised.
and then they get raised again.
and again.
and momentum starts to build.
It sounds dumb, but whenever I would get depressed, I’d glance at the scores of regulations for appliance efficiency Obama’s folks managed to push through. Every one of those regs reduces emissions by 10s or hundreds of thousand of tons of CO2 over a decade. Individually, they aren’t much. Together, it’s like shutting down many coal plants.
E.
I don’t see most of the doomerism or the “solutions “ as being that realistic or helpful. How much worse does it have to get before China, India, or possibly Iran start blasting aerosols into the sky? I think not much. And at that point faith and prayer that they got their numbers right is all that will help. Who knows? Maybe they’ll nail it.
Fake Irishman
@Eyeroller:
You’re right we’re almost certainly going to miss the 1.5 C target, but most projections now have us between 2.1 and 2.4 C. That’s bad, but far far better than the 4.5C we were looking at a decade ago. And there’s a real chance we can keep it under 2. And every tenth of a degree counts a lot.
So go ahead and plant that tree. You’ll appreciate the shade, the birds will like it, it will suck up some particulate pollution, lower the noise levels from cars, and pulling 100lbs of carbon out of the year won’t hurt.
Bupalos
OMG thank you this is so needed. Lately I’ve been feeling like folks I’ve assumed are natural allies are slipping away into doomerism. Which to me isn’t what it often is presented as, some kind of hardheaded courage of the realist. Honestly, I think it’s often just a thin cover for laziness and addiction. The “nothing can be done” translates as “I’m actually just not willing to do anything.”
The other thing I don’t have much time for anymore is hopeism. Scrolling around looking for signs of potential solutions that could happen if [insert action performed by someone else or some external force] happens.
How about some do-ism people? Every single one of us has things sitting right there in front of us we can do today. And yes, it WILL make a difference. From local food sourcing, eliminating food and energy waste, reducing meat consumption, adjusting the thermostat, insulating, adding a heatpump, adjusting our lives to reduce driving, planting trees…just on and on. There are so many angles to make YOUR difference as we support and grow the movement to make mass action thorough political change possible. So many things, and a lot of them are fun and fulfilling and can make a better world than the one we had.
Jeffro
Good point. I use variations of that one like, ALL the time. =)
Yup. We are waaaay past the point where our little individual voluntary decisions and choices will make a dent in the issue. It’s time for big, concerted, government-driven/mandated action.
Baud
@Bupalos:
My hunch is much of it online is pushed by people who are, in fact, our adversaries. Just another psyops in the propaganda war.
Bupalos
@E.: I think your idea of geoengineering is probably discounting the vast resource allocation and committment an individual country would need to make to even try it. The renegade geoengineer scenario is very very far from the enevitability you seem to present here.
How about you just move your “who knows?” Up toward the top of this post, and help others recognize that the uncertainty involved in climate action and climate change isn’t a pass, it’s an ethical mandate.
Mike E
More than half of wildlife populations are gone, and this steep decline has happened within my lifetime. Now climate effects threaten whatever remains.
I started working on environmental legislation and public awareness back when Earth Day had a major resurgence in the early ’90s. The victories we achieved back then depended on enforcement of conservation compliance; we now know the wins were largely pyrrhic as corps and big business are having their way with ignoring and eliminating resource protection.
This generation of young people are now tasked with saving the planet but don’t see any kind of future when they can’t work and live with any comfort, sense of health and affordability. Their anger and doom comes from a relentless onslaught from end-stage capitalism with nihilists dead set on profit over reason.
I don’t doomscroll, my eyes don’t need to read articles about what I am seeing and have seen for decades. It will take something drastic (not incremental) to right the ship but I won’t be around to witness the turnaround. I’m happy to be wrong about any part of this!
West of the Rockies
Thank you so damn much for this, TaMara!!
Yes, we are in a perilous situation, an existential crisis, but abandoning hope and ignoring some positive outcomes (yes, they require diligence and effort) is pointless.
I have a kid who is 21. I will work to make their later existence and happiness possible. I want to believe future generations have hope and opportunities.
Omnes Omnibus
Hard disagree. Everything done to normalize good ecological behavior matters. Kids making their grandparents recycle, tiny drop in the bucket, but it raises awareness. Maybe it will move a few voters. Maybe those few voters will shift Congress. Etc. Can’t hurt.
bookworm1398
We need to be realistic without getting depressed. Too much of the conversation about climate change assumes that we won’t need to make any changes in our lifestyle. And that isn’t true. We need to acknowledge that the warming that has already occurred has caused lasting changes and we need to change things to accommodate that. We need to change building codes to be more hurricane resistant, we need to drop houses that have flooded twice from insurance. We need to think of ways to have more targeted air conditioning rather than cool a whole huge house which is mostly unoccupied.
Kelly
My attitude regarding climate change has trended pessimistic since fleeing the 2020 Beachie Fire and living amongst the wreckage. Our home survived but hundreds burned. Nearly 3 years on with cleanup and reconstruction I’m better but it’s not like before.
BR
@Jeffro:
The thing is individual action and government action are not opposed. Often government is small-c conservative, because they will get yelled at if they’re too proactive. So, for example, showing that there is community support for widespread fruit tree plantings — through individual action — then helps governments ease up and take action at a city or larger scale.
Citizen Alan
@Jeffro: And that’s right there is the source of my own doomerism. I truly believe that concerted global effort and technological advances can ameliorate the worst aspects of climate change. My sense of doom, however, arises from the fact that doing so is impossible in the face of conservative intransigence. Effectively combating climate change would mean two things: 1. The wealthiest people in the world would make slightly less money, and 2 that liberals would win an important ideological debate over conservatives. And conservatives would literally prefer for the entire human race to die off than let either of those things happen. Any serious action on climate change must first grapple with the fact that the GOP (and, globally, conservativism in general) is a literal death cult.
Baud
@Baud:
As circumstantial evidence for my hunch.
The Earth’s enemies understand that discouragement works to their benefit.
bookworm1398
@ Bupalos. Private company Make Sunsets has already launched balloons to deliver sulphur to the upper atmosphere earlier this year. The amount of sulphur they carried won’t make a huge difference. But it shows people are ready to try it and a number of countries all spending a little could add up to a lot.
RedDirtGirl
Thank you TaMara!
Antonius
My despair was never rooted in engineering challenges — it remains rooted in human nature. I have not a scintilla of doubt that if even a substantial fraction of humanity worked together we could avert the worst and then reverse the environmental damage we’ve done. However, I have not a scintilla of hope that a substantial fraction of humanity will do that, I don’t care how many thousands of cool people are doing cool things. Without the backing of united, major governments, all their efforts amount to a fart in the coming February hurricanes.
Instead, we’re going to claw each other to pieces over dwindling resources to supply a failing civilization, because I can count on one hand the times in recorded history when we’ve ever done anything else.
trollhattan
Sans kid I would be of one mind, but with kid I am pulled into a different mindset. IOW fatalistic vs. fatalistic-hopeful.
The U.S. has bent the curve and is gradually reducing our emissions so need to work on steepening that downward slope. One might, for example, ask why Texas has such a larger power generation segment than California, with a fraction of California’s population? It would be comical if it weren’t so critical. Efficiency, Texas. You have a huge renewable sector but it’s a scant fraction of your total production. One suspects Florida is similarly weird, but I’m guessing they at least don’t have coal plants?
China and India must take this more seriously but are loathe to do so, falling back on “it’s our turn to fuck the climate” the obvious problem being that it’s a self-fucking first and foremost. One hopes this changes soon, as they combine to be a carbon juggernaut.
I’d like to hang in long enough to see what happens to the California air quality as our transportation and power generation transition to renewable. Modern car engines emit far fewer pollution than in the ’70s, when L.A. air could be consumed with a fork, but that tech is stalled so an EV fleet takes it out of the equation entirely. Retiring gas powerplants as more solar et al plus storage come on line, will be the other dropped shoe. Once again it will be possible to see the Sierra Nevada from Mt. Tam. and I’d love for my kid to experience that.
lowtechcyclist
From the link in the first quote box:
“But we need a majority.”
RevRick
Last month, I initiated a conversation at our church governing board about setting a target of going green by 2030. I kind of put the cart before the horse, because we kind of got lost in the weeds, but the overall sentiment was that we have a moral imperative to care for creation, so we’re forming a Green Team to begin the process. Our national church (UCC) has a Creation Justice initiative that we’ll connect with. Gotta walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
RevRick
@Mike E: When I was a kid, every trip to the gas station required scrubbing the windows to remove the insect splatter. Now, that rarely happens. There’s been a huge reduction in insect populations, which in turn affects pollination and bird populations.
Jeffro
I know they’re not opposed, but I see it making a bigger impact if it’s the other way around. Win elections, take action, reap applause, keep moving – and if it inspires more individuals to do more, that’s great! But I think we need bigger and more focused efforts here. The idea that a few folks will plant a few trees, and then maybe tell their neighbors about it, and a few more get planted, and then maybe someone decides to go to a town hall meeting and tell the town council about it…that’s just too slow. It’s a great add-on to large-scale efforts though, so (as you note) these actions are not opposed.
Baud
@RevRick: I’ve noticed the same wrt bugs. I do wonder whether the cause is climate change or aggressive mosquito control measures.
john b
@Baud: My quick read is that increased traffic means that any insects that are near the road, are killed and not replaced as quickly as more cars come through. Think if you had 100 bugs along a road. If you only had one car an hour come through, it would take a while for all those bugs to die. If you have a car a second? Your chance of hitting one is much smaller. Even if the population of bugs for the region hasn’t changed.
stinger
@Eyeroller:
EVERYTHING we do to help, helps.
Baud
@john b: Interesting. I hope that’s correct. I hate it when my windshield is covered with bugs, so a less dire cause for fewer bugs is welcome.
RaflW
@Another Scott: Right. We don’t need to paint Australia white, but in a lot of cities, we need to replace every black roof with as light a color as possible/practicable. And plant trees in lower income neighborhoods, and support their irrigation and growing needs so the trees succeed. So that even if we can’t stop all the warming, we can reduce the terrible heat island effects in cities.
