Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Environment Page 8 of 15

The Problem with Neoliberal “It’s Never Been Better” Triumphalism

By

On July 15, 2019

Comments

Saying that humanity is currently the best off it has ever been (a dubious proposition in any case) is like saying “I’ve never been warmer” as you burn down your house.

Globe on FirePeople like Pinker have been trotting out stats to claim that we’ve never been better off. Those stats are questionable, based on a definition of  poverty that is beyond questionable. Meanwhile, in India, people eat less calories than they did 30 years ago. (I traveled in India and lived in Bangladesh 30 years or so ago. Eating less calories is unimaginably bad. That a small middle class and a new wealthy class has been created means little to those eating… less.)

But let’s wave that all aside. Let’s posit that human life now is the best it’s ever been.

Meanwhile, in India, people are dying in 50 degree C weather. France had a massive heatwave. Indian farmers are committing suicide in droves, in large part because of issues with ground water.

Extreme weather is getting worse, the permafrost is melting 70 years ahead of the consensus forecast, and so on. Ecologically, fish stocks are collapsing, the Amazon is being chopped down at a ferocious rate, more than one study has found collapses in insect populations at 80 percent or so, and others have noticed that without insects, you don’t have birds, and so on and so forth.

Blah, blah, blah.

Not only is no human an island, but humanity lives among other species, and they make our lives possible in ways we are barely aware of. Most oxygen in the world, for example, is produced by small ocean organisms, organisms which could have a mass die off.

Sigh.

So let us say that this is the bestest of best worlds, a Panglossian paradise.

Present prosperity is being paid for with future poverty, future mass death, and a non-trivial risk of human extinction. As for non-human species, they are already dying at a rate which will show up as the fastest mass extinction in Earth’s existence.

This is only a good bet if you are sure that you’re going to die before the bill comes due. That was a good bet for the GI Generation. A decent bet for the Silents and not a bad bet for about the first half of the Boomers. It’s a bad bet for everyone afterwards who expects to live to 70 or 80 or so (a normal human lifespan in most developed countries).

And, of course, it’s a bad bet if you actually, y’know, care about your children, or other people’s children, or the future of humanity when you’re gone. (Gonna be a shitty place to reincarnate too, if reincarnation exists.)

Now let’s bring this back to neoliberal “greatest time to be alive” triumphalism.

The sub voce message there is, “We don’t need to change, everything’s fine and getting better.”

But, if we’re living not just unsustainably, but in a way that will call Biblical level catastrophe within the lives of most people now alive and their children, perhaps we do need to change, and radically.

So this sort of triumphalism, even if it were true, would be a disservice to not just humanity, but life on Earth.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why the Consensus Environmental Predictions Are Wrong

By

On June 15, 2019

Comments

So, a little bit ago, I noted that with temperatures of 70 degrees in the arctic, we could expect permafrost to melt, and that would release methane. Methane is a lot stronger a greenhouse gas than carbon, in the short run, and there is a lot held in arctic permafrost.

It was suggested that this was “alarmism” and the temperatures would penetrate enough for the permafrost to really melt.

Yeah, about that…

One point I have made consistently now for many years is that virtually everything will happen faster than the consensus estimates. That point has been, well, consistently true.

The estimates made by organizations like the UN are always way too optimistic. Always. They are always wrong.

This is partially because they are playing politics: They’re trying to tell decision makers what they are willing to hear. It is partially because decision makers trim their estimates and it is partially because most people, even most scientists, are shitty system thinkers.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

The concepts of break points and exponential growth don’t really penetrate into most people’s thinking.

The way the world works for long periods is that it’s mostly the same, and there are trends, and the trends are mostly linear. Assume the world be about how it was yesterday, add or subtract the trends, and you’re done.

But when the world actually changes, it changes fast. Those linear trends (which often aren’t linear, they just look like it) hit break points, and they go exponential, or geometric, or they just change their linearity dramatically (from a one percent change to a three percent change a year, say.)

And everything then changes, big time.

This is true for human affairs and for non-human systems (though the two are largely the same now that humanity is the elephant in the ecosystem tea shop). So everything changes after the Great Depression and after the War. Everything changes because of the oil shocks leading to stagflation leading to Reagan/Thatcher.

There’s a status quo, with slow change, then something breaks the status quo, and BOOM.

