Category: Environment

There is a life lived within the rhythm of the seasons and the embrace of the land.  A life where the cry of the chickadee announces a new season, a world where the return of salmon, silver in the whitewater, is celebrated as much, or more, than any holiday.  In this life, the sheltered bend of the river where the trout linger, the trees where the red-tailed hawks live and the stubbled fields of water where the duck rest during their yearly pilgrimage are all known.

It is the world most of our ancestors lived in, the world, even, which many of our grandparents and great-grandparents lived in.

And it is the world that Oceanographer Carl Safina returns to in his striking book, The View From Lazy Point.  Buying an old, run-down cottage in Long Island, on a peninsula called, as you’d expect, Lazy point, he settles back into a life where the seasons provide the frame of his life, and within that frame, he witnesses the comings and goings of the animals who are his neighbors, from red-tailed hawks and bluefish to frogs and even lowly earthworms.  They great him in the morning or keep him awake at night, they feed him, and they announce to him, clearly, not just the changes of the seasons but the changes in our world.

And it is Safina’s meditations on those changes which move this book from a modern “Walden Pond”, as great as that would be, to something else.

For, really, this is a book about philosophy.  It is about what it means to be human, to be, as Safina puts it, “self-assembled stardust aware of the universe and the future”, a wonderous miracle we rarely every think on.  It is about what it means to be human in a world where the rhythms of life have been throw askew, indeed, burst asunder.

Long ago I remember reading accounts of the first explorers in the Grand Banks, off the Maritime coast of Canada.  They could dip a bucket into the sea and it would come back with cod in it.

Today there is no cod fishery and hardly any cod in the Grand Banks.  I remember, as a child, the warnings, again and again, that the cod fishery was in danger.  That it could collapse.

Then it did, and it has never come back.

I shant bore you with all the statistics about how many species are going extinct every day.   If you care, you’ve heard them a thousand times, if you don’t care, well, you’ve still heard them over and over again.

Those numbers are in Safina’s book, but they aren’t the heart of the book.  The heart of the book is living with nature, and seeing, as the months roll on, not just how much has been lost, but how much remains and how beautiful it is, how rich it is, and how much a part of that world we are.

For that’s ultimately Safina’s point, a point made with more grace than this bundle of starlight can, though he’s not the first to make it, nor will he be the last.  We are not separate from nature, we are a part of it.  The web of life, the rhythm of the seasons, supports us as much as it does any other animal, any other life.

The great philosophers, the great prophets, one by one, have extended the circle of self-feeling out—have expanded the circle of compassion from kin, to tribe, to creed, and ultimately to all of humanity.  If we fail often in this self-feeling, in this duty to love our neighbor as ourself, to treat all humans as means and not ends, well at least the great amongst us, whether Jesus or Socrates, have told us again and again that we are all one.

Another expansion of the circle, from all of humanity, to all of life, is now necessary.  Not only are we not as different from the rest of the creatures living in the world as we might think, for all that we can imagine the future better than any of them, including the disasters to come, but until we start treating their concerns as our concerns, well, those disasters will happen.  The world is great, the world is fecund, but the world is finite. There is only so much life it can support, and as with any other animal, if we put too much of a burden on the world, we shall pay the price in death and deprivation, in disaster and even catastrophe.  One day the species dying off may be ours.

This extra circle of inclusion, this extra step, however, need not be  feared as so many do, as if caring is some horrible burden.  Compassion is the truest beauty of the human spirit, and in embracing all life, we make of ourselves something greater, something bigger, something more beautiful than we are, even as embracing humanity as a whole has created our greatest souls and our most beautiful dreams and accomplishments.

This, ultimately, I think, is Safina’s message, and it is a message more beautifully told than I can do justice to.  Read his book and remember, or learn, what is to live in the embrace of the seasons and to see in all life oneself.

Peter Daou wants to know if this is the best the US can do (h/t Digby):

A calamity is unfolding before our eyes – the greatest oil spill in history – and America’s response is little more than a big yawn.

The vast, sprawling coastal marshes of Louisiana, where the Mississippi River drains into the gulf, are among the finest natural resources to be found anywhere in the world. And they are a positively crucial resource for America. The response of the Obama administration and the general public to this latest outrage at the hands of a giant, politically connected corporation has been embarrassingly tepid. … This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter. America is selling its soul for oil. – Bob Herbert

Where is the outrage? Where are the millions marching in the streets, where is the round-the-clock roadblock coverage tracking every moment of the crisis, every effort to plug the leak, every desperate attempt to mitigate the damage?