The Greeks were neither stupid, nor trying to create postcard perfect environs for tourist pics when they painted their gorgeous island hill towns white!
trollhattan
@stinger: Fuckin’ A right it does. An urban tree canopy will of course uptake some carbon but vastly more importantly it lowers artificial cooling demands. I have a pre-Cole willow in the southwest corner of my lot that has a huge shade pool covering the entire backyard and a chunk of the house a portion of the day. On the west side we planted three shade trees at the time we took out the lawn–they now protect the west wall from mid-late afternoon summer sun. Through some kind of magic, they know to drop leaves and let winter sun warm the same walls the summer sun once heated to frypan status.
A mere four trees do all that. I’m miffed the oak I planted to shade the front plus form a canopy over the street, has remained a grumpy sapling. Other neighborhood streets with effective canopies remain cool on the hottest days, while ours gets blazing hot and remains warm through the night, forming a heat island.
Plant those fucking trees.
Another Scott
@john b: Cars are much, much more aerodynamic than they were back in olden days, too, so it’s easier for things to flow over and around the car, but I doubt that’s as big a reason as the drop in insect populations.
I remember catching grasshoppers to feed to a praying mantis I caught and kept in a big jar. I don’t see many grasshoppers any more either…
:-/
I am heartened that I’m seeing much more large bird and mammalian life here in NoVA than 20 years ago. I see foxes every night, lots of chipmunks, bald eagles and ospreys are common when they were rare back then. So, it’s not all bad news, but there are too many worrying signs.
Cheers,
Scott.
H.E.Wolf
Thank you to TaMara for the reminder that doomerism (environmental, political, etc.) is not just passive, it’s actively unhelpful. Despair is a paralyzing force.
Small, concrete actions – yes, I go on about this all the time – make a difference. One of the most important ways they make a difference is that a person who takes an action becomes less despairing than someone who sits on the sidelines.
Brachiator
@RaflW:
According to historical sources, there is one more explanation to what led to the prevalence of the whitewashed houses.
artem1s
If it makes you feel better, another explanation may be that the bird populations decimated by DDT have come back and are eating the bugs. I seem to remember dire warnings in the 70’s that we were doomed to have plagues of locusts eat all our crops and there would be widespread famine. Turned out the bugs were proliferating because their natural predators were declining. Which goes to show that doomerism is always present when we are facing this type of complicated multi-system, global crisis. Ozone depletion had a similar communication arc. I remember when we weren’t going to make it to the 21st century due to UV killing everything on the planet (starting with amphibians). There was much whinging and gnashing of teeth about giving up hair spray and air conditioning fluid. Then there was finally a ban on CFC’s in most countries and the ozone has now started to replenish. And the conspiracy minded all say the government was crying wolf and lied and we never had anything to worry about. This is the danger of spurring action with doomsday talk. Sooner or later people have to shut it all out in order to stay functioning.
Truth is that if and/or when we find a solution it will happen gradually and the conspiracy minded will do what they always do and ignore the role of prophylactic measures needed to solve long term problems and declare there was never a crisis to begin with.
trollhattan
@Another Scott: Read a study years ago, maybe in “Nature”?, of swallow populations near Midwest highways and interstates, comparing fatality rates and wing length over time. There are specimens going back more than a century and over time, wing length has shortened to a statistically significant degree, resulting in a swallow population that is more maneuverable and thus, betters avoids hitting moving vehicles such that the fatality rate has likewise dropped.
One would call that adaption rather than evolution I suppose, given the birds are the same WRT DNA, just as Billy Barty and Manute Bol shared their DNA with the rest of the human population.
Layer8Problem
@Baud: I’m in total agreement. The Koch Brothers or whoever’s left of them, whoever’s running the fossil fuel companies here, that screwy billionaire coal woman Gina Rinehart in Australia, all probably have clever (“cunning”?) plans to deal with the worst case with regards to themselves. For the rest of us it’s all disinformation and sowing of chaff.
trollhattan
@trollhattan: Oops, the willow is at the southEAST corner for best shade in our particular hemisphere. Did that willow move?
Baud
@trollhattan: Probably moved closer to the house. It’s what willows do.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Afforestation is an especially promising approach to reducing atmospheric carbon because if an when we achieve a carbon neutral world economy, the trees will start reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and consequently the CO2 in the oceans. That 1.5 or 2° temperature rise could then gradually fall.
Carbon negative approaches in general have promise. For one instance at least one study I’ve read suggested that grinding up a lot of stone and spreading the dust on farmland could suck up a lot of CO2. And I’ve seen that stone dust is a helpful mineral soil amendment, so there would be a double benefit.
And kelp can help
So might ocean fertilization with minerals, especially in the Southern oceans where minerals like iron are scarce. That is controversial though, and the UN has prohibited commercial ocean fertilization, and apparently research has been put on hold.
Anyway, marine scientists can get good data on ocean fertilization by observing the effects of volcanic eruptions. A good volcano eruption can spread many tons of mineral dust onto an ocean. I read a Physics.org Report that..
Bupalos
No, we don’t need to understand that at all. First off, that’s just straight up false. Every action we can take that moves us towards sustainability is part of the solution. And you don’t know either the complex math or the even more complex social and follow-on effects, so why pretend to? Climate change isn’t a binary. It’s a question of how much of a challenge we leave for others and how much violence we embed for them in the climate system by how much carbon we spew. And everything you do or don’t do in that arena impacts this. You’re kidding yourself.
TriassicSands
@Jeffro:
Thank you for a little sanity.
TriassicSands
@Layer8Problem:
True, but they may just discover that there is more interdependence than they think and their billions won’t necessarily save them if things get bad enough.
The Pale Scot
A decade ago Loyd’s of London, G.E.M Swiss RE, the biggest re-insurers put out prospectuses saying that they foresaw governments world wide collapsing due to drought and famine by 2040. You want to predict the future? Watch the re-insurance business. Then five years later they pushed out new prospectuses declaring that the future sucked, but they’d said they could still make a profit on it.
When Reagan got elected, I knew that humanity was fucked.
trollhattan
@Layer8Problem:
It occurs at many levels and I have experienced, going back to the 1990s, that whenever a climate discussion is ongoing in an open online platform, a certain segment of participants will magically (look for unfamiliar nyms) appear to spread FUD and talking points contra the notion that it’s happening, it’s an issue, it’s in any sense changeable by puny humankind.
Once sussed out, in a backpacking forum of all things, that a BP-paid professional climate denial troll was strenuously working to derail any conversation on the topic. We should have felt honoured, I suppose, because he popped up elsewhere in much more…prestigious platforms.
The petroleum industry–all of the bigs–are working against us today and in a much more coordinated and professional manner than any Russian troll farm. What one reads about, for example, Exxon shows that they have been dissembling for decades, in the manner of the cigarette industry, the asbestos industry, the leaded fuel industry. They all knew.
RaflW
@bookworm1398: I need to do more ruminating and writing on this, and looking around more for others who have similar messages to boost, but I think that many of the lifestyle changes that would be climate-suporting would also be good for us as individuals and as communities.
The atomized anomie of these tech years, mass suburbanization, drive everywhere, hang out less and less in common spaces is, I feel, killing us. Isolation and loneliness is rampant.
Not everyone will want to, or need to, live in compact, walkable city centers. But we can also help to refashion suburban nodes and mid-size towns to be far less auto-dependent (and just moving cars to electric isn’t a real climate net plus, till mining and generation are both far, far cleaner than now).
trollhattan
@Baud: Been thinking of setting up a surveillance cam to catch what it’s doing at night. You just can’t keep an eye on a willow 24/7 by yourself.
Elizabelle
@Brachiator: That is fascinating. I never knew about whitewashing, and it has a lot of uses and purposes. Wiki article.
Whitewashing homes was associated with poverty. An old expression: “Too proud to whitewash, too poor to paint.”
However, whitewashing barns was another matter, and helpful in maintenance and hygiene.
This is intriguing. Maybe to the rescue of climate-affected fruit trees. Needs a citation, though.
Eyeroller
@Baud: Insect populations are collapsing, largely due to pesticides–not so much mosquito control as agricultural (and homeowner!) pesticides–and another big factor is what is reducing populations of most wildlife, namely habitat loss. Invasive/non-native plants are a bit of a contributor as well since most native insects can’t (for whatever reason) use them as food/larva feeding/shelter/etc.
WhatsMyNym
@Layer8Problem:
She makes her mostly money from Iron Ore.
via wikipedia
RaflW
@Bupalos: Eyeroller is wrong even on the individual level. Poor neighborhoods in big cities are often several degrees warmer, day and night, than well-to-do neighborhoods (even adjusting for lot size) because poor neighborhoods often lack local tree canopy.
Old people dying in heat waves in unairconditioned appts and homes can quite possibly be reduced by tree planting (not as the exclusive strategy, of course! but as part of mitigation stratiges on the micro/local level).
BR
By the way if you live in a hot or sunny area, consider getting a white elastomeric roof coating. It’s basically a white paint for your roof that also seals the shingles or tar or whatever you’ve got. Usually lasts several years, easy to apply.
Hoodie
@Fake Irishman: These things are cumulative and can eventually lead to tipping points. For example, I was talking with the guy replacing our AC yesterday and he noted that the price points on new systems used to be based on efficiency, but now you can’t buy lower SEER AC units because the major manufacturers don’t make them. Of course, this is somewhat due to changes in regulation and tax incentives, but the reason the cheaper units were made was because they were legacy stuff that used existing tooling, etc. Now it’s more efficient in terms of production to just make the base hardware the same for all price points because of economies of scale and the differences in prices now are less about efficiency and more about other features. We may something similar with auto manufacturing as EVs become more prevalent, e.g., it will become less cost effective to produce ICE vehicles because of increased production of EVs. These kind of improvements typically require changes to government standards but can reap bigger rewards than you might immediately think.
It’s funny, but climate doomerism is not much different than climate denialism and other types of denialism. I remember when requiring seat belts in cars was going to doom the auto industry or eliminating lead in gasoline was going to devastate the economy. People adapt.
Bupalos
@bookworm1398:
I’m aware but that’s basically a tiny proof of concept thing. And if I remember right they are facing legal action.
the supposition there was that some country is inevitably going to unilaterally try to geoengineer the planet, and I think that misunderstands the incentive structure, probably by underestimating the scale of effort actually required to create the political payoff that decisuon would be aimed at.
Geminid
@Geminid: the Physics.org article covered a report by a Columbia U. Carbon Lab scientist and a Scripps Institute ocean scientist. Their data analysis indicated that the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinataubo was followed by a few years of flat or even lower atmospheric CO2 levels. The mechanism would be the additional plankton growth triggered by an increase in oceanic minerals. Plankton can fix a certain amount of CO2, some of which ends up deposited on the sea floor. Scientists probably study volcano dust plumes now in order to confirm this, and develop more information on ocean fertilization in general.
RaflW
@BR: Flat roofs can be done with white or light tan polymer roofing rather than the traditional black rubber.
Pitched roofs should, at such time as they need re-shingling, the lightest color possible. I’ve had two houses redone in my decades of owning one then another house. Both got shifted as white as I could get in the product line.
Eyeroller
@Bupalos: Actually I do know the math, or used to, since I worked in climatology for a while (admittedly quite a few years ago). I have also dabbled a bit in forest modeling (mainly to assist a group doing that work). By far the largest carbon sequestration currently is in the vast boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere. I’ve also worked with groups that model socioeconomic effects.
I am not disagreeing that we should encourage people to do their individual parts, but often they can get the idea that they should recycle or plant a few trees, but then they’ve done something and they can jet off to Europe for their vacation. And I think that this supposed large reservoir of nonvoting environmentalists is mostly people who maybe think about it more than their taxes, but they are still in demographics less likely to vote. Particularly young people, though the current generation of young people is outdoing their elders when we were their age.
Martin
So, I tend to speak in panicked, terrible language about climate change, but I’m not a doomer (I have moments though).
In early 2020 I did the same thing with Covid not because I thought everything was lost, but because shit was about to go down, and it did, and people needed to break out of their focus on American Idol and whatever the fuck was top of mind, and move this Covid thing up most of those rungs on their attention ladder. It needed to be a daily front-of-mind thing, at least for a while, and having worked in large institutions and with large populations of people, they tend to reorder their attention until hit that moment of helplessness when they realize they are sick or a loved one or whatever, and that’s always too late.
I don’t know if this is a good way or the right way to do it, it’s just how I’ve always done it. My training is in math and physics and data science and policy writing, and particularly how those policies fail to achieve their intended goals and how to change that. I spent a lot of time looking at feedback loops and how systems succeed or fail and how a public audience interprets those policies and either conforms to them or routes around them. And my training means that I’m sometimes the only person in the room who doesn’t think linearly about these things, that a system that is doubling annually needs WAY faster attention than one that is increasing by a fixed amount each year. And also how we measure things influences how we respond to them. 3 million annually deaths turning into 3.1 million annual deaths isn’t good but doesn’t sound alarming. But if that 100,000 are all Covid deaths, and all occurred in 2 months of that measurement period, and it’s continuing to spread, that’s a fucking emergency, but one that wasn’t apparent from the measurement. 1.5C doesn’t sound like a lot warmer, unless it doesn’t all happen in one place. The arctic is heating 3x faster than lower latitudes. If the gulf water is heating disproportionately to the rest of the environment and the prevailing winds blowing into Florida come off the Gulf, Florida will experience much more heat and humidity relative to other places. You have to do the work to measure in a manner that accurately expresses to people *why* they should pay attention and *what* actions they should take from it. A lot of science measures in ways that are helpful to scientists, rather than ways that are helpful to non-scientists and policy makers. It’s a big problem.
Anyway, I’m not a doomer, there’s a lot we can do to mitigate this problem, and almost none of it is technological or requires some future deus ex machina event, it’s all social policy, which means it’s cheap and can be fast, but people gotta fucking stop and listen and do it. And my policy ideas are hardly the only path that can work – there are lots of possible paths.
There’s a big debate between individual and systemic impact, and I tend to be on the wrong side of that debate. I think it’s necessary for people to make individual change, not because individual change will solve this problem, but because by and large we are operating within consent by the masses systems like democracy, and individuals generally do not appreciate what is possible, what the actual costs would be until they experience them individually. We have these extremely powerful cultural currents that keep everything in its lane (including us individually) and we need to break out of those, and policy is also governed by those currents. Culturally we believe ‘x’ is not possible, but then people start to try it, they push against that belief, you get pockets of organized resistance, and then things change. That applies to *everything* – rights of minority groups, abortion, but also changes to transportation, consumer buying, taxation, and so on. As a nation we are extremely fearful of stepping out of those cultural currents (look at the GOP) but doing so gives you the courage to say ‘you know what – this isn’t so hard, we can do this, I’ll demand this policy change’ and then because my friends trust me, they try it, and then my neighbors, and then you all, and before you know it you have 40% of the public saying ‘yeah, gay marriage is fine – we should support that’ or ‘yeah, shifting to a somewhat more climate friendly diet is fine – lets lift subsidies on this kind of food or tax it to reduce it’s market and put that money into other things’ and so on.
I don’t think you can actually get systemic change without individual change. And making those individual changes is how you practice doing that, even if they collectively won’t add up to enough, collectively they add up to getting the systemic policy change.
This is a collective action problem, which means it can only be solved if you can convince people to NOT act in their personal best interest and instead act in the collective best interests. Americans are fucking terrible at that – like world class – would not be an Olympic sport because nobody could ever come close to beating us. But we have the capacity to do it and with good leadership we can do it. And the path is identifying the particular way each of us is willing to make a sacrifice and opening that avenue and creating a mechanism to make sure that everyone is making some kind of sacrifice. Convincing Ms Martin to go to a vegetarian diet ain’t gonna happen. It’s taken me 30 years to deprogram her parents food shaming to get her to eat what few vegetables she does eat. But she doesn’t see driving less as a big sacrifice, or turning up the thermostat a bit, or what have you. There are things she can do, so you need to enable those without shaming the one she can’t. It doesn’t *really* matter which specific policy path you take, so long as you take one of them. By comparison, I’m mostly vegetarian – some climate related, and some ethical treatment of animals – and aspirationally vegan but struggling to get there quickly. But I sold my car and I ride an ebike almost everywhere. My policy paths don’t need to be the same as Ms Martins, and yours don’t either, and there’s no shame at all in saying ‘this is too much for me’ so long as you have some ‘but I can do that’s in there.
And that mirrors how this community got through covid. We did a lot of informing – front page every day stuff. We encouraged each other that mask wearing was fine, and some of us were better than others, and we cheered each other along to get shots, and we worked from home – and vented when that was miserable, and so on, but we did it and it worked. We all sacrificed, and we also found that a lot of that sacrifice wasn’t as bad as we thought. Wearing a mask for most of us was fine once you got used to it. Working from home had its advantages. Not driving so much was kind of nice, and saved some money. Instead of buying groceries from 4 different stores, limiting to 1 so you limited your exposure wasn’t so bad. FaceTiming with family wasn’t the same as being there, but it helped make less frequent visits more tolerable. And so on.
That’s where we need to get ourselves to on this. And in fairness the US is doing okay. In terms of emissions reduced, we’re doing really well, problem is, we were by far the biggest offender, and so we are obligated to do the most and we have a long way still to go and the first stuff done tends to be the easiest and it’s a bit unclear if that was front-of-mind enough for people to accept the next sets of policies or if it was so behind the scenes that most people really haven’t practiced for it. Covid started with very public facing stuff – stay at home and wear a mask. There wasn’t really any easing into it. Climate change has been a lot of changes to the power grid that doesn’t affect how your TV works so most people haven’t really done shit yet. That’s what I’m nervous about.
Layer8Problem
@WhatsMyNym: Thanks, glad she’s out of the coal directly. She still supported Trump from afar, so screw her.
Martin
@trollhattan: Florida is 7.5% coal, compared to 20% for Texas. Relatively speaking it’s still a lot, and the only reason it’s not more is that they don’t have any coal nearby so it was always expensive to get.
trollhattan
@RaflW: “City of Trees” Sacramento, CA has an urban forestry initiative focusing on poor, untreed neighborhoods as part of environmental justice reform.
I’ll add a side note that it’s not an easy task bringing an urban forest to maturity, vandalism being a significant problem, also nurturing them through the hot summers. It’s best to enlist a neighborhood team to lead the task, with city/county support.
Also, the neighborhood I grew up in had green “parking strips” between the sidewalk and street, providing an ideal spot for planting. We don’t do that here and there are many places with no sidewalks at all. “Everybody will just drive, right?”
California dreamin’.
Kay
Not to go all “think of the children” on you, but think of the children. I think we freak them out a little with catastrophic talk. It’s bad enough we stuck them with this – we shouldn’t also indulge all our worst-case fears and present it as hopeless to people (teenagers) who might not have the context and experience to handle that. They worry me a little how they talk about it. I think some of us have contributed to that. They need to think there’s something they can do.
Martin
@john b: 10% of insect species have died off in the last half century and ⅓ are endangered. Insect populations are collapsing globally.
trollhattan
@Martin: Thanks. Figured distance from coal fields and no native production would keep coal out of the Florida equation, but since it’s Florida didn’t want to assume. “End Woke Gas” seems like an obvious DeSantis initiative, provided Peabody became a big donor.
trollhattan
@Martin: Pollinator loss looms over ag and as the almond industry will attest, having every beehive in the country hauled to California each spring has its issues.
Martin
@Kay: I think the problem is the reverse, at least based on my kids and the other young people I worked with. They’re pretty clear-eyed about this and can see solutions, but what they don’t see is their elders and leaders (who are all their elders) doing anything about it. They’re not doomers about the climate, they’re doomers about us and our interference with efforts to solve this because we’re selfish and lazy and greedy.
Martin
@trollhattan: Yeah, there’s a lot of direct causes for it, apart from climate change. But it also begs the question of how these things are indirect contributors to climate change – lack of agricultural diversity in the US which pesticides help enable, transportation needs to move food across the country which could be grown locally, etc, etc. These aren’t the immediate problems to fix, but they’ll need to be addressed eventually.
And I should add, the almond pollination industry is both a problem of pollinator loss and of growing 80% of the worlds Almonds in one state. California *never* had a pollinator population strong enough to do that.
Baud
@Martin:
There’s no functional difference. If you’re a doomer (at least as I define it), you are not capable of helping the climate.
lowtechcyclist
@West of the Rockies:
@trollhattan:
I’m with you guys on this. It occasionally crosses my mind that my teenage son, in a hospitable world, could live to see the beginning of the 22nd century.
For his sake if nothing else, fuck this ‘giving up’ shit.
rikyrah
Claude (@esq57nyc) tweeted at 0:42 PM on Tue, Jul 18, 2023:
BIG BOOST — A new “hybrid PAC” with deep ties to the Congressional Black Caucus is rolling out an effort to engage Black voters w/ the goal of flipping the House and seeing HAKEEM JEFFRIES become the first Black speaker. NICCARA CAMPBELL-WALLACE will helm Rolling Sea Action Fund,
(https://twitter.com/esq57nyc/status/1681358794301882400?t=NREWjKosZf0gwGMcNhKDVw&s=03)
rikyrah
Leaundra Ross![]()
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![]()
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(@LeaundraRoss) tweeted at 11:06 AM on Wed, Jul 19, 2023:
If you ever come sideways at MVP Kamala Harris I don’t care what you have to say after that.
And then to say some BS to prop up a![]()
dude that couldn’t even carry her scratch paper.
Nope! Next! https://t.co/J7OzUSUVWV
(https://twitter.com/LeaundraRoss/status/1681697081646362625?t=ubTLmGJ20W2HKGG7P6gYAA&s=03)
lowtechcyclist
I was today days old when I first heard this. And this is fucking HUGE, that we don’t have decades of global warming literally baked in.
We humans still have to get our shit together pretty fast, but we’re not doomed just yet.
catclub
OT evrything trump touches turns to shit edition:
rikyrah
David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) tweeted at 6:37 AM on Tue, Jul 18, 2023:
It seems like many in the media, afraid that reporting the straight facts of Biden Admin accomplishments (or a host of other positive stories) will make them seem soft or biased, go into the “yes but” business, searching for the clouds around every silver lining.
(https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1681266875999682560?t=UT3f6cJV8f_QThlw-tLT9g&s=03)
rikyrah
Dr. Virgo, Politics is a Zero Sum Game (@DrVirgo1981) tweeted at 7:47 AM on Tue, Jul 18, 2023:
I will tell you the truth that nobody will tell you. Since before the civil rights era, there has been a set of white nationalists preparing for a race war. And they run deep in the republican party they see these people as casualties of war, because the ends justify their means
(https://twitter.com/DrVirgo1981/status/1681284649085988864?t=TuXPleA_6keShKvhn-jjdQ&s=03)
Baud
@lowtechcyclist: First I’ve heard of it too. That is amazing if it holds up.
trollhattan
@Martin: Checks out. My now 21 YO and her cohort have HAD IT with us.
BR
@Baud:
Yeah the number has definitely been revised down from 30-40 years to a decade or two. It does not seem to be a consensus view that it is 3-5 years — that’s still under study, and it also gets complicated when we consider the dozen or so greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, NOx, water vapor, etc.)
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes, and aeroplanes
And Lenny Bruce is not afraid
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine
Martin
@Baud: No, there’s a big difference, at least in terms of how we receive that message and deal with it. And there’s a HUGE political difference. If Democrats actually start fighting for this stuff (they’re getting better) proportionate to the threat, I think you win the elections you need to enact it. If you want young people to stay home, all you have to do is be scared of the oil and car lobby, and you’ll lose that next election.
Technological solutions to climate change are hard and irregular. Young people are sending a very simple message – fight for this (like, meaningfully) and we’ll support you. That’s really cheap and easy and you can do it tomorrow in your political ads.
And note, young people aren’t failing to do their part – they’re still in it, but they think GenX+ is hopeless and their enemy. See, this isn’t a fight *against* the climate. This is a fight *against* the people who continue to make it worse, and that’s to be fair, mostly genX, boomers, etc. who made their money, settled into their habits, want their payoff and don’t want to do anything that feels like a sacrifice. I *earned* this lawn and this truck and this boat and this trip to Italy and to live comfortably in a 70 degree house even when its 110 out. That’s what they’re fighting, and even a LOT of well meaning people still have that attitude, even when the implication is that the 40 and under population will never have those things, no matter how hard they work.
A lot of them see systemic racism as a mechanism to make sure that minorities never get the good life, and in exactly the same way systemic consumerism is a mechanism to make sure young people never get the good life, because the next generation is expected to forgo the lawn and the truck and the boat and all of that. They are already unaffordable, being hoarded because we know we can’t societally afford to keep doing this so someone is going to have to take the shit end of this, and that’s going to be young people by pricing them into housing we refuse to live in, transit we refuse to take, and so on. And they’re a little bitter about that, because they’re expected to pay their share, as well as ours, which is pattern the US is very practiced at doing.
rikyrah
@Kay:
We need to empower them.
Be for real. That they need to vote and vote for Dems.
In America, they have two parties.
And one of them is part of a Death Cult.
Evangelicals don’t give two shyts about helping the planet because they want to bring on ‘The Rapture’.
The other part of the GOP is just greedy and would sell their mother, let alone, this planet off… for a buck.
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: It’s kind of a vibe in the scientific community that models are usually very conservative at the rate at which things happen. The community is not good at coming up with models that aren’t like that, but if you see ‘this shouldn’t go up or down faster than x’ view that with skepticism, because it’s probably wrong. We saw that with the ozone hole – it repaired up faster than models projected, so it happens on global scales as well.
The flip side is things can get also get worse faster than models project.
Baud
@Martin:
If the Dems haven’t proven themselves to young environmentalists, they probably never will. You really can’t complain about doom if you’re completely disinterested in who wins the election. It’s like complaining about abortion restrictions and then not caring who wins. Nothing in my book diminishes someone’s credibility more.
Isn’t this the same attitude that we told people who had paid off their student loans not to have?
There are bad people across all age groups, and they are disproportionately older, I grant you. But an obsession with resentment is right-wing ideology, regardless of whether it’s wrapped in a left-wing policy. I don’t believe we do the young any favors by feeding or validating these sentiments.
BR
As for young folks, which on this site I may be among, I think we need a generational changing of the guard. While I was never a huge AOC fan, I think she gets it — the urgency, the policy, the messaging, etc. Not just her — she and other younger Dems are who need to be in charge of the party. They get the existential nature of the risks, of the need to shed process and policy wonk language and comity, etc. Yes, Biden for now, but everything else needs to shift to leadership by younger Dems.
Baud
@BR: Last I heard, Millennials and Gen Z make up a majority of eligible voters in this country.
BR
@Baud:
Yeah, but incumbency is a real advantage and primary fights are ugly and the leadership tends to side with incumbents. We need more senior senators (e.g. Feinstein) to recognize that a graceful retirement is far better than going out hard.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I remember a discussion of hospitals considering going back to whitewash as a way of controlling hospital-acquired infections. It’s a highly effective bactericide, and its mode of action means pathogens can’t easily develop resistance. You would have to repaint the walls more frequently, though, which hospitals saw as a major disadvantage. IIRC, though, they were looking to see if they could develop paints that had encapsulated calcium hydroxide to act as a bactericide while not needing repainting so often.
Kay
@BR:
It’s (now) a pipeline problem though, because people in their 50’s and 60’s will want a peak period and they’ve been sort of held back by people in their 70’s and 80’s who stayed too long. It’s going to take a bit to work through and obviously someone like AOC is aging that whole time, so no longer the youngest guard. It’s choked up.
Martin
@rikyrah: This will be unpopular, but Democrats are almost as greedy.
So, I have this unpopular view of EVs. I think they’re bad policy. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they should exist, or that people shouldn’t buy them, but there’s a ton of evidence that on the scale with which Americans own and use cars, EVs are insufficient to getting our transportation emissions down as low as we need – even if the grid is 100% renewable. At the end of the day, we’re going to need both EVs *and* fewer cars. I think policymakers are blowing a lot of smoke up a lot of skirts and getting Americans to invest a lot of money into a system that we’re ultimately going to have to pull apart, at least partially. And we aren’t investing in the infrastructure to do that latter part, and we’re giving an overly rosy picture of things with the EV subsidies.
Democrats are hardly inherently better at this. Witness SF liberals that have pulled out all the stops to make sure the city can’t build housing ‘to preserve the character of our neighborhoods’ such that they have a massive homelessness problem. Honest to god, that city at least on the housing situation would have been better off with Donald Trump tearing through every ordinance and tipping up mafia built slumlord apartments, and saying ‘fuck the 2 million in equity that homeowner is sitting on’. At least housing would have gotten built.
Democrats can be every ounce as greedy as Republicans, but when they do so, they tend to do it in different ways, but with not necessarily different outcomes. I think you can maybe appreciate how that has historically looked as a party that looked out for black voters, but wouldn’t allow any black leaders, or threaten to eliminate the filibuster in order to get a voting rights win.
Better does not mean sufficient. I would say Democrats are better. I would say Democrats are not yet sufficient. And I don’t just mean Manchin on that, I mean most of the party. At least on this issue. Even Gavin Newsom who is picking up the pace on things, is still too slow. Why is gas lawn equipment still legal to buy? And every comment that tries to explain why it’s still legal to buy will be used as evidence for why Democrats are still being too greedy.
Sure Lurkalot
@bookworm1398:
While we’re at it, let’s try to move on from the huge house concept. My duplex housing two persons is not much smaller than the 2000 sf house I grew up in with 4 kids, parents and grandma. I would love a small ranch home but those are either priced as scrapes in Denver or dwarfed by the 4000-5000 sf houses crammed on to city sized lots.
Cameron
To the Democrats, I’m a Doomer. To the Republicans, I’m a Groomer. To the Youngs, I’m a Boomer. What’s a poor old purity leftist to do?
Jeffro
1,115% this
trollhattan
Compare and contrast, both are dealing with a heatwave and these are real-time current electricity data.
ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas): Current demand, 81 gigawatts, current reserve capacity, 6 GW, customers, 25 million/90% of Texas.
CAISO (California Independent System Operator) Current demand, 34 gigawatts, current reserve capacity, 2.4 GW, customers 30 million/80% of California.
trollhattan
@Cameron:
I’m a joker
I’m a smoker
I’m a midnight toker
I get my lovin’ on the run
Ooh, whoo, ooh, whoo
Luckily the kid does not know Steve Miller exists.
Carlo Graziani
One datum on solutions: this year, the U.S. Department of Energy is beginning funding for “Energy Earthshot Research Centers” at the National Labs and at Universities, to the tune of $350M over 4 years. These are centers to study high-impact R&D ideas for 6 basic research areas: (1) Hydrogen generation, (2) Long-duration energy storage, (3) “Carbon Negative” (including direct air capture, (4) Enhanced Geothermal (i.e. geothermal energy anywhere, not just near hot springs), (5) Floating offshore wind generation, and (6) Low-GHG Industrial Heat.