This is how climate change is working and will work. Slow change, then a threshold is crossed and BOOM. Weeks of tornadoes. Category 6 hurricanes (5 was supposed to be the top.)

Or permafrost melts.

And the permafrost melt is happening 70 years before expected by the consensus estimate.

People suck at systems thinking, even most scientists.

The world is changing. We have the foreshocks now of changes which in a decade or two, will lead to a VERY different world. Ecologically and socially.

This can no longer be stopped. It will not happen. (Maybe we can, once we take it seriously, make it better with geo-engineering, but that will not stop it from first happening.)

So, again, we are now in the “Something bad is going to happen, what are you going to do?” stage. Organizing to stop it failed. It failed. It failed. It is done. You can organize to mitigate and prepare, and you can prepare yourself.

Good luck.

 

The Most Important Climate Change Graph You’ll Ever See

By

On May 28, 2019

Comments

This is why we won’t be stopping climate change, and why you must personally plan for it.

We are not going to start mitigating at 5 percent this year.

We are not going to start mitigating at 9 percent in 2029.

These are political non-starters. They will not happen. For whatever reason, probably because most decision makers are old and will die before the worst, and the rest are rich and think that their money will protect them, we have not and will not do what is needed until there is widespread catastrophe: Catastrophe which kills millions in the developed world and China.

And maybe not even then.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

If you are not yourself old, and likely to die in the next ten to 20 years, or if you have dependents you wish to protect, you need to take this seriously and make plans.

As part of my recent essay collection, I wrote two new essays. One of them was a long article on how to evaluate your risk from future events, including climate change.

That essay starts on page 146, and if you read no other essays in the book, I’d appreciate it if you read that one.

You can get the book, in PDF or Epub format, here.

Even if you have little money, there are preparations and precautions you can make.

Start thinking about this now; start preparing now, because if you just react when catastrophe hits, your odds of surviving or avoiding the worst suffering go way down.

Start preparing also because when catastrophe hits, it is likely to do so by surprise and sooner than most mainstream estimates. The systems in question are not linear and we don’t properly understand all the feedback loops. It is very likely that there will be a point where change becomes geometric.

So, please, read and prepare (or just prepare).

Say Goodbye to Permafrost (And Civilization)?

By

On May 13, 2019

Comments

Globe on FireSo, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are now higher than they have ever been since homo sapiens have existed.

Meanwhile, on Russia’s arctic coast, which is permafrost, the temperature is 29C, 84F.

That means the permafrost is melting.

Because we continue to pump green house gasses out, because every scenario includes more significant warning, I will state again: We are not going to avoid permafrost melting.

Permafrost holds vast amounts of methane. Methane is, short term, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

This will likely then lead to methane releases from arctic seas. It will lead to faster melting of glaciers and polar and antarctic ice. As oceans warm, they will expand further, leading to sea level rises.

Increased temperatures will lead to even more extreme weather events such as category 6 hurricanes.

We will see changes in weather patterns and so on.

But the key point is that we are about to hit the accelerator, and there is no actual possibility of avoiding it, which will almost certainly lead to exponential, uncontrolled increases in climate change.

We are, for all practical purposes, past the point of no return. We will lose our coastal cities, for example, the only question is when. The glaciers and snowcaps in most of the world will go away, leading to many rivers drying up.

Etc, etc…

Climate change is not a question, it is a certainty, and the question is not, “Will it be bad?” but “How bad?”

The answer is, almost certainly, “Very, very bad.”

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

One Million Species at Risk of Extinction + One

By

On May 6, 2019

Comments

Globe on FireSo, you’ve probably seen all the articles aboutthe UN report which finds that one million species are at risk of extinction, out of the 8.7 million species we believe exist.

That’s more than 10 percent.

The key thing that tends not to get emphasized in this is that ecosystems are chains, or complex webs of interactions. The death of insects, for example (remember when driving caused bug splat? I can’t remember the last time I saw that), will reveberate through the entire web, starting with birds.

These interactions are complicated and we do not understand them well at all.

For example, there is a non-trivial risk that the algae, which are the major oxygen producers in the oceans, will die. They produce 70 to 80 percent of our oxygen.

If that happens, humanity will go extinct, along with a lot more than one million other species.

Our actions are insanity. Absolute insanity. We are destroying the web of life which makes our own existence possible.

We have no escape. We cannot even make biospheres (enclosed environments) work. Without that, we cannot begin to try to keep even a small population alive during the collapse (not that that would be anything but a catastrophe anyway).

