Is There Hope For Mitigating Climate Change?

“We need to lose millions of people to climate change and ecological collapse in an obvious and terrible way, so everyone else wakes up.”

Know that religion also has a history of stepping into catastrophic moments to succor those that have succumbed to learned helplessness.

“It’s the rapture! It’s the rapture!” they will say.

@someofparts,

Even though Naked Capitalism is not as philosophically First-Principles deep as this blog is, and even though they banned me from there; I still read their blog for interesting material and comments.

Unfortunately, they write so many millions of words so fast that there is no keeping up, and DEFinitely NO being able to refer anyone from elsewhere to any one particular “something interesting I read there”.

So, before it is too late to find it under the ever-flowing flood of new words over there, let me just say that in the last couple days they have begun writing about how the Clinton Political Mafia and the Wall Street DLC took over the DemParty and spent the last 30 plus years purging every “right-thing-knowing” political wannabe from out of the party and also preventing any emerging ” right-thing-knowing” political wannabes from getting into it. Naked Capitalism is facing up to the fact that a whole generation of DemParty persons are Clintonite cancer cells and the only hope of making the DemParty a legitimate political party again is to find and “exterminate” every single metastatic malignant Clintonoma cell from every last little corner of the Party.

There are right-thing-knowing people in the 40-60 year group. Millions of them have given up on voting at all. Some few of them are supporting Sanders or maybe Warren or maybe Gabbard.

If you don’t believe me about the Clinton Plague, go over to a Jonestown Clintie blog called The Confluence written by a True Clintonite High Priestess named Riverdaughter. And make sure to read the comments in order to “wake up and smell the sewage”.

the thing I can never wrap my head around is how to organize self-constraint amidst the free-rider problem

the word, “mitigation” is used too broadly I think in climate change discussions — i am going to use it more narrowly to mean response to climate change that meliorates the consequences, but not the constraints on energy use generally or fossil fuel energy use particularly that limit the human contribution to consequence-generating processes.

“hope” seems attached to rather uncritical expectations that somehow we can switch the economy to “renewable” sources of energy and posterity can continue the scientific and industrial revolutions on the way to a singularity of full automation and universal basic income and electric cars for everyone. Or, somewhat more realistically, that people will come around thru a consciousness raising process to forego air travel and become vegans.

but, waiting for a consensus to support radical conservation measures does not seem to be working. i read stirling newberry’s but i do not understand. i have watch fracking balloon, despite — almost because, I think — it is a financial disaster. if no one makes any money, why do they keep doing it!??! i am confused. and, the implications of world population growth seem to put everyone into denial

putting on my little economist’s thinking cap on, i find it fairly easy to imagine how humans might organize (and finance) mitigation measures of a narrow definition: seawalls, say, because the community that organizes the building of a seawall benefits proportionately. i think rich people will rather uncritically want to cope with heat waves with more air conditioning — it is crazy from a global perspective, but rational from individual self-interest and easily organized in a way that radically reducing all electricity use may not be.

i am not without “hope” — some self-constraining conservation measures — the ones that take aim at the ridiculously wasteful economic activity that just annoys and burdens everyone in the society — seem like they could be organized. It would be in everyone’s interest to dial back on meaningless work that produces nothing of value at the margin. Even things like constraining the use of electric light, so that we get an energy conservation effect from LED tech instead of the death of night, seem doable, though the will and imagination to do them continue to be absent for the moment.

but, i cannot imagine that the “other” guy, the late adopter, is not going to benefit from “cheating”. and, for all the hang-up on whether climate change is due to human causes — i fear that many people miss the fact that natural processes — like methane release from the permafrost and the deep ocean — can take over on scales humans cannot hope to “mitigate”

It is pretty hopeless if, the “left” draws the dichotomy between generations and not between the truly powerful [0.1%] and the weak [90%]. Yes, I purposely left out the 9.9% of “middle management suck-ups” because, they would do whatever “leadership” told them to do.