It’s a very substantial research portfolio, addressing important goals related to the Big Three GHG emitters: transportation, energy generation, and industrial manufacturing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
In 1992 Al Gore was sufficiently identified with climate issues for Poppy Bush to mock him as “Ozone Man”. Eight years later Tom Morello and Susan Sarandon told me he was a phony environmentalist because his mother owned stock in Occidental Petroleum and he owned a big house. They convinced a small but historically significant number of people, many of them young, that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Gore and Bush.
trollhattan
Tuesday I saw my second-ever western tanager. Returned yesterday, camera in hand, and did not get sighting #3 but I’m no birder, either. Anyway, just wanted to note that this lovely species will benefit from proper forest management as will their feathered friends, even the less colorful.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: William Rehnquist and Fat Tony Scalia stole the White House from Sighing Al and here we are.
Martin
@Baud: If Democrats aren’t pushing for the sufficient solutions to climate change, then they aren’t addressing climate change, and they’ll continue to put their faith in the free market to bankrupt the bad actors. If the economy goes to shit, it won’t affect them – they already can’t afford rent, but if it puts GM out of business that’s a bigger climate victory than Democrats are offering.
It’s not resentment, though, it’s bargaining. It’s why black voters nope out now and then and hand an election to Donald Trump – because withholding their vote is the only leverage they have to get the party to listen to them and step up. And if the party refuses, and they stay home, in the autopsy of the election someone will say ‘young people said they stayed home because we didn’t put climate change higher on the agenda’.
You’re trying to blame young people for the party not listening to them, or caring enough about their vote to give them the policy attention they demand. That’s how politics works. It’s the responsibility of the party to listen to voters, and Democrats aren’t doing that enough, because just like we dismiss the concerns of minorities, we dismiss the concerns of young people. We never, ever dismiss the concerns of old rich white people though. Ever. It’s why a million Americans got sacrificed to Covid because the economy was more important. Not the economy as it would look after covid, which any idiot could see would have to change in some ways, but the economy of the 1980s or 90s which is when most of these policymakers learned how the economy worked.
I mean California proved to economists that you can work to address climate change and MAKE MONEY DOING IT. But national Democrats still reject that and are terrified to lean into that kind of economic model. And until that changes, Democrats can expect to be fighting with young voters, because Democrats are still missing the very foundational thing that the country needs to be doing in almost exactly the same way that Republicans are.
CaseyL
“No Doomerism” – Yes! Thank you!
I can be as prone to this as anyone, but lately I find my tolerance for it reducing to near zero. I now try to avoid doomerism.
The impulse is understandable, since it is a way of venting anger.
But there’s no actual benefit after the momentary pleasure of venting.
NotMax
@trollhattan
Trying to make some sense of it all
But I can see it makes no sense at all
Is it cool to go to sleep on the floor?
‘Cause I don’t think that I can take anymore
Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you
;)
Cameron
@trollhattan: Some people call me a space cowboy. Alas, however, nobody calls me a gangster of love.
NotMax
@trollhattan
Gotta admit it took a several seconds to realize that didn’t say “Tuesday I saw my second-ever western teenager.”
;)
zhena gogolia
@Baud: I appreciate this post.
trollhattan
@Cameron: Never give up on the dream of being the pompetus of love!
trollhattan
@NotMax: Of course, they’ve all migrated east. :-)
BR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
This is what the anti “purity stories” bit is in the Ada Palmer piece above:
https://beforewegoblog.com/purity-and-futures-of-hard-work-by-ada-palmer/
It’s super important we (collectively) move beyond “purity” and embrace this sort of hope narrative she talks about.
Bupalos
@Eyeroller: my point is that no one actually knows the math, too much remains unknown…but your calculation that a tree is “not even a drop in the ocean” was just obviously wrong.
Your response corrects for most of what I disagreed with in the first post, and yes, I can agree that there could be a danger in people taking a small action and saying “there, did my part.” Personally, I don’t really see that in practice. Even small gestures end up more like a step on a road. Encourage that step, and the next and the next. Don’t catch yourself saying it doesn’t make a difference when what you mean is it isn’t enough. And don’t concentrate on the first step’s inadequacy before it is taken.
Baud
@Martin:
Black people have been dealing with white people in this country for 400 years. With climate change, I’m being told we’re out of time, except when to comes to voting for the pro-climate party, or even against the anti-climate party, in which case we have all the time in the world to wait. And I’ve been hearing versions of this for as long as people have been talking about climate change. Perhaps more nimble minds can square that circle, but my narrow mind cannot.
@Martin:
I’m not blaming young people for anything. But in 2023, anyone who holding out for better is not my ally, no matter their age.
trollhattan
OT But can anybody edumacate me why Henry Fucking Kissinger is in China meeting with Xi while the president is named Joe Biden? Can I presume this is a Xi-Kissinger thumb in Biden’s eye.
Baud
@trollhattan:
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
They’re welcome to keep him.
trollhattan
@Baud: Making him the Dennis Rodman of war criminals? Huzzah!
raven
A bird crapped on Victor Hovland as he lined up his shot on 15 at The Open!
Baud
@raven:
Nature is fighting back!
narya
Anchor employees trying to buy the business! They want to run it as a co-op.
Baud
Via Mastodon
That number is crazy.
raven
Fifty four years ago today I was in Sydney on R&R and we landed on the moon.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@trollhattan: He’s a long time lobbyist for China [as well as Russia].
After he left office he became a lobbyist. He’s been in China’s payroll through his company “Kissinger Associates, Inc.” and through his think tank “The Kissinger Institute” for decades. He also plays both sides of the fence. When multinational corporations have an issue/dispute with China they hire his firm as lobbyist.
Geminid
@Martin: The fact that the clean energy transition will produce jobs and economic growth is well known outside the borders of California. I think you exaggerate the gap between the bold California Democrats and the “terrified” national Democrats. I’m not sure you are paying attention to politics outside your own state.
Sure, California has gotten a few years head start on other states in the clean energy transition, but that’s because California is a bluer state, not because California’s Democrats are bold and sagacious while the rest of us are a bunch of clueless chickens.
Baud
@Geminid:
Plus, while California is currently the best state in the nation, they also gave us Nixon and Reagan, so they have a lot to make up for.
Prometheus Shrugged
@Geminid: Well, as both a former Columbia University carbon lab scientist and as a current Scripps Institution ocean scientist!!….I think I can clarify that the effect of Mt. Pinatubo on CO2 growth rate in the atmosphere was the result of the cooling effect of the ocean surface, as opposed to any ocean fertilization effect. (CO2 is more soluble in cold water.) A more open question is why we see atmospheric CO2 fluctuations over El Niño cycles–it’s complicated because it not only involves changing upper ocean temperature and circulation patterns but also changing precipitation patterns that drive terrestrial carbon dynamics. Most of us in the business would probably agree that the latter terrestrial effect is primarily responsible for the CO2 fluctuations associated with El Nino.
As for the more general issue of sequestration, I’m highly skeptical of the artificial “ocean alkalization” or ocean fertilization schemes since I have to deal with the dynamics of upper ocean ocean circulation for my work. (What goes down, eventually comes back up. And by “eventually”, I mean by a few years.) The sequestration schemes that make more sense as a viable long term solution are the direct CO2 capture technologies, since, yes, that captured CO2 can be turned into rock permanently.
Martin
@BR: Yeah, AOC may not be a great policymaker. I honestly don’t care about that. But she reaches a huge segment of the electorate in a way that almost nobody else in the party does, in an engaging way, and acts as a good representative for that group.
I am not at all surprised that much of the over-40 crowd here is not particularly enamored with her because a lot of what she is calling for is very threatening, and she operates in channels (TikTok, Twitch, video game chats, etc.) that are out of view of older people and are looked at suspiciously. But she is honest to god the biggest asset that Democrats have if we want to win going forward.
This is a video I’ve linked to before, and it’s a bewildering watch to anyone who does not engage with young people culture, memes, metamodern humor, and so on, so don’t worry if you don’t ‘get’ it (you may not get *any* of the jokes or even some of the context), focus instead on what the audience gets and how they respond and what they respond to.
This was 4 years ago, so it’s getting on. And it’s a retelling of an online event by a marginally popular leftist YouTuber who did a meme video game Twitch stream to raise money for a transgender supporting charity. You’d be forgiven for thinking this is a pretty niche thing that might get the attention of literally dozens of people. And the person telling the story would have agreed with you.
It happened in early 2019, and it blew up into the biggest event on the internet that you were probably completely unaware of. I still remember sitting in my family room, my son was still finishing his degree and was in there with us along with my wife and daughter, and he says ‘hey, AOC just jumped into some guys donkey kong 64 Twitch stream and is talking about trans rights’. It was blowing up on Reddit. That was the moment my daughter learned who AOC was (she just turned 18) and we jumped on and tuned in for a while, not appreciating the moment.
Now, understand that AOC had just been sworn in 2-3 weeks before. Brand new member of Congress but somewhat well known because ‘OMG, we have a member of congress that isn’t a fucking fossil’. And the story tells of how she got into this call, and on the call she makes a no-caveats defense of the rights of transgender individuals, in a community that has invited in ‘national security threat’ Chelsea Manning, and activists from the community that are offering up at the time kind of radical ideas. And AOC, not fearing the optics of what someone might have said an hour ago, or an hour later, jumps in and says the right thing with no ‘but the country isn’t ready’ bullshit.
This event reached *millions* of young people. The video I linked to recounting the story has nearly a million views. These are national election deciding numbers. And I think an argument can be made that the current trans backlash from the right is to some degree directly due to that stupid fucking twitch stream where the transgender community became superpowered by having a current member of the House of Representatives standing behind them saying ‘yes, these things are correct and should be fought for’, and in the wake of that you did get this increased push for transgender rights in the US which started to pay off immediately after Biden was inaugurated, and I think that moment was to a large degree pivotal.
Yes, it was a trivial activity in a trivial space that had a very serious consequence, and we tend to underappreciate these opportunities – but AOC didn’t. A LOT of young people know about that event, and most old people can barely parse a description of it. Democrats leave a LOT of wins on the table because so few of them even know how to meet young voters where they congregate and engage with them in ways that they respect.