But the fact that we can’t make even a simple enclosed environment which can support human life work is the point. We are playing with systems we don’t understand. We are committing mass genocide of other life forms.

And there is a better than even chance that it will be a million, or millions, +1. We do not exist separate from the web of beings who make life on Earth possible.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Is There Hope For Mitigating Climate Change?

By

On March 22, 2019

Comments

I’ve always felt that the last thing which came out of Pandora’s box, hope, was the worst thing to come out. People wouldn’t put up with the evils of the world so readily if they didn’t feel hope.

Most recently, in America, Obama ran on “hope” and did, well, very little to help most people who voted for him. (And rather a lot to hurt them.)

So, what hope is there for dealing with climate change?

What, I think, there clearly isn’t, is hope that we avoid serious and catastrophic consequences. The methane in permafrost will be released and we are going to get hit hard.

People will die, it will be bad. For some people very bad.

Combined with ecological collapse there is an outside, but still real, chance that we will destroy our civilization or wipe ourselves out.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the generational cohort is changing. The Boomers are giving way to the Millenials (Xers, of whom I am one, never counted for much politically.)

As Stirling Newberry explained, old people don’t much care about climate change because they’re going to be dead before the worst of it hits.

Young people do.

And the Overton window is shifting: even if Pelosi (old) sneered at the Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got it talked about and taken seriously. Multiple Presidential candidates are for some version of it.

What is possible; what is acceptable, is changing.

The Green New Deal is no different from what many people have suggested in the past: refit the entire economy to be as carbon renewable as possible. Make every building as close to energy neutral as possible, use renewable energy, etc..

We had the technology in the 90s, heck we had much of it before then. AOC’s plan is, in broad strokes, identical to what I used to propose Democrats run on back in the 2000s, when no one took it seriously.

So, yes, there is hope.

The other piece of hope is that things get really bad; catastrophically bad, as soon as possible. We need to lose millions of people to climate change and ecological collapse in an obvious and terrible way, so everyone else wakes up.

That’s not nice, but this is a boiling frog situation: we need something to happen that makes people panic and realize that they can’t take their time fixing this.

As long as it seems like a slow change, we will tend to put off the very radical change that is needed.

Fortunately, I’m almost certain climate change will be discontinuous and that bad things will happen off schedule and before we expect them to. In one sense that’s bad, especially if whatever happens is so bad we can’t recover, but if it doesn’t, it’ll be exactly what we need.

Grim, but that’s where we are.

Hope? Yeah, there is some. But only if we seize the chances we will be given.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Climate Change and Game Theory

By

On March 21, 2019

Comments

**This Article Is By Stirling Newberry**
It is certainly true that if you want to know the economic outcome of a situation, it is best to study Game Theory. But it is also true, that if everyone else is bad at game theory you’re even better off. Which is why the New Yorker has a writer whose job is mis-represent game theory.

 

I suppose that I should talk about Brexit, and I will in due time. But there is a larger game afoot: climate change.

 

Money is crated in the past, but paid for in the future. Loans are paid off by future earnings. Normally money is created about the same in the future as in the past, so the fact that it’s actually created in the future doesn’t matter. Because this is mostly true, economists usually don’t pay much attention to the fact, even though they know it. As a result, they don’t think about the times when the future will be a lot different than the past.

 

But 1st people are going to use the false game theory to make a bundle of cash, and then die. Because after all, dying is a way to keep the money and choose who it goes to. But more on that later.

 

One of the main ways that the future changes from the past is when we change how we get our supply of energy. Think back 300 years, only the most vital industries could use coal, almost all of the rest used either wood, wind, or muscle power. Coal started extremely expensive, but once transportation was run by coal became cheaper. That means that 100 years ago, everybody who could use coal did so.

 

But on the boundaries there was a new kind of energy: oil. Oil had several advantages over coal, mainly because it was liquid and flowed from place to place rather than solid which meant it had to be shoveled. And do not think the people shoveling did not how hard that was. Coal was mainly for industry, and next for naval (which is the 1st place when Churchill appeared on the scene, he was one who decided that oil was the right way to power ships, rather than coal).