Young folks are not trying to save the world, they are trying to get laid…this is an observation I made back in ’68 when, as a kid on Schwinn bicycle, I asked some hippies why they were all in Chicago to protest and when some of the young women tried to answer, the guys cut them off and told me to beat it or they’d kick my ass. Yeah, peace-love brother, if you are worried that a 10 yo is going to “steal your chic” your sanctimony doesn’t impress. Since then, I’ve watched every young group virtue signal in sacred vows that were broken as soon as they became an impediment to personal advancement.

The last generation to go through the Depression and preceding depressions,[as adults] was the last generation [as a whole] to actually give a shit about the future. When the people who broke the back of the last gilded age started to die off in the early 70’s, power reasserted itself. And when those youth were warned by those few who still remembered the FDR miracle, those elders were not just ignored, they were taunted by the “youth”. The youth of the world are not going to save anybody’s ass, only a conglomeration of good people across generations will be able to overturn the satanic works of thoday’s neogilded-uberists.

During the last “youth rebellion” the 60’s, besides social justice and anti-imperialism, lots of young folks fled to the countryside and went “back-t0-the-land”. Out of this came our present day challenge to factory food: organics, farmers markets, etc. Also a small home birth and artisan movement that persists and has made some inroads into industrialized hospital birth and McJobs.
Much of the anti-imperialism was driven by the draft and the youths personal experience with fighting meaningless wars.
There is no anti-war movement today because only a small group of mostly poorer kids are personally affected by it. So are we going to see other socially rebellious behavior by the millennial? or Gen Z? like the “tune in, drop out” behavior of the 60″s ? Is it already happening and no one is paying attention?

Re: geoengineering. Everything about it is unproven, and it might have all kinds of unintended side effects. But if the choice is between 1) doing nothing and you know we’re gonna die, 2) doing a GND which might actually increase emissions and then we’re gonna die, and 3) doing geoengineering and there’s a 50% it might work and only a 50% chance were gonna die, I’ll take that 50% chance.

One of the dangers of the GND is that by selling the lie that climate change is easily fixable just by passing legislation, it lulls us into believing we don’t need to do more radical things like geoengineering.

So geoengineering proposals will not be taken seriously … until, as Ian predicted recently, millions of people die in India and Pakistan, and people are rioting in the streets, and the rulers start to worry about keeping their heads attached to their torso. At that point, geoengineering will suddenly be a great idea!

Ah, but you ask, how will you get all that dust or chemical or whatever into the atmosphere? My friend, India and Pakistan have nukes. Nukes by themselves have a cooling effect by stirring dust into the atmosphere, and nuking a pile of sulfur or whatever would give you a double bang for your buck. Even better, how ’bout nuking a pile of sulfur at the Yellowstone Caldera?

The trick will be lighting just enough nukes to provide a few degrees of cooling, but not enough to cause a nuclear winter, so you’d probably set off a few nukes every year, year after year. After a while you’d get the hang of it.

Of course the nukes will have side effects, but after a million people starve and a million more are rioting in the street, you won’t lose sleep over side effects.

Thousands of people have died this week in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/22/africa/cyclone-idai-1-week-later-intl/index.html

If the number were a million there would be barely any more notice taken in the US or Europe.

If it takes millions and millions suffering and dying for there to be political will to mitigate climate change, those suffering need to be in the US and/or Europe. And that won\’t happen until much poorer people are totally devastated, and that will be much too late.

@Daniel A Lynch

Are you saying the emperor has no clothes? Are you trying to tell these youngsters that we can’t just pass a law to make everything wonderful? Are you saying that we can’t have all of our needs taken care of by government (socialism), pay no taxes (tax the rich) and have high wages all at the same time just because the Democrats are in charge?

Most of your rules make pretty good sense to me. One I would change a bit is, “at age 75 your doctor puts you to sleep.” A bit more harsh than needed I think. I would go more with, “after age 65 your doctor quits making any real effort to keep you alive.”

Good comments Ella and Trent.

So the hope you have Ian is that there will be an accelerated calamity that will galvanise people into action. On the face of it, a seemingly neutral position.