Subsole
@Antonius:
What instances are you thinking of??
I can imagine a couple, but I’m curious to hear your list.
Yarrow
For BR and Martin and anyone else who was participating in the discussion last night re: native landscapes in gardens, the Kiss the Ground link in the post above talks about regenerative agriculture. That’s an idea/movement that’s sort of adjacent to what I was talking about with using natives in urban/suburban gardens and landscapes and the benefits that brings of lowered water usage and increased habitat for insects and other wildlife.
Regenerative agriculture is generally used to describe larger farms and farming practices but there’s overlap with home gardens. And some of the general principles work in a variety of farming/gardening locations. And benefits can be similar.
Subsole
@Layer8Problem:
I remember reading about that.
Their cunning plan was pretty much
“How do I trick the cutthroat PMC washouts guarding my luxury Rapture-bunker/sex-dungeon into letting me implant loyalty-enforcement micro explosives into their skulls so they don’t slit my throat for the last can of tomatoes.”
These folks are greedy, shameless, and born lucky. But they are human. They are not gods, and they certainly ain’t pulling twelve-layer overlapping Xanatos Gambits.
BR
@Yarrow:
Yeah. I particularly like the idea of native plantings in bioswales in cities. Regenerate groundwater, reduce stormdrain issues, native species habitat, and pleasant to walk by.
prostratedragon
@Baud: “Halftime entertainment will be provided by the Marching Willows of trollhattanville!”
That Our World in Data site is a find. One can get lost in there for hours.
Bill Arnold
@Martin:
Fewer smaller cars.
American “cars”, for most usages by most Americans, are ludicrously larger than they need to be.
Driving a Prius C hatchback for now (bought used a few years ago for <10K) , and it is fine for even a large (8+ bags) grocery shopping trip.
Too small for buying large potted plants, and definitely too small for e.g. lumber. But otherwise fine. And watertight and climate-controlled.
I'd happily trade it for an EV 2/3 the size. (Am 6'1" so legroom is a hard constraint.) Less maintenance, lower operational costs even with expensive electricity.
Anyway
@Geminid:
I thought it’s headless chickens…
BR
@Martin:
Yeah, I agree with all this. I think when I’ve seen her do that, I get the gut sense I did when I first saw Obama speak — this person is going to be a great leader one day. She may be the younger generation’s Obama.
Martin
@Baud: They’re not holding out for better any more than black voters do. They’re holding out because that’s the only language politicians listen to. If they don’t hold out, they never get what they need. Why are black women getting a LOT more juice in the Democratic Party – because they were denied that in 2016 and Democrats got the message and made big improvements for 2020. That’s why KBJ is on the Supreme Court. That’s why Harris is VP. That’s why Newsom has said if Feinstein can’t finish his term he’ll appoint a black woman. The message sent in 2016 has been received. But Democrats aren’t fully receiving the message from young people. Joe’s doing _okay_.
The solution is that the politicians need to listen and then have the courage to act. It’s that simple.
Bill Arnold
@Martin:
That’s how Democratic party politics works, sadly. It’s not how Republicans traditionally have worked; traditionally, Republicans always showed up for voting, and voted Republican. (MAGA has messed that up a bit because it’s a personality cult.)
Martin
@narya: I will start drinking beer again if they succeed.
Yarrow
@BR: Indeed. I toured a garden where the landscape designers built a bioswale to help with water runoff/standing water that had been a problem. It was gorgeous. It’s possible to incorporate them in smaller scales as well.
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
Used to have a Volkswagon Rabbit Cabriolet.
ex-California Car with AC, (never used). When we had “Air Care” inspections here, had the tech’s scratching their heads because it had a ton of smog reducing gear that local Rabbits did not have.
Passed every time.
Anyway, had the Clinton Street house at the time, was putting in gardens and buying mature shrubbery from houses being torn down. From one, I got three perfect “umberella” rhodo’s, 18 feet in diameter, 12 feet tall.
Hauled them home one at a time, at night, with the top down and all the shrubbery sticking out.
If I had been smarter, I would have just had a trailer hitch and wiring installed, then rent a trailer for the day.
Dan B
When I downsized in 2009 I air sealed and insulated the house, put solar PV on the roof, channeled water off the roof and backyard into a big pond and three other water features, leased a Nissan Leaf. All lights were replaced with high CRI index LED’s. The gas furnace was replaced with Ductless Heat Pumps. And we got two induction burners this year. Seattle’s electricity is 95% renewable so our footprint is almost nothing. Sadly our friends don’t seem curious or interested.
It was a big investment but it’s starting to pay off. Utility bills are down and we get a couple thousand dollars per year for the electricity our PV produces. What would help are banks and credit unions offering low or zero interest loans to homeowners and apartment owners plus incentives for developers.
Geminid
@Prometheus Shrugged: Thank you for the informed analysis. I don’t think ocean fertilization will become a public policy even if it was proven to work, if only because that would undercut efforts to achieve a carbon neutral world economy. But the assertion made by a marine biologist at a 1988 conference on climate that he could cause another Ice Age with a sufficient amount of iron has always intrigued me.
The most recent experiment in Ocean fertilization that I’ve read about was one conducted by a Germsn team in 2012. They distributed an iron compound over patch of the Southern Ocean that tended to circulate around itself. Their data showed promise but was hardly a proof of concept.
Mechanical means of carbon removal, like direct air capture, are promising but also contoversial, maybe not for good reasons.
I noticed that British climate scientist Myles Allen said in his Feb. 2019 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article “The Green New Deal, a View from Across the Atlantic” that he thought some investment by wealthier nations in negative carbon technologies would be neccesary if the IPCC goal of a carbon neutral world economy is to be achieved by 2050. He did not name particular technologies, but that might have been because these technologies are just beginning to be developed and deployed
Miles Allen had worked on the IPCC report that set this goal, and was released October, 2018. His Bulletin article is a good, brief outline of the problem of excess atmospheric CO2 and the challenges involved in reaching a carbon neutral economy.
Martin
@Geminid: But their policy choices don’t reflect that. California didn’t not get here buy buying out industries. We got here by forcing industries to compete differently. The money that is currently being spent federally to do this doesn’t buy very much, and it leaves existing systems which are the core drivers in place. It *looks* good, but it doesn’t change a lot.
Texas can claim they have the largest renewable generation all they want but if their residents still habitually leave their windows open when running the AC, it don’t mean shit.
I don’t mean to say that other states aren’t doing good things – they are. I mean to say that *federally* many of the Democratic policy ideas are wrongly approached.
RevRick
@Eyeroller: Declines in insect populations have been noticed in Germany and the question of cause is still not answered. Perhaps it is due to pesticides, but perhaps global warming could be a factor. In the latter case, it would be increased temperatures have disrupted the biochemistry of the insects.
Martin
@Bill Arnold: $45 at Lowes will get you the lumber and plant delivered. For the $38K you saved between the Prius and the median new car, you can do that every week for the next 16 years.
Martin
@Bill Arnold: I should add, cargo bikes are better at carrying things like large potted plants and even small trees than any hatchback or SUV.
Yarrow
@Martin:
Huh? Who does this? What are you even talking about? Habitually? What?
Bill Arnold
@RevRick:
This (in general, not just Germany) is a very active area of research. Eyeroller did not drop a paper link; here’s one (2019) with over 2000 citations so far (with a lot of argument). I was hoping some researcher who knows the field might drop in, but here goes (pdf):
Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers (PDF, Francisco Sánchez-Bayoa, Kris A.G. Wyckhuysb, 2019)
Dan B
@Dan B: Did I mention that the Ductless Heat Pump is whirring away filling the house with 75° air? The insulation is keeping the house cool. The PV is shading the roof. The water features are giving us a gorgeous garden that we sit in when it’s cooled down in the evening. Going green is wonderful. The waterfeatures and plants attract birds and butterflies. Going green has been wonderful for our house.
Martin
@Yarrow: Apparently it’s pretty common. Common enough that you can find various PSAs to get people to stop. I’ve heard three arguments:
That last one might actually be true in some cases, but could also be the same fallacy as how marginal tax rates work and how some people think they will lose more money to taxes than they will get to keep if they tip into a new tax bracket.
Regardless, it’s an overall failure of the Texas regulatory system to put forward a rate system and requirement for how to explain that to consumers that they have any of these misconceptions. I think California did a good job of explaining how conservation will always save them money, in a way that Texas has clearly failed to do. I don’t think Texans are dumber than Californians, I think Texas policy has failed Texans in a way that California policy has not failed Californians.
Baud
@Martin:
Wow. We just completely disagree about politics. Black women got to where they are in the party because they were the workhorses of the party and consistently vote well over 90% for Dems. We could change the world if young people adopted the same model.
ETA: Honestly, it sounds like young (white?) people want the same results without putting in the same commitment. I hope your description of them isn’t accurate for most of them.
Martin
@Baud: I’m not going to argue the point further. I think we need the perspective of black voters to resolve this, which I’d love to have, and also wouldn’t blame them for wanting to stay out of this. :)
Bill Arnold
@Martin:
Works in some areas. I have terrain and the nearest garden store is 5 miles away with some of that on crowded roadways., plus winter, and distracted semi-rural drivers who hit deer often enough to make it quite clear that they do not pay attention or are straight up killers.
Re delivery, Home Depot also rents little pickup trucks for cheap. (Have both, HD and Lowes, across the street from each other.)
RevRick
@Baud: There is one -one- company in the Netherlands that makes the machine that makes the computer chips that are now in everything.
Baud
@RevRick: I hope the dikes are strong.
frosty
I’m probably one of the Doomers from last night, talking about three tipping points to runaway climate change.
This is a great post, thanks. I’d like to add that the most positive thing I’ve read is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (SF) which posited a way to break through bureaucratic inertia to apply some engineering that might work. My favorite was hiring the out of work oil drillers to pump out the meltwater under Antarctic glaciers and stick them back on the rock.