Where is the White House? Where are Republicans? Where are Democrats? Where is the left? Where is the right? Where is the “fierce urgency of now?”

Prominent oceanographers [are] accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope. The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean. – NYT

In the movies, pretend heroes like Bruce Willis and Will Smith save the planet while the whole world watches with breath and belief suspended. In real life, a global catastrophe is treated like a mere annoyance, mismanaged by a rapacious oil company, while drill-baby-drillers double down on their folly and the White House puts out defensive fact sheets about how they were on it from “day one.”

In some parts of the country, the sight of oil drifting toward the Louisiana coast, oozing into the fragile marshlands and bringing large parts of the state’s economy to a halt, has prompted calls to stop offshore drilling indefinitely, if not altogether. Here, in the middle of things, those calls are few. Here, in fact, the unfolding disaster is not even prompting a reconsideration of the 75th annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. “All systems are go,” said Lee Delaune, the festival’s director, sitting in his cluttered office in a historic house known as Cypress Manor. “We will honor the two industries as we always do,” Mr. Delaune said. “More so probably in grand style, because it’s our diamond jubilee.” – NYT

Is this really the best we can do?

Yes, it pretty much is, Peter.  First, this shows the fundamental continuity between Bush and Obama.  The reaction to this is fundamentally the same as the reaction to Katrina and New Orleans: do the least possible, and sweep it under the rug as best you can.  Does anyone imagine the Bush administration’s response to this disaster would have been fundamentally different from Obama’s?  Or rather, does anyone think that Obama has treated this more seriously than Bush would have?

But Daou’s point is broader than this, he blames everyone.  The left, the right, both parties, the public.  The outrage over this doesn’t seem to be there, the demands for action are tepid.

I think this comes back to something about Americans I’ve witnessed over and over again.  Many Americans, if something doesn’t directly affect them, think it doesn’t matter enough to get worked up over.  There is this weird sense of “we’ll be fine and who cares about what’s happening to someone I don’t know?”  Americans can’t really imagine disaster, or catastrophe, unless it happens to them or someone they’re close to.  Otherwise, it’s all just “something on TV”, and fundamentally unreal to them.

So they don’t connect the dots.  They don’t get what wiping out all this sea life, destroying beaches and marshlands, is going to do to them.  (Among other things, dying wetlands means more likelihood of Katrina style disasters).  Of course some of them do care and do connect the dots, but believe that there’s nothing they can do.  After all, millions protested the Iraq war and it didn’t matter.  Americans voted in Democrats in 2006 to end the Iraq war, and it didn’t happen.  Americans called 19/1 against TARP and it passed.  Americans voted in Obama to get real change, and he decided to be Bush #2.

I think it’s probably a bit of both: some folks just don’t see how it affects them and don’t care about things that affect other Americans, while other folks care or understand, but feel that there’s nothing they can do about it, since government is almost entirely unresponsive to their concerns, so why waste time getting worked up?

This is America, Peter.  The best suffer from learned helplessness, the worst just don’t care unless they’re the ones being hurt.

Seriously, Chris, I know you know better.  The Feds are not making sure independent scientists and media can’t measure the oil gusher by mistake.  Obama wants to downplay how bad this disaster is. If he didn’t, he’d allow scientists to deploy equipment underwater, which he has not allowed.  As it turns out, the flow is probably closer to 95K barrels a day, not the 5K BP and the government “estimated”.  And yes, those scare quotes are there because I don’t think they mis-estimated, I think they’re just liars.

I wonder what sort of sociopath you have to be to run BP, or the US.

Plus ca change…

Mean continetal temp 95-10

Let’s talk a bit more about global warming and climate change.  The majority of the American population now thinks that global warming probably doesn’t exist.  Part of that is the huge amount of money which has been spent on propaganda, but part of it is that one of the only major areas not experiencing higher temperatures is the continental USA.  If you want to be a climate change denialist, America is a great place to live.

It is also true that the speed of global warming has slowed down.  This is primarily due to two factors:

1) The sunspot cycle.  Solar radiation is currently at its lowest level in some time.  Less heat equals, well, less heat.

2) The icecap and glacial dump.  The polar icepack being dumped into the oceans has had a cooling effect.

The sunspot cycle can change pretty much any time it wants.  Probably we’ve got a decade or so at lower heat levels, but that’s not a sure thing.  As for the icecap and glacier dump: well, once the ice is gone, it’s gone.

The bottom line is that we are going to see things get worse, more slowly, in terms of temperature rises.  We will, however, keep getting crazy weather, changes to weather patterns are an early sign of climate change.

Once the mitigating factors are gone the pace of global warming will pick up again, and it will pick up fiercely.

Now, as for fixing it—there are two main problems.  The first is the will to do something.  While there may be technical solutions which would reduce the amount of carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, there is no will to deploy them on a wide enough scale to matter.  This is as true in China as it in the US, and without China and the developing world coming on board, what the US does, assuming it does anything, will not be sufficient (and the US will not do anything, the propaganda campaign claiming there is no Global Warming has been successful.)

The second is that there will come a point where global warming becomes a self reinforcing cycle.  With no glacial caps and with the methane released from Siberia, even radical decreases in human CO2 dumping will probably not be sufficient to stop the cycle.

Add to this the severe water shortages we can expect, which will hit large parts of African, a huge swathe of China, much of India and a big chunk of the US, as aquifers are drained down to effectively zero, and you have a recipe for huge loss of life and destabilizing migratory movements.

It is also entirely possible that large parts of the tropics will become effectively uninhabitable, the combination of humidity and temperature will be so high that it will literally be lethal to be outside air conditioningfor any length of time for much of the year.

If world population is only reduced by a billion, I will be amazed.  I also expect some serious wars.  Our civilization will not go quietly into that long long night.

I don’t usually write about climate change, because as dire as my views are on economics, they’re even more dire on global warming.  As I understand the science it’s already too late—we’re going to get hit with runaway temperature increases over the next century, and they are going to make a good chunk of the globe essentially uninhabitable.

Huge climate change events are the sort of events which end civilizations. While it is always possible that something I can’t forsee could occur, of course, it seems to me that we’re on the glide path for disaster. With the best will in the world, and a great deal of competence, we might keep the deaths under a billion or so.

I hope we get that level of competence. Unfortunately, my guess is that by the time we do, by the time things are taken seriously, it will be so far past too late that all we can do is mitigate.

That mitigation, of course, is important, as is every little bit people can do now to mitigate. Every .1 degree centigrade the world’s temperature doesn’t rise by date X is some people who live, some people who live better, some more time to get out act together.

Sometimes our role in life isn’t even “to hold the line” it’s to engage in a fighting retreat, to buy time for others. For most of us alive today, that may be our job. It’s not glorious, it’s not fun, but it is necessary.

[Written as commentary on Sara Robinson’s excellent article on possible futures.]

Just like it took Nixon to go to China, it takes Obama to pass Republican policies:

The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses
of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of
Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas
drilling for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies
and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of
affected states and many environmental organizations — would
end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the
East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central
coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

Change!  Hope!

One of the main stumbling blocks at Copenhagen is the US’s insistence on outside verification of carbon reducation claims.   China doesn’t want this verification, but the US is right to insist on it.

Chinese econonmic statistics are even more fictional than their American counterparts.  They are what the Chinese want them to be.  Moreover, carbon offsets in particular, according to those I know who have spent time in China and are involved in the industry, are often entirely fictional.  They exist only on paper.

It’s one of the best business in the world. You get money for nothing more than some fraudulent paperwork.

China doesn’t want independent confirmation not just because they want to continue the fraud games, but because independent confirmation could be used as a cross-check on many of the official economic statistics.  If you know how many power plants, factories, cars and so on there are: if you know how fast forests are being cut down, coal dug up and so on, then you can figure out what the economic statistics should really look like.

Reagan once said to “trust but verify”.  There’s a lot of money to be made in the carbon game, not just by China but by many other countries and private interests.  Anything that isn’t verified is bunk and worthless and even outside of China the evidence is that much of the carbon offset market is already fraudulent.

As with health care “reform”, a deal at any cost isn’t worth it.

If countries are really serious about global warming, then what they would do is set up a system whereby the amount of carbon created by a country is taken out of any purchases by that country of another country’s currencies, or would build them into tarifs, so that tarifs are based on the level of carbon that country produces.  And if a country won’t allow verification, then they will estimate it and take the high end, worst estimate.

Except, of course, that that would require reforming foreign exchange markets and rethinking the modern version of “free” trade.  And that the powers that be want to do even less than they want to save a billion or more lives due to global warming.