But the reality is that accelerated calamity is going to hit the poorest in the world, who have benefited the least from unbridled greed and consumption. Europeans have for the last 500 years plundered and pillaged the world to feed their industrial revolution, and even today continue to seek to dominate and exploit resources (vide Middle East, Venezuela . . .)

And your hope is that a calamity will hit these people soon, in order to save the exploiters?

I find this climate change angst and activism from European-based countries rather amusing – pity there wasn\’t a similar level of angst when their governments were destroying lives through bombing other civilisations into collapse.

Let\’s face it human beings are corrupt, self-absorbed and greedy. Even your premise of \’hope\’ is self-absorbed. We have destroyed not only ourselves, but also other species and our habitat in pursuit of this greed. We are an experiment of nature which has gone wrong. And the planet is reacting appropriately to remove the virus.

We have gone off the cliff, and trying to brake is not going to help, given species coextinction, top soil erosion, inability to grow crops with increased / variable climate conditions, and nuclear power stations that somehow need to be kept running in a collapsing civilisation. If any survive in their bunkers in NZ, they will truly inherit a wonderful world to slug it out in.

The Green New Deal has raised awareness of both the problem and potential solutions among less-engaged citizens. The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act in Congress (HR763) will actually make a difference and with speed. I encourage you to take a look.

Fascinating comments.

The youth do care about the environment in a way that the middle aged to old don’t but I’m skeptical how deep their commitment is.

One young girl went on strike to protest against climate change but happily flew to Switzerland a week later on a family skiing trip paid for by daddy.

There are millions of the same examples going on every day. If the young generation are SERIOUS about climate change in the developed world they will need to EMBRACE POVERTY. I see little to zero evidence of that so far.

Regarding the Green New Deal, its deeply flawed but it does at least raise a debate which needs starting. I think there should be a consensus to start some of the more sensible stuff within GND, like conservation, retro-filling homes to be more energy efficient, develop rail networks and so on but the central premise of the current GND is still techo-utopian to quote John Greer and doesn’t remotely deal with the reality that America (and the wider world) will be facing shrinking resources, energy and money in the decades to come.

Still, at least we are talking about it which is something (I think).

Regarding climate change, Ian is spot in, a certain degree of warming and chaos is already baked in.

Throw in resource depletion, something Ian oddly doesn’t refer to much, and our industrial civilization is definitely in the early stages of a collapse.

https://forecastingintelligence.org/2019/03/10/how-to-prepare-for-a-dying-future/

On my blog I discuss what individuals can realistically do to prepare for what I consider a dying future.

Currently reading John Greer’s latest post and funny enough one of his comments deals with this exact issue.

The short answer is that Ian you are wrong. The youth won’t save us (or at least there is no sign of it so far)…

“Kevin, so far what i’ve seen of the school strikers reminds me much more of the Children’s Crusade than it does of anything that’s likely to have a constructive outcome. The thing that Thunberg et al. apparently don’t know, and may not be willing to learn, is that it’s not just a matter of getting rid of fossil fuels and putting something

else in place to power the kind of lives they assume they’re going to lead. There is nothing else. Renewables can provide maybe 15% of the energy, and less than that of the products of energy, that we currently get from fossil fuels. The other 85% will go away forever, and take everything corresponding to an industrial lifestyle with it. Mind you, that’s going to happen anyway in due time — fossil fuels are nonrenewable, and we’re depleting them at an insane pace — but the notion that all people have to do is throw a tantrum demanding that something nice and green be put in place of fossil fuels to keep their lifestyles going is the supreme delusion of our times.”

My guess is that there’s going to be a die-off of humans and other life forms (already in progress), but it’s unlikely to be total, even if nukes are exchanged. Life will very likely continue. But this cancerous civilization has got to go, either peaceably or by force.

Whatever happens, no matter how tragic or disastrous, the individual always insists on being reassured that they’ll come out of it alive, if not entirely unscathed, and that things can “get back to normal” as soon as possible so they can pick up and continue on with their life.

I’m poor by US standards also, and I lived thru the Harvey flood here in Texas.

Devastation is already happening in the US and is being successfully ignored. Right here in Houston the plight of hundreds of people trying to live in uninhabitable, moldy houses, right now, is not a topic of conversation, much less concern. Tens of thousands were made homeless by the California fires and most of us don’t know or care how they are getting on now, but I’m pretty sure they’re getting on in more poverty. Puerto Rico, the panhandle of Florida, North Carolina, all in the US and after initial heroic efforts, left to founder.

So yes, the poor everywhere are going to suffer first and most, self-evidently. The GND at least has gotten more people in this benighted country to entertain the idea of being less destructive to the environment. Apparently China and Vietnam are no longer taking our “recycling” so the mountains of trash we make are going to stay with us until we learn how to consume less, much less. Consumer societies have to bear the costs of their lifestyles, it’s the only way to learn.

Without all these frickin conservative evangelicals I think we have a reasonably globally concerned citizenry, enough for change I’d think. At least in the States.

The powers that be made “global warming” uncool for consumerist boomers and most evangelicals. Maybe we need to make a green Jesus cool, since killing him off is taking way too long.

A grand second coming Jesus with all the commanding archangels and sky trumpets might be entertaining (especially the part where bodies simultaneously climb up out of graves to worship), but a Green Jesus would obviously be better for us. Instead of Cecil B Demille meets Ridley Scott Jesus we need a humble boring eat your spinach Jesus. Green, ethical, nonmammonistic, just do your frickin homework already Jesus. We have to make that kind of Jesus cool again.

I am not a scientist. I am a lay amateur science buff. I do the best I can with what I think I know.

I do not have my own computer and therefor I do not have 24/7 screentime access. I use the breakroom computer at work while on lunch or break. I use the public library computers sometimes. So I don\’t have endless time to read everything. I have to pick and choose. The GND document is one thing I haven\’t gotten to yet, or anytime soon.

Can climate decay be slowed down or even stopped or even eventually reversed? Can up-violent weather outbursts and weather peaks and troughs be mitigated? Even now the barriers are not ecological or bio-geo-physical. The barriers are political-economic and cultural and psycho-social.

@Ella,
The IFTC ( International Free Trade Conspiracy) spent the last few decades carefully dsmantling parts of America\’s good-quality-production industrial base and sending it to China/Vietnam/Mexico/BanglaDesh/ etc.; and repurposing it to produce fallapart throwaway junk. The only way to reverse that within America would be to unilateraly abrogate all the Free Trade Agreements going back to GATT Round One. Then we would have to institute militant belligerent Protectionism for the next few decades needed to restore a smaller leaner slower meaner thing-making base to produce half-as-many-things each one lasting twice as long. For example, I have a black cast iron frying pan that is at least 70 years old now and still works just fine. With decent treatment it should last many decades to come. So which consumes less to produce and use over its lifetime, one frying pan per 120 years or 12 frying pans at 10 years apiece? The First World Poor can\’t do much about that on their own.
Perhaps a TAR United ( Trash of All Races United) movement could win that war on the field of political combat.

We know that the climate system is sensitive to heat budget input-output changes. The global was already heating in the 80s and early 90s. When Pinatubo erupted, the high atmosphere sulfur dioxide particle ( sulfuric acid droplet?) shroud blocked enough sunlight from even reaching the surface to degrade into heat to begin with . . . that parts of Earth surface re-cooled measurably for a few years.
CBC News ran a program about how the Greater Hudson Bay area polar bears had spent the \”last few years\” starving as Hudson Bay failed to ice over the way it had used to. This was depriving the bears of their sea-ice landscape to go hunting seals in. For several years after Pinatubo, Hudson Bay began icing over better again, and a few generations of polar bears became better fed and non-starving again. Canadian wildlife managers began calling these the Pinatubo bears once they understood the process.

If we could re-lower the CO2 skyload enough to give the same re-cooling effect as the Pinatubo sulfur-shroud gave us, we would get the same level of re-cooling.

People tell us that once the CO2 is up there, it stays up there. But is that really true? Let\’s think about this. We are told that 2/3rds of the fossil carbon burned since 1800 is up in the air. The other 1/3rd is in the ocean. How did it/ does it get out of the air and into the ocean that fast? I don\’t know, but here is my little hypothesis. Mere passive diffusion across the air/ocean interface would be too slow. Forming and falling skywater is actively dissolving aerial CO2 into itself, and taking its dissolved load of CO2 down with itself as it falls through the sky to the surface of land and sea.

If if IF there were a way to increase plant growth to bio-fix and bio-store that downwashed skycarbon before it re-gassed skyward again, then more re-down-falling carbon would be KEPT down than is now being KEPT down once it FALLS down. Ideas on how to increase plant growth on land and sea and how to increase plant-mass carbon storage once that growth has been increased would be useful.

Meanwhile, can global de-warming wannabes do something in their personal lives to reduce their own contribution to carbon skydumping? Can they share different ideas on that with eachother such that millions of people do those things in full view of eachother and thereby find eachother to grow a culture and form a movement for supporting the political combat needed to conquer enough social political power to use that power to up-efficientize and down-waste-ify the physical matter-energy body political-economic we all live in? To facilitate greater carbon re-suckdown and lesser carbon sky gas-loading?

“Instead of Cecil B Demille meets Ridley Scott Jesus we need a humble boring eat your spinach Jesus. Green, ethical, nonmammonistic, just do your frickin homework already Jesus. We have to make that kind of Jesus cool again.”

Cracking me up Willy 😉

This has got to be one of the most depressing posts + comments I’ve read here at ianwelsh.net.

Rather than spank the participants (including Ian, who IMO has over-estimated millenials, but also made an extemely offensive remark about their progenitors), I’ll make what I consider to be 2 constructive comments.

First, the notion of sustainability gets conflated with the lefty notion of catastrophic “climate change”. While there is overlap, these are not two identical concepts. While some non-CO2 catastrophists seem to disdain “sustainability”, this is baffling, to me. I disdain CO2 catastrophism, but I certainly don’t disdain sustainability, and don’t get folks who do. It’s hard for me to imagine a more self-evidently civic virtue than “sustainability”. I mean, if you pump your water table dry, and then can’t drink, bathe, or grow local crops, how is this not a bad thing?

So, there is a means to make common cause with many (most?) people who find CO2 catastrophism unviable, to put it kindly.

Secondly, Robert David Steele (who I don’t trust, but does collect and express many good ideas) has often advocated “true cost economics”. IIRC, he has said, e.g., that the true cost of a McDonald’s hamburger is $200. Even if he is off by, say, a factor of 4 or more, I can’t for the life of me understand why meat isn’t far more expensive than it is. The reason being, it takes many pounds of feed to raise each pound of an animal. There simply MUST be government mandated resource allocation going on – Ralph Nader would probably call it “corporate welfare”.

So, if you can first integrate true cost economics into the public discourse and practice, not just in the US, but worldwide; and secondly, create a consensus that all societies should be sustainable, and hence allocate resources reflecting true cost economics, then you would mitigate at least part of the “climate change” catastrophes you anticipate. E.g., much more expensive meat means far less consumption of it, and this mean less destruction of Amazonian rain forests getting cleared to feed cows.

That is something conceivably attainable, IMNSHO. Telling people that they can’t go over 15 mph, e.g., is not.

metamars:

You’ve essentially said in a whole lot of words that capitalism only exists because consumers subsidize negative externalities. We’d have a steady state economy should the negative externalities be factored in. Been harping on this for years.

@Ché Pasa,

” Of course there are plenty of other alternatives, but they are outside the parameters of discussion.”

Well . . . are they outside the parameters of discussion here on Ian Welsh’s threads? Maybe not.
Why not write a comment about plenty of other alternatives and if Ian Welsh does not erase it, then it may be taken as being just-that-much inside the permitted parameters of discussion here.