Prometheus Shrugged
@Geminid: Yes, it’s currently wild wild west in the direct capture technologies and who is funding the necessary R+D (venture capitalists are big in the mix). There are multiple schemes that work in the laboratory but are uncertain in how they might scale. I should add that, in addition to the sequestration schemes that react captured CO2 with rock, there are other schemes to react CO2 with limestone to convert it into a neutral form of dissolved carbon in the ocean. Those show considerable promise for deployment on cargo ships (to make the shipping industry carbon neutral). So it’s an interesting time…Also, BTW, one of my very first public presentations as a PhD student was in front of John Martin (the scientist who said “give me a tanker of iron and I’ll give you an ice age”). The point of my presentation was to show why his idea wouldn’t work. He was sitting in the front row but was very gracious.
cain
Beating climate change will be humankind’s greatest community driven endeavor. It’s an enemy that cannot be defeated unless we are completely united in changing our behaviors as a species.
frosty
@Baud: Insect apocalypse? Caused by neonic pesticides everywhere. To bring the bugs back, change the farms. Care for the soil and it becomes a carbon sink. We know how to do this dammit!!!!
cain
@Martin:
I think what Baud says:
I think a lot of young people want to see things happen quickly and are impatient. That’s not how real life works. In fact, in many ways it is too our benefit that change is hard. It’s why we were able to stop Trump – the checks and balances and needing to compromise is our protection from rapid and possibly unwise.
That said, I think it might be more useful to get young adults to be engaged more locally – we can changes faster in smaller pieces but become big in the aggregate.
I’m still inspired by Obama’s speech
“One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”
I know this to be true. I know I’ve changed things because I had the temerity to say “this needs to change”.
Martin
@RevRick: In fairness they have manufacturing spread around the world – including two in the US. But they are a somewhat worrying single point of failure, which is altogether kind of common in that industry.
cain
Regarding black women or just black people – there has never been more resilient set of Americans. Their perseverance inspires me – no matter what is thrown at them – they shoulder it. But they have patience, and continue to work slowly within the system for their freedoms. They deserve every political power they’ve gained in these past decades – they’ve earned it.
If there is one thing that Trump has done for me is completely look at my country in a new light. A light that glaringly challenges my notions of racism, equality and justice. I’m seeing a fraction of what black and indigenous people see where I was blind before.
cain
Thanks to high gas prices and others – I’m seeing a change in the make up of traffic on the roads. I’m seeing a bigger portion of electric cars on the road here in Portland. I think in the next few years there is going to be a bigger shift towards electric cars. I’m thankful that Oregon put in all the infrastructure for an electric highway.
What we need now is a massive green infrastructure spending on high speed trains.
Bill Arnold
@frosty:
We will see some direct action actors like the Children of Kali. IMO.
Yarrow
@Martin: A blog post from an HVAC company is not a PSA. If you look around you’ll find the same kind of HVAC company posts from HVAC companies all over the country. Probably even in California.
If the temperature outside is cooler than inside then it can actually be more efficient to open doors and windows to get that cooler air inside before using the a/c or possibly using the a/c for a few minutes to help pull the cooler air through the house faster. It’s not common to leave doors and windows open and run the a/c all day, though. Who’s telling you it is? Have you just decided that’s a thing in Texas?
People joke about cooling the outdoors but it’s just joking. It’s also a thing you get yelled by your parents for doing, just as kids in cold climates get yelled at for leaving the door open in winter. I’m sure there are some people out there who think it’s a thing but there are probably those sorts of people in California too.
It’s possible that some people have electric company deals where their rates go down if they use more electricity and up if they use less. There are weird deals like “nights and weekends free” or “one free day a month” but the companies make up for it in other ways.
It’s very clear that you think that. It’s clear you think California is way ahead of every other state, especially Texas.
Geminid
@Prometheus Shrugged: Thanks, that’s a neat story about Dr. Martin.
I read that Occidental Petroleum was going to build a large direct air capture plant at a site atop the Permian Basin. The idea is to inject the CO2 into the oil bearing rock below and sell the recovered oil as carbon neutral fuel (as well as collect on the Q45 tax credit).
The fuel might be used for air transport. I think that in the last Congress Democrats considered including a mandate for carbon neutral fuel that airlines would be required to phase in over time. The proposal was shelved, but it may reappear in the next Congress if we can eliminate enough Republican Reps next year.
The EU is ahead of us in this area, as they are pretty much across the board when it comes to the clean energy transition. I’ve read that they are a little worried that the IRA bill may push us ahead in some areas, though. But I think that unless the Republicans regain political power here, everyone will be caught up with each other in10 years.
That timeline is part of the problem we are talking about, though. I look at current developments and conclude that five years from now we’ll be seeing a lot of tangible progress. I think a lot of people will have to see it to believe it though. They don’t see any substantial progress now, so it’s easy to downrate the investments being made.
Speaking of direct air capture, that is what the practice of spreading rock dust is about. Instead of mechanically capturing CO2 and binding it to minerals, the idea is to crush and spread minerals and let the CO2 bind itself. Then you plow it under and spread some on other fields. You could probably repeat this a few times and only help crop production. The crushing, transport and spreading would of course be done by clean energy-powered equipment.
Subsole
@trollhattan:
Some people call me…Maurice.
Geminid
@cain: How about massive spending on all forms of public transit? The Infrastructure Bill included a lot: $60 billion for Amtrak, capital improvements, and large investments in mass transit including $10 billion for New York City’s MTA alone.
Of course, Amtrak could probably put another $40 billion to good use, and upgrade more track so trains can run at 150mph, Amtrak’s current top speed. That’s kind-of-high speed rail. New York City’s MTA could similarly put another $10 billion to good use..
But we may see Infrastructure Bill 2.0 in the next Congress if we can put those knuckledragging Republicans back in the Minority. Once we do I think they’ll likely remain in the Minority for the rest of the decade and beyond. Then we can shift the clean energy transition into high gear.
Martin
@cain: I hear you, but those were the same arguments I heard at work heading into covid. I wasn’t supposed to be writing the policies that shut the entire institution down, just one part of it. The problem was that the university was doing the ‘that’s not how real life works’ things and forming committees and the like. They had a ‘how the world works’ timetable. There were going to be a series of committee meetings starting on March 30, 2020 the day after finals, that week we would load test the VPNs to gauge what needed to happen to prepare for work from home, all that. Lots of activity that week, in anticipation of maybe making a decision as early as the end of that week or as late as April 17th, which was an administrative deadline for a number of things. 4 students got sick on March 24 suspecting Covid but diagnosis would take a few days, the administration was notified on March 25, they pulled my plan out made the decision to close at 2PM effective 10PM that night. We never made it to March 30. We never made it to an institutional plan. The guy who was moving fast wrote the only plan they had, and that closed 4 of the top 10 public universities in the US that day. You all suffered under my manic 100 hour weeks, which I funneled some of to the front page with whatever grammatical accuracy I could muster up, and not always hiding my daily emotional response to the whole thing.
So, understand I am not panicked about climate change in the ‘we’re all going to die’ sense. I’ve spend enough time doing policy work to know that you almost always fail your optimistic goal. We didn’t get zero institutional covid deaths, I’m sorry to say. But we got fewer than we would have had we waited, and I can take that as an absolute victory despite the fact that it wasn’t perfect.
We *will* address climate change. I would very much prefer that it didn’t take killing a non-trivial fraction of the human population, nearly wiping out some cultures, suffering through mass climate migration and the inevitable fascist backlash that will result in that, economic harm, and all that. But we won’t avoid at least *some* of that given that *some* of that has already occurred. My urgency is that speed avoids suffering. And that is an absolute relationship. There is no decision we would make later that is better than one made sooner, at least in terms of impact to human suffering here. The opportunity cost of making climate decisions is measured in human life and suffering later, and that cost is paid daily.
Eventually though, an equilibrium will be reached. What will the cost be to reach it? How many of us will be counted as part of those costs? Will it be me in California lacking water, will it be Betty and Adam displaced due to storms or Cole due to flooding? It probably won’t be all of us, but each day increases the likelihood it will be one of us.
I don’t disagree with Obama’s statement – I absolutely believe that too, which is why I do advocate for individual effort because I think that’s a good mechanism to get that process rolling, but I have seen the ‘this is how real life works’ machine fall flat on it’s fucking face, and recently. I’m also inspired by a quote, this one by Mike Tyson:
That’s the counter-argument to ‘that’s not how the world works’. You can realpolitik until you’re blue in the face, but Putin still invaded Ukraine and is determined to threaten NATO. At some point you have to actually deal with that even if it’s not entirely on the terms you want or at the cost you want. Trump never wanted Covid to reach the US, so when it did, there wasn’t a fucking plan, because he worked so hard to not plan for it.
We can do this. We have evidence we can do this. From the end of 1941 to the middle of 1945, the United States produced a grand total of 130 passenger automobiles. We just turned the machine off, because we couldn’t afford to have it on. The country didn’t end. People didn’t die because of that. Yeah, we had to make some choices, we had to keep vehicles running on spare parts and tape. But we turned the economy off to solve a problem. And we did solve that problem, and then we turned the economy back on, stronger than it would have been if we tried to keep that economy running. People complained, and rich people got less rich, but a decade later we were pretty fucking happy we did it.
So we can do it, we just don’t wanna yet. Change that and it’ll get done. And if the US does it, it’ll force a lot of the global holdouts to as well, because like I noted above – if you do it right, you make money doing it. A final quote, by Einstein:
We just need to be brave and to grab it.
NotMax
@RevRick
Fairly fascinating documentary look at that company.
NotMax
@Geminid
Shocked, shocked.
Congressional Republicans push new cuts to infrastructure investments.
Geminid
@RevRick: What about all those chip makers in Taiwan? Don’t people use their chips?
Geminid
@cain: Have you seen any electric buses yet? Any hydrogen fuel cell buses?
Martin
@Geminid: I don’t think the EU is worried the US is pulling ahead so much as they’re also worried that the US is throwing so much cash into the air that it’s shifting their opportunities away from them. From what I’ve read, they liken this to Covid when the US appeared to co-op European developed vaccines, throw cash to rapidly get production going and then was either late or soft on committing to equitably distributing that vaccine back to the EU. Trump for a while there took a very FYIGM attitude toward snatching that research and then keeping it for ourselves, where the EU would have more welcomed a cooperative approach where we pooled resources and distributed benefits.
And they see some of that in the recent US plans with the US uprooting investments in clean energy in other countries by throwing so much cash at getting them built in the US. Sure it helps keep the US on track for our climate commitments, and it’s potentially economically good for the US (you can see some of my doubts about that above), but it doesn’t necessarily buy a lot of global progress because we’ve uprooted someone else’s climate gains. Contracts and permits the EU already had lined up immediately vanished as soon as the US slammed $1T down on the table.
I think they understand the political challenges of getting incentives passed – they have similar challenges, but are annoyed or maybe disappointed that it happened the way it did. And again, will the US reciprocate or will we build up a green energy economy and then sell it for high profits to the rest of the world, kind of thing. I don’t think we can answer that, but we don’t have the best track record on that one.
NotMax
@Geminid
ASML (the Dutch concern) doesn’t make chips, they make specialized machinery which is used by others to make chips.
Gvg
@Baud: the bugs I remember were invasive non native love bugs which had a huge population explosion due to no natural predators. They seem to have dropped back to a more normal level and some birds have learned to eat them.
The huge masses of bug splatter I remember was not good nature.
I am not sure about insects, but amphibians have rebounded a lot due to our reducing emissions which in turn reduced water pollution. amphibious are susceptible to serious birth defects and infertility from almost any kind of water pollution. Possibly the amphibians are eating more bugs for us.
Yarrow
NBC Nightly News had a segment tonight on a solar electric car.
Dan B
@Martin: Wonderful video on a heartfelt level and the guy has amazing comedic timing. Thanks for posting!
Martin
@Geminid: You don’t even need to do that. The federal transportation bill gives $60B a year to states for road construction and about $2B a year to transit. Just flip that.
Or change the formula – how much you get depends on how much in emissions you reduce, or reduce deaths per passenger mile – which some state would grab to build protected pedestrian infrastructure as a good ROI toward that goal.
Again, you cannot consume your way out of climate change. More money is *always* the lever we grab in the US, but it doesn’t need to be. You can simply change the incentives, regulate out the bad bits, shift dollars to the good bits without having to add any.
California didn’t get the energy efficiency that we have by spending money on it. We got here because the state changed the regulatory system – how rates are adjusted – such that utilities make more money when consumers use less power. It’s this almost unique market system in the US – where buying less of a good makes the producer more profits. But it meant that the utility and the consumer have the same goal, because that conservation saves me money while also making the utility profits. So the utility does the heavy lift. It’s a positive economic feedback loop in favor of conservation and climate change. And the state leverages that for how the power is generated and all that. But it doesn’t require adding money. It doesn’t require taxpayer dollars. And the high rates become a feature because it raises consciousness – doing the bad thing becomes expensive, so you develop a habit to not do the bad thing.
Someone asked the CEO of a CA utility ages ago how they expect to see consumer usage increase over the next x years, and they responded that they really wanted it to go down, because that’s how they become more profitable. CEOs are very simple creatures, like squirrels. Their whole life is dedicated to finding nuts. If you can train them to do something good for society in exchange for a nut, they’ll do it without questioning it.
Regarding Amtrak directly, US passenger rail – at least any commuter or long range rail – can’t be fixed without nationalizing the rail infrastructure. The private railroads own it, it’s the highest profit margin industry in the United States, and they are going to fuck over every national need so long as it stays that way. Nationalize the track and right of way and give it to Amtrak and convert Amtrak from a for-profit federally owned corporation to a non-profit one. It’ll be expensive, but we’ll get the century of track upgrades have been largely neglected, we’ll get passenger rail with a higher priority than freight, we’ll get trains short enough to fit on sidings, we’ll get safety improvements, and we might even get electrification. The freight operators will have to compete nationally instead of having their handful of regional monopolies.
Most of the cost of CA HSR was buying right of way because it wasn’t possible to run passenger trains on freight right of way. CA could have avoided at least some of that if the feds would have allowed those right of ways to be taken over and reworked to serve both needs.
Martin
@Geminid: The fuel policy is to some degree being driven by CAs low carbon fuel standard (LCFS). The law says that any plane operating inside the state needs to pay taxes equivalent to the cost of the full lifecycle emissions of the fuel – extracting, refining, transporting, and operation based on the fleet average emissions. That applies even the flight only has one end in CA. So a certain fraction of US airlines are going to be paying that money to California and that will already be factored into the economics. Federal laws could then shift that economic cost by pre-empting CAs law, and it will set a benchmark for that that cost ought to be.
And CAs role here should be well understood. These are things other states aren’t allowed to do. CA can only do them because we are the only state with an exemption from the Clean Air Act because we had stricter laws on the books before it passed. This allows CA to set stricter regulation than the feds, and once set other states can choose whether to adopt CAs rule or the Federal one, which is why states follow so many of CAs rules – because they can’t make their own. It’s not because CA is inherently a leader on this, it’s just that we’re the only state that is allowed to do more – and other states do approach CA with their wish list to try and get them into CAs legislation. It’s a weird system, and one that I think would work better if other states had more autonomy, even if it was regional. Let New England work together to address issues that are more pressing there, etc.
Gvg
@Martin: I think you are falling for some tall tales that are taking advantage of you prejudices. Sorry. That costs money and is stupid. An exceptional drunk Texan one time might do that. Otherwise it’s just a story to yank your chain.
Martin
@NotMax: To expand on this, the semiconductor industry is pretty globally interdependent.
The leading foundry in the world is a Taiwanese company with factories in various places including the US, but less technical chips are made all over. The US has fully American foundries to support our defense industry, etc. The equipment to manufacture them comes primarily from the Netherlands, but other equipment from Japan, Israel, etc. The companies that design the chips are mostly from the US. The materials (wafers) that feed into the machines are made all over but Japan remains a big player. The software that is used to design the chips is also mostly American. The software and hardware that is used to control the equipment in the factory comes from Japan, the US, etc. (this is what my son does).
This is why the US has been fairly successful at freezing out China (note China is not a leading player in any of this) because without the US software, you first have to replace that. And if you can get Netherlands to support sanctions, then China needs to develop their own equipment (these machines are about the size of a garbage truck and cost about $150M each. They are mind-blowingly complicated) and so on. It also guides some thinking on geopolitics because this industry, which everyone is so dependent on, requires keeping the Netherlands, Japan, the US, Taiwan and a number of other important players in good relations and influences US attitudes toward defending Taiwan. If that system is broken, there will be a global economic cost borne by the US, Korea, the EU, etc. but mostly by the US. Taiwan is a very sensitive nerve to the west for China to be poking.
Subsole
@Baud: Yeah. We are really, really going to have to start building some redundancy and survivability into our supply chain.
Martin
@Gvg: It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Texas residential electric usage is quite high per capita, even accounting for their hot summers. I don’t care if it’s open windows, poor insulation, or whatever. Florida’s is as well.
And I don’t particularly care what mechanism is used to get that usage back in line, so long as it does. Texas can crow about their high amount of renewables, but they’re clearly struggling to build generation as fast as they are consuming it. They are not actually making any real progress. They have to cut consumption.
And here are some things that CA is terrible about:
I could go on. I’m not trying to suggest that CA residents are great. We’re no different than anyone else, but policies here have caused us to achieve certain good outcomes that should be able to be implemented anywhere, again, because we’re not special. The electricity generation thing is mostly due to 3 people – Jerry Brown, Art Rosenfeld, and Mary Nichols. In various roles they steered the ship here. We were fortunate to have them.
lowtechcyclist
@cain:
But that’s how young people ARE. (I’m sure people were saying exactly the same thing in 1968.) Any approach to getting young people involved and voting that expects them to have the perspective that comes with time and is disappointed with them when they don’t, is an approach that’s not going to be very successful in motivating them.
RevRick
@Geminid: The company in the Netherlands makes the machines that make the chips, which are made in Taiwan.
RevRick
@Baud: I am totally with you on this understanding of how politics works. Politicians go fishing where the fish are, not where they aren’t. If young people withhold their votes, that forces Democrats to look elsewhere for that 50%+1 source of winning votes. And the fact remains, both Democratic and Republican voters are over 50. If young voters are dissatisfied with current results, the only way to change that is to vote in large enough numbers to move the center of gravity.
And you’re right about black women. The shrinking majorities are due to black, Asian, and Hispanic men moving in the Republican direction, because of concerns about manhood.
Geminid
@RevRick: Than you for the correction. I see I did not read your comment carefully enough.
Geminid
@RevRick: I just have not seen reports of Black people withholding votes because the Democratic party has not met their demands. I’ve seen a few fringe politicians and Twitter warriors advocate that, and they get swarmed by other Black people telling them off. I thought the assertion was spun to set up a point about young voters.
pieceofpeace
@Martin: This was very interesting, disturbing also, but a good deal of useful information that contained enough ideas that got my mind juices going.
Your range of knowledge seems broad and detailed to me, with a subject that needs our attention and is emergent until we begin to take action.. And I’m tired of not doing more about it than donate for political influence.
Thanks for this. I hope you write more.
slightly_peeved
@Another Scott:
I’d avoid any policies based on making Australia white, even paint-based. It took us until the 1970s to get rid of that policy the first time.
cain
@Martin: I agree 100% with what you’re saying – there is indeed opportunity in a crises and we just need to rise to the occasion.
But the people who will die are those that are not from privileged nations or have highly corrupt govt systems.
cain
@Geminid: We have natural gas run buses, but can’t recall any electric ones
cain
@lowtechcyclist:
Hell that’s how I am! I just also know that there is a reason for it all – and it tempers my sense of urgency. We’ll get through it – but we need to find ways to channel young energy. Voting is a powerful tool – but for the young it doesn’t seem to be doing it and I can udnerstand that if you’re in red states where they are gerrymandering – but gerrymandering can’t go on forever. Eventually, those people are going to fuck up badly enough that no amount of cheating let them keep power.
jlowe
“One of the biggest obstacles to avoiding global climate breakdown is that so many people think there’s nothing we can do about it.”
It’s a matter of who “we” are, something which is presented absolutely context free here. If the “we” being talked about here are the voters, consumers and wage slaves constituting most of us, is there precious little agency we have to arrest climate impacts beyond voting and organizing, taking personal actions to reduce consumption and increase resilience, and setting a good example (peer pressure).
If the “we” being talked about here are politicians, economic and cultural elites, corporate leaders, billionaires, and public intellectuals, then there is a lot they might do to affect climate change. They’ve been ineffective on this topic for the past 30 years, frequently willfully so, and there’s little evidence that they’re going to change now.
Political media in the US fails to provide this context because it would upset its core advertising market. It is one of our problems here, and not a solution to averting the hazards from climate change.