Category: Environment Page 8 of 15

The great neoliberal compromise was, “We’ll make some of you rich, fuck the rest, and the bill will come due after you’re dead.” Tax rates were scrapped and policies deliberately inflated the prices of both real estate and stocks. If you already were well off, i.e., owned a house and some stocks, you did really well.

If you were old enough, well, you died before the bill came due for the lower end of this, in 2008. Those who weren’t liquid, were over-extended, or were living in unimportant cities or suburbs, got smashed. Those who hung on, and lived in or near cities like San Francisco, survived as home prices went back up and as stock prices were deliberately driven to even greater levels.

And now we have more wildfires in California. We have massive power outages, even in some very upscale areas. In the Pacific Northwest, we have fires that rage for so long that cities are filled with smoke for weeks on end.

We have more and more powerful hurricanes, and they’re hitting Category 6, which was said to be impossible.

We have the vast melting of glaciers and ice and the drying up of groundwater.

We have utilities like California’s PG&E which did their job: They gave out tons of money to make people rich and didn’t update their infrastructure, which is causing a lot of those California fires.

And, yeah, the really rich have off-grid power. But they don’t have immunity from fire, and almost none of them can survive when the water runs out.

Then there’s, oh, New Zealand, where the rich have bought houses and condos. But if things really go to hell and they go to New Zealand, what power will they really have in that level of civilization collapse? Their money won’t mean shit, and the New Zealanders, who are coming to hate them already, are unlikely to be kind.

The level of climate change and ecological collapse we’re going to hit is such that I think most of the wealthy, and probably a heck of a lot of the truly rich, are not going to avoid it.

There isn’t going to be an escape for most of them.

A silver lining.

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The Amazon goes, we go. This map doesn’t make it seem like it’s in danger, though it’s bad, but…

So many #Climate emergencies worldwide, it’s hard to keep up. But #AmazonRainforest burning is stand-out global disaster.
Every red dot below represents a significant fire pic.twitter.com/AZ6IaOO1Pv

— John Gibbons (@think_or_swim) August 21, 2019

The Intercept has an excellent article on what the Amazon does, and what its loss would mean, but the simple facts are two:

• Loss of another fifth of the Amazon, many scientists believe, would trigger a “dieback” causing the rest to die quickly.
• Loss of the Amazon would release as much carbon into the atmosphere as all human activity since 1880.

What this means is a doomsday scenario. There are scenarios where not only humans, but all higher life dies, and this stands a good chance of being one of them: an uncontrollable increase of ten degrees Celsius or more.

We don’t survive that.

There are claims, which I find credible, that most of these fires were set deliberately by ranchers.

The Amazon is being deforested to create ranches, to sell beef to the rest of the world.

The obvious solution is for the rest of the world to simply pay Brazil more than the meat is worth to stop deforesting and to reforest. Any such treaty must have teeth– independent verification by auditors, NASA, and so on. And if the treaty is broken, not only does the money stop, but severe punishment is levied on Brazil. I hate that, but I don’t see a way around it. This sort of thing must stop. At the very extreme end, if we’re going to go to war over anything, this would be it, but despite what I wrote earlier, that wouldn’t be necessary: serious threats from the US and China would make Bolsonaro crumble. They could destroy Brazil’s economy tomorrow.

The general problem is larger, very difficult, and everyone’s problem. There have been such huge fires in the Pacific Northwest the last couple years that people had to stay indoors for weeks. Those fires weren’t deliberately set (though some were caused by human carelessness), but the problem is bigger: The southern part of those rainforests are no longer viable as rainforests. They’re going to go.

In general, we need to be re-greening.

A new study shows that the earth stopped getting greener 20 years ago.

Declining plant growth is linked to decreased moisture — a consequence of climate change.

The impacts of the climate crisis are expansive.

They must push us to act now. https://t.co/vXeU02gahq

— Rep. Joe Neguse (@RepJoeNeguse) August 21, 2019

We also need to do it smart, as too much replanting happens under conditions that amount to plantations: Monocultures which don’t have the full benefit of proper forests. (A good book to read for background is The Hidden Lives of Trees.

To further emphasize the issue, more long term…

speaking of forests pic.twitter.com/CLa25bxdXu

— Deem (@DeemTheDreem) August 21, 2019

Some parts of this problem are genuinely difficult but others aren’t. We can certainly re-green, and even re-green relatively quickly. Some things, like the temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest may not be saveable, but re-greening is.

The second thing we need to do is to help the oceans. We need alternatives to fished seafood, and we need them now, and we need to get after bad actors hard (like, but not exclusively, Japan). The key issue here is phytoplankton, which are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of the world’s oxygen, and which are in sharp decline.

This is a truly difficult problem and I won’t pretend it isn’t. But we must do what we can and treat it as the emergency it is.

As I wrote yesterday, we have a ton of problems, we have a ton of money which can’t find anything to do, and somehow we aren’t putting that money to use doing what needs to be done.

This is a question of political will, and so far, we don’t have any. Bolsonaro wants to do the exact wrong thing and reduce the Amazon faster. Obama bragged about increasing fracking massively. We aren’t, as a species or world society, taking these problems seriously, and they are potentially existential problems. Even if they aren’t existential (and I’d rather not risk it, thanks), they will certainly kill billions.

Perhaps we should do something.

Now.

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I want to keep this a very simple post.

There are three likely initial problems which will make the current situation turn into its first catastrophe.

I’m putting aside violent weather events like hurricanes.

The three are water, food, and other supply chain disruptions.

Water should be obvious. Aquifers are drying up, rainfall patterns will change, snowfall patterns will change, and glaciers are dying. This means that all our water sources are in play – groundwater, lakes, rivers, and streams. Many of these will just dry up. The annual cycle of rebuilding snowpacks and glaciers accounts for much of the world’s water.

The American Southwest will run out of water. Period. Most of India is borked, and so are vast parts of China, and so on. You need to do the research for wherever you live. Start by figuring out where your water comes from now and whether it is vulnerable.

Supply chains are a problem. It is barely an exaggeration to say that we have created the the most easily disrupted supply chain in world history. Things tend to be made or grown in a few specific areas, then shipped all over the world.

A severe climate shock which really wrecks food production will cause a huge rise in food prices, which will lead to various famines. That will lead to hoarding, looting, and violence.

But it needs to be emphasized that supply chains are a more general problem. Are you on a drug or medicine from which withdrawal will be ugly–or even deadly? This includes a lot of legal psychiatric drugs, including SSRIs and so on. Withdrawals are really ugly. Most people don’t have an extra supply. If the supply chain is disrupted, and at some point it almost certainly will be, you could be in a world of hurt.

Our capitalists, who are already killing people by raising prices on drugs like insulin, will, of course, capitalize on this and kill many more.

So these are the three most likely initial catastrophic scenarios. There are others like heatwaves and category 6 hurricanes and cyclones, but those tend to be localized. When water is scarce you have only days to live. When food is scarce a few weeks (you can go a week or two if you are healthy without any real problem, it’s just unpleasant.) And when medicines or other supplies you need go away, well, that may put you down or incapacitate you.

Look at your vulnerabilities in these areas, and if you can do something to mitigate them, please do.

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.

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).

So, 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.