 

What this has to do with Game Theory? Very occasionally the past is loaded with people who made money from an economy based on one specific power, but the future needs another source. This is why today we are stuck between the people who made money in oil, but whose future is not oil. The problem is that it is not just oil, it is the entire apparatus for distributing power: cars, for example, are actually oil on wheels. So the people who made money in the past want to keep going because they are going to die before the bill comes due. Meanwhile, people who live in the future, that is to say, young people, realize that oil is bad for them. One can draw supply-demand diagrams if one really needs to. All people with oil are rich, and the vast majority of young people are poor and they do not spend as much of their lives on oil-based things and activities.

 

That means that old people, who run the economy and politics, keep voting for oil ( and to some extent coal.) The problem is that it is not just people, but climate which has a say. Almost everybody reading this will not be alive by 2200, but our children might just make it, and their children almost certainly will. This is a problem with Game Theory if you think about it: the people who have the money are going to die before the bill comes due. If John Maynard Keynes was alive he would propose government as the solution, but the government is now run by same old people. So don’t hold your breath.

 

 This is why action is coming from below: young people know that they are going to pay the actual bill for the oil based economy, while old people are going to get the money. There are various other problems, such as nuclear power being safe, except because of the people who run it. This is actually also part of game theory: nuclear power requires smart people run it, but the probability says that there are more profitable things than running a nuclear plant, so people with talent go into those rather than supplying nuclear power. Which is a problem because nuclear power is dangerous, and stupid people who run it make mistakes (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi.) Once every 15 years does not do the job, it has to be 0 tolerance, and that means getting brighter people, but the economics does not allow for that. Thank you for playing have a nice day.

 

But the general problem of money from the past dictating the future can be solved: because borrowing occurs regularly, and most of the borrowing is rolled over. That means that the currency markets could, by general government agreement, make borrowing for the oil based economy more expensive and make it cheaper for renewables and nuclear power. Proceeds will be split between the 2 currencies, and while there will be graft ( you cannot help that, but you can limit it.) slowly the world’s energy supply will be made cleaner. Gradually as more people become aware of the cost to themselves, the fee will be enlarged to cover the cost.

 

Thus the result is an N by N matrix with each player determining what is the best use of there time. This means that the government sector, will determine the cost, and the market will determine what should be done.

If you enjoyed this article, and want more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Water Wars And the Great Indian Die-Off

By

On March 19, 2019

Comments

Humans can go without food for weeks. Water, a few days:

The core fact of climate change and human mismanagement of resources that a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that the worst of it is going to be about water.

Consider the Indian subcontinent. It is under three main water threats:

  • As glaciers go away, glacier fed streams and rivers dry up.
  • There has been vast depletion of aquifers, and within twenty to thirty years this will reach a crisis that devastates agriculture. There is no water to replace this aquifer water.
  • Climate change will change wind and rainfall patterns. Much of Indian agriculture is based on the monsoon cycle. If it fails even a few times in a row, agriculture will be devastated.

These items often feed into each other: for example, depleting groundwater is one of the culprits in drying up the Ganges, and if the Ganges goes dry, India dies.

Meanwhile, how do you think Pakistan is going to react, when, as things get worse, they realize that their agriculture, or people, are dying because India has decided to take upstream water they need?

India isn’t the only nation that will be hit hard by all this, but it’s going to be one of the worst. I am almost entirely positive we will see a famine in India which kills literally hundreds of millions of people.

Perhaps it won’t include a war between Pakistan and India; nuclear armed states, over water.

We are now in the triage period of an oncoming catastrophe. A lot of people are going to die, more will be immiserated, and the question now is who, and to a lesser extent how many.

This isn’t to say that nothing can be done to decrease the death count slightly, and to reduce the odds of human extinction, but we are past the point of no return on Climate Change. It will happen, the large stores of methane in permafrost (and probably in the arctic) will be released and climate, including rainfall patterns, will change. Large numbers of rivers and streams will dry up, and sea-levels will rise.

This will not happen on an even schedule of +X every 10 years, when it goes bad, it will go ballistic, and events like ice melts and changes to ocean and wind currents will happen quickly. Some of them may happen like switches flipping. It will go from “sucky” to “catastrophic” fast, with little warning.

So, I know that many people are stuck. No money, no health, no youth and too many obligations.

But be aware of this and plan for it if you can.

And if you live in India or any of the nations around the Indian subcontinent, please be particularly careful as there is even less possibility of India avoiding the worst case scenario than there is for most countries.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Page 8 of 15

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén