Environment, not done yet

"The IPCC has calculated that to have a 50 percent chance of restricting global warming to less than 1.5°C, the total cumulative CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere since 1850 must be kept below 2,900 billion tonnes. Between 1850 and 2019, emissions totaled 2,400 billion tonnes; 42 percent of that total occurred between 1990 and 2019." 

-Paul Abela, "Is Climate Doomism More Like Climate Realism?"

"The "100 seconds to midnight" setting remained unchanged in 2021 and 2022. On January 24, 2023, the Clock was moved to 90 seconds (1 minute, 30 seconds) before midnight, meaning that the Clock's current setting is the closest it has ever been to midnight since its inception in 1947."

-Wikipedia entry for "Doomsday Clock"

For all the awareness and discourse, our emissions continue to grow exponentially. That humanity should be the cause of its own undoing is not a surprising fate. I'm sure Greek tragedians soliloquized the concept. Paradoxically, it's alarming how little is being done about. The media makes a roaring outrage over America dropping out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which would limit warming to 3.2C above pre industrial levels. That is far beyond the point of no return, 1.5C. Automobile companies constantly hype up electric cars, but people forget that electricity is produced by fossil fuels, it is not a power source in of itself; studies show hanging on to reasonably efficient vehicles is better for the environment than buying a new one. The transition to renewable energy requires a heavy, up front cost in nonrenewable resources. It is not certain that we have the material resources to fully make that transition. In other words 2 things: (1) Electric cars are not as green as they claim to be and (2) Even if they did live up to their promises, we're only buying a little bit of time any way. We read articles which boast of the increasing expansion of green energy, creating the false impression that the more renewable energy we use, the less fossil fuels we burn. The reality is that emissions have almost doubled since the 1990s. While for most of the 20th century we were unaware of human effects on climate, since making that discovery we have ramped up our emissions exponentially. The expansion of green energy only means that a larger chunk of the additional energy we consume each year is renewable, but fossil fuel emissions are still growing. 

Industries and governments tend to see this green expansion as a justification to burn more fossil fuels. Carbon credits, a popular policy to deal with climate change, are just a penance to pay in order to allow industry to burn increasing amounts of fossil fuels. More often than not, carbon credits come in the form of land grabs which evict indigenous tribes from their ancestral lands (a familiar practice by now.) Companies greenwashing their products claim to fight climate change by planting trees, but trees need about a century to grow before they begin to absorb significant amounts of carbon. We don't have a century to burn while we wait to take action. The most popular idea among green washers is "Net Zero." "Net," as you know, means after adding and subtracting 2 values. In this case, corporations can pollute as much as they want (adding) so long as they counter those emissions (subtracting) in some way. So long as the (self reported) amount of emissions is offset by investments in green technology or carbon sequestration, companies have achieved net zero. This sort of band aid, book cooking allows politicians and corporations to seem to be fighting global warming while ramping up emissions and kicking the can down the road indefinitely. While current net zero proposals claim a 2050 goal of totally eliminating emissions, they can add more time if necessary. At any rate, we are currently emitting higher every year, not showing any signs of slowing down.

Slightly less popular solutions, like geoengineering and terraforming Mars, are at best, more excuses to continue on with exponential growth. Scientists suggest spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which will cool down the sky until we find a better solution. Climate, being as complex and interconnected as it is, cannot be beta tested. The only way to test sulfur dioxide spraying is to go ahead and do it full scale. Once started, we will never be able to stop or warming will increase at 5-10x current rates. In fact, much of our pollution is currently masking warming effects and aerosol spraying is nothing more than directed pollution of the atmosphere. Further, when sulfur dioxide is released from volcanic activity, there is a tendency for droughts to occur more frequently and more intensely. It is also associated with acid rain and the now infamous holes in the ozone layer. As you can imagine, further pursuing a policy like this is rife with political conflict. The other option, terraforming Mars or Venus, which would only be an option for the wealthy, is ridiculous when you consider that even in the worst case scenario of warming, the Earth will still be more habitable than a desolate planet we have never so much as stepped foot on. Put another way, if we can't terraform the Earth, we absolutely cannot terraform Mars. Even if we could, the majority of humanity would be left behind while the chosen few escaped to a brave new world. Market solutions can only address symptoms of climate change, so long as we continue on a path of infinite growth, there is only one outcome. New technology cannot address the over consumption of resources and environmental destruction for the sake of profit. The only real solution is, besides transitioning away from fossil fuels (which we will have to do no matter what once oil deposits are exhausted) is to focus on degrowth.

Many see the problem as the inevitable result of over population and it's undeniable that having more people intensifies all of the problems of global warming and resource depletion. Thomas Malthus argued the human population grew geometrically ( 2, 4, 8, 16, 32…) while the food supply grew arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10…) One of his recommendations for this was to make streets more narrow so that poor people would get sick and die more often. His philosophy manifests in modern times through the works of Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin who combine Malthusian population ethics with global warming. Hardin especially emphasized the role of race and migration, arguing that birth rates in the global south were out of control. However, this perspective does not fully appreciate the extent of inequality between the rich and the poor, the latter of whom by definition have less access to resources. We see in countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia that high emissions correlate more strongly with GDP than with population size. Population control measures such as sterilization invariably target the poor and vulnerable, as with the post WW2 American Eugenics movement. These policies would, afterall, need to be administered and possibly funded by the very people who are most to blame for climate change. Some more left leaning (relatively speaking) advocates try to implement eugenic programs under the banner of family planning and the pro choice movement. The idea being that they make abortion more accessible to poor women who didn't want children. They would willingly sterilize themselves, peak efficiency. Whatever your feelings about population control, these sorts of policies target the individuals least responsible for emissions and phoney, moral justifications exist to give the movement legitimacy. 

To be clear, I am an antinatalist. I think that bringing a child into this world is a significant harm to that child. I do not think that we should see antinatalism, abortion or birth control as a valid means of reducing emissions. One should not have children for the sake of the children, not because of politics. Likewise, I believe we ought to practice veganism for the sake of the animals that are bred, tormented, and slaughtered simply for the pleasure of eating their flesh. While factory farming is the 2nd largest source of emissions and the largest cause of deforestation, individual action does not have a significant impact on emissions. The idea of personal responsibility, or that an entire nation will agree upon anything and unite in boycotting that thing, is ridiculous. Climate change is a complex process that no one fully understands, few take it seriously, some outright deny it, and many powerful individuals have a vested interest in profiting from the coming disasters. Any solution to this problem will be equally complex and require solidarity across many strata of societies around the globe. Compare this to polio, a deadly disease that can be completely prevented by a simple vaccine; and yet is making a comeback in western countries despite being essentially eradicated in the United States 40 years ago. Consumers are responsible for much of emissions, but the possibility that people will largely band together is bleak and the necessity of that unity remaining intact as we deal with the warming which we are already locked in for is basically impossible.

Every new report on climate devastation tries to end on a positive note. Usually something along the theme of "It's not too late, we still have time to make changes." This will always be true, because climate change will likely not wipe humanity totally extinct. It may decimate our numbers, starve billions, send billions to war, wash away billions in floods and mudslides, kindle billions in wildfire, forsake billions to homelessness, slowly suffocate billions and cause billions to die of heat exposure, but none of the projected outcomes of climate change predict the total extinction of humanity. Climate models can only make predictions that go so far. True, humanity will eventually go extinct, if not from climate change than something else, but extinction is not in the foreseeable future. After every additional degree of warming, there will always be the possibility that humanity can prevent things from getting worse than they are, but saying it's not too late misses the point. It implies we have not yet gone down the path. We live in a society where global powers are actively investing in fossil fuels and profiting off of environmental collapse. Corporations and billionaires are buying up cheap land abroad, expecting to resell it at inflated prices when coming disasters strike. Collapse seldom happens over night, the way popular culture envisions it. It is a drawn out process, one in which the individuals on the inside of it tend to not notice because they are constantly acclimating to it. The image of frogs in gradually boiling water is all too pertinent. Compared to reality, the notion of a meteor striking the earth and ending humanity in an instant is comforting. Everyone prefers sudden death to prolonged and painful death. What we are in fact dealing with is generations (each likely bigger than the previous, at least for a while longer) of individuals with increasingly miserable lives and drawn out deaths. 

What I am talking about is no prophecy, it is already here. The 2020 report by the State of Global Air finds that 95% of the global population breathes air that is polluted above safe levels. This causes obvious respiratory illnesses, as well as less obvious cognitive impairments. A study published in the peer reviewed journal Nature (2021) found that the Amazon, once considered the Lungs of the Earth, has gone from absorbing atmospheric carbon on the whole to being a net emitter of carbon. The melt rate of polar ice caps has tripled in recent years, according to a study looking at melt rates from 1992 to 2017, also published in Nature. Recent years have been the hottest years on record and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. Heatwaves are occurring more frequently, lasting longer, becoming more intense, and killing more people. Hotter seasons yield smaller harvests, leading to refugee crises in already politically unstable countries which will increasingly need to fight over disappearing resources. War, keep in mind, is not known for its tendency to preserve natural resources. Jurassic viruses, preserved in permafrost, are thawing and will soon be unleashed on the world with no way of knowing how they'll affect humans. Tropical diseases like malaria and dengue fever are spreading as habitable zones for the insects that carry them are expanding. Bacteria in our own bodies can react to warmer climates and attack us from the inside, as has been seen in some mammals. Thawing causes cooler fresh water to be released from melting ice caps, slowing down oceanic circulation and causing more extreme local climates; meaning hot areas will be hotter and cold areas will be colder. 

There is enough water stored in those ice caps to raise sea level by approximately 230 feet, drowning coastal cities and whole peninsulas. The Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have both passed their tipping points, meaning that we are already locked in for about 40 feet of sea level rise as these sheets melt. As ice sheets melt, they reflect less heat from the sun, which also increases warming and then speeds up melting. This is known as the Albido effect. The effect is further intensified by wildfires, which have become a global problem, accounting for 25% of emissions. Fires now reach the arctic circle where black soot draws more heat to the melting ice. As arctic permafrost melts, it releases methane, a more potent greenhouse gas which eventually converts into carbon dioxide. Feedback loops like these are what make predicting the rate of warming difficult and why the meme "Faster Than Previously Expected" has found its way into so many climate headlines. Climate scientists, in anticipation of public reaction to their findings, often downplay their findings; and fearing that the public will exaggerate any disagreement, climate scientists often only talk about what is most certain. Whatever picture we're getting about climate change, therefore, is overly optimistic.

The problem, as many will tell you, is that we have the means to address climate change but we lack the political will. I think a more realistic assessment is that political will is decidedly in the opposite direction. To fully appreciate how capitalism drives climate change, consider non-energy related emissions, which account for ⅓ of total, global emissions. Even if we completely switch to renewable energy, there would still be emissions related to deforestation, animal agriculture, landfills and waste water, and carbon released from soil degradation because we will still be doing the same things as we are doing now. As long as growth and profit are the sole values of our economic system, renewable energy will only buy us time while we continue down the path we're currently on. GDP, keep in mind, only measures production in a country. It doesn't account for the cost of burning down a forest to clear land. Everything we do as a society comes down to profit, this single value determines who lives and who dies. Natural gas flaring, which is the burning off of associated gas on site, occurs because the financial cost of storing this form of gas is too high. Meaning that free market logic dictates the most effective method of dealing with this gas is to burn it off, releasing it into the atmosphere and further dwindling our fossil fuel reserves. And yet there are those who call capitalism "efficient." There are analogues of gas flaring in every industry: from farmers destroying crops to keep supplies low and therefore profitable, to factories destroying a certain percentage of widgets for the same reason. That gas will clearly be very valuable when the price of extracting oil becomes higher than selling it. In fact, studies have pointed out that not investing in renewable infrastructure early on will eventually cost us trillions. It would be more accurate to say that decisions are made on the basis of short term, quarterly profit, since the system in which we operate basically fails at everything except for the 1 purpose for which it was formed.

Further complicating the problem is the global apartheid between industrial core countries and the global south. Developing countries will necessarily have to increase emissions in order to catch up with Western countries. These same countries will also be disproportionately hit by the effects of climate change. Extreme weather events, from snow storms to heatwaves, destroy crops and farmland. Cyclones, floods and hurricanes destroy homes and infrastructure. The chaos results in refugee crises and political instability in the places where poverty is already the most hard hitting. Many of these countries are demanding climate reparations. Many of these countries are in debt, of which the principal has been paid off but high interests have made the debt more or less perpetual. In some cases, these debts were brought on by military dictators, installed after western back coups. While it is technically possible for a country to declare bankruptcy, leaders who attempt to do so tend to die of sudden, natural causes. Given this relationship between Western countries and the global south, climate reparations seem unlikely.

At UN meetings, ambassadors do more finger pointing than compromising. Americans, the ones that acknowledge climate change at all, will point to China as having higher emissions. This is wrong in multiple ways. The first being that climate change is a global problem, everyone needs to cut emissions regardless of what anyone else is doing. Second, America and Europe are responsible for the majority of historical emissions, which is what causes the warming effects we are currently experiencing. China is the highest emitter in recent years, but they're far behind us in terms of total emissions. Third, we should expect China to have higher emissions since they're basically the world's factory. Products destined for the west are manufactured in China and therefore count towards their emissions. Finally, China has 2x our emissions and 4x our population, meaning per capita, China emits half the emissions Americans do. Of course the country with the highest population will have the highest emissions, what is surprising is that China's emissions are as low as they are. At any rate, finger pointing is not a productive means of negotiation or problem solving.

Climate change is here and it is the result of human activity. This is another paradox because those who admit it is anthropogenic are the alarmists; those who think climate change is natural and unstoppable act as if it isn't a problem at all. Whether the engineer driving a train that pummeling towards you has control over doing so or not doesn't change the resulting destruction. That said, one would hope that the train is driven by someone who can and would stop it. The problem is that it seems like in our situation, the driver is actively, and literally, pumping the gas. And while most of humanity would, if asked, agree that we should stop climate fallout wherever possible, those who stand to profit from it have a history of decidedly horrifying decision making.