The GND is a starting point. It raises the topic and keeps it under discussion. But a lot of meat needs to be put on its bones. Meanwhile it will be opposed and vilified by Republicans. Various Democrats will adopt it as a matter of expediency but will have no intention of fighting for it (the aspirational approach) or will recast it into something ineffectual and status quo (co-optation). As others have mentioned, Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Maria (Puerto Rico), droughts, floods, wildfires have had no real effect on business as usual. So it is likely that much more severe weather events where the death tolls are in the tens of thousands and the costs are in the $50-$100 billion range will be necessary before real action is taken. This amount of resistance and inaction is an important indicator because even with all this the US remains in the best position to survive the ravages of climate change although likely severely altered. The prognosis for most of the rest of the planet is much worse. Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are effectively already gone. Central Asia and Southeast Asia have a high likelihood of collapse. South and Central America are an open question with Brazil having perhaps the worst prospects. Europe’s chances are reasonable as long as the Gulf Stream continues to function. Northeast Asia odds are diminished by the likelihood of nuclear exchange involving North Korea. One of the things we should be looking at is what is likely to happen. Not what we want to happen but what is most likely to.

Models and predictions of the effects of climate change have been broadly correct — glaciers and permafrost are melting, sea levels are rising, storms are increasing in frequency and intensity, consequences are spreading and so on. Yet all of this and more is happening in a global socio-economic and political context that diminishes the importance of the ratcheting up of a stark and difficult reality.

Mitigation needs to be the key, and I don’t think we’re there yet. We’re still conceptualizing as if we can prevent or reverse the climate warming trend, and I think it’s too late for that. We had the opportunity decades ago, but instead our leaders and influencers went in the opposite direction.

So. What do we do now? How do we mitigate the looming catastrophes that are closing in? Can we take practical steps to limit the consequences of what is to come?

Can we do it while preserving at least a modicum of dignity, justice and personal intellectual, social, economic, and political liberty? Maybe not. That’s always the hard part, isn’t it?

We’ve witnessed and experienced numerous extreme devastation events over the last several decades that have wiped out many communities and caused the deaths of many hundreds of thousands in horrible ways. Some of it has been deliberate — like our governments’ ugly addiction to wars of aggression — but much has been “natural” due to storms, floods, heat and cold waves, earthquakes and so on. I don’t think it’s something we can ever get used to. But it will be more common in the future, and there is not a whole lot we can do about it. When technology was less advanced, living with calamities of all kinds was routine. It’s what you did. Survivors picked up the pieces and went on. So it goes. We deal with it.

Dealing with it has tended to reinforce authoritarianism, however. It’s always been thus. So I’m not really optimistic that the kinds of social, political and economic transformations necessary to mitigate the consequences of climate change can be accomplished without the heavy and perhaps arbitrary hand of authority. My hope is that it doesn’t slide into totalitarian cultism.

In the meantime, we need to think more about what’s possible on the community and individual levels to take on the challenges and mitigate the negative effects of climate change.

Getting out of the way of fires, floods, sea level rise and so on seems axiomatic, but for whatever reason, at least in the US, people tend to flock to the at risk areas. That mindset needs to change.

Learning to live more naturally with desertification as well as the expansion of rainforests — both happening simultaneously — is long overdue. How to live relatively comfortably in a desert without or with only limited air conditioning, where water is scarce, where weather is unpredictable, and self-sufficiency is difficult or impossible is a lesson that needs to be relearned. Same with expanding wet areas. Take to the high ground, don’t settle in the flood plains, live lightly and in community.

Question the necessity of vast cities, of towering skyscrapers, or of multiplicities of server farms using tons of water and electricity to… do what? And for what? Remember, large parts of numerous cities and towns in the US and elsewhere have been abandoned and left to ruin, rot and decay in the recent past. The ruins are a stark reminder of impermanence. If so many cities and towns are already partially abandoned, couldn’t many more be? Could many of the technological goodies and gadgets we think are indispensable be dispensed with?

The Green New Deal provides an outline of steps to take toward a better future for more people under difficult circumstances, and that’s why I applaud it. But it isn’t a panacea. Realistically, there isn’t one. Be as adaptable as you can and do the best you can. Help one another.

Don’t tell them what to do, show them what can be done.

@ricardo2000,

Under your scenario, why would Americans forget about moving to Canada? Wouldn’t it be more likely that Americans join with Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbean Islanders in all moving to Canada together?