There is a path out of this mess, if we’re willing to choose it (…and we can be!)
Climate Reboots
Note: I have not gone into detail about methods for implementing ‘reboots’, as I have extensively covered these in my January 2022 diary that first introduced this proposal and it is not the my main thrust here.
If we’re going to have a fighting chance at taking the climate tiger by the tail, what we need more than anything at this juncture is a way to get CO2 emissions down to safe levels ASAP. Incremental change is simply not managing to do this fast enough. In fact, all outward signs indicate that we are still moving in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, there is a safe, tested and effective way to accomplish this in the time we still have. I call these ‘climate reboots’.
In the comments to a recent environmental post, someone suggested this as a way to save ourselves from ourselves:
“All of it. Shut. It. Down.”
In January of 2022, I published a diary on DK essentially calling for us to do exactly that.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/11/2073994/-Freeze-the-Warming-An-Emissions-Moratorium-Proposal
But, like alchemy gone wrong, my ‘golden apple’ turned into a ‘lead balloon’ and my post went virtually unnoticed. What little attention it received was in the form of knee-jerk dismissals. At least one commenter, with vastly greater intelligence than I could ever hope to possess, immediately spotted the fundamental ‘flaw’ in my logic, didn’t feel the need to read any further (to where I addressed his ‘concerns’) and went for the jugular. “People” were the problem, as they would never go along with it and his proof was in his own actions. He excreted this ‘pearl’ despite the fact that “people” didn’t want the first shutdown either, which this savant of human behavior either never knew in the first place or conveniently forgot…Case closed. Having my diary treated like a ‘skeet shoot’ was disheartening, but a valuable lesson from which I ultimately benefited. I did not give up.
In fact as time marches on and climate events jockey for attention, I’ve become increasingly convinced of the efficacy of reboots.
In the nearly two years since I was first struck with the idea, no alternative, safe and demonstrably effective proposals have surfaced to rival it. Nothing even vaguely close. While it is possible that something of the sort flew under my radar, it would still indicate that any such (hypothetical) proposals are getting no more traction than my own.
As it stands, there are those engaged in climate action who walk right up to the edge of recognizing the potential of reboots, but appear to be inhibited from taking the next step.
This may simply be ‘elephant blindness’.
Environmental specialists will come especially close and then immediately veer off from suggesting the obvious solution for addressing what they’re now collectively calling for: CO2 emission reduction shutdowns. Perhaps, as policy, they feel this lies outside their field of expertise or responsibilities or jurisdiction? Sadly, the vacuum created becomes a reverberation chamber for failure.
The great irony is that if we don’t do this, everything will shut down soon enough anyway when the entire edifice of our paper money construct collapses. It is a given that this will inevitably happen from the economic stress being caused as environmental collapse wreaks havoc on global societies. Playing major roles in this are the ever increasing severity of global food shortages from which no country is safe and the ever-increasing mass migration partially due to this. This process is clearly already underway and running concurrent with burgeoning environmental disasters. It’s a sure bet, but don’t expect to collect any winnings.
In August of 2021, Angmar published a diary
Climate Brief:
with a link to an opinion piece in “The Hill” titled “Coming soon: Climate lockdowns”
thehill.com/...
which, as it turns out, was published 3 weeks after my January diary and mirrored my proposal. Concurrent with Angmar’s August post, word started emerging that climatologists had completed their studies of the Pandemic shutdown and had determined that it had brought ‘CO2 emissions to safe levels, ASAP’ and they advocated that we get them back down there again, ASAP.
During the Pandemic shutdown, when I witnessed first hand the extraordinary effect it was rapidly having on the environment in south Florida, it occurred to me that if we were a ‘mature’ species we would recognize the golden opportunity offered to us to continue the shutdowns as we segued into a sustainable future. However, as our collective ‘immaturity’ was writ large during this time, I didn’t get my hopes up. (If we were a mature species, we wouldn’t have needed to in the first place.) But I did correctly see the ‘silver lining’ and a year later, in September 2021, it occurred to me that we could do it again. I took my time conceptualizing a firm proposal for implementation, while looking for possible similar concepts and trying to punch holes in mine before sticking my neck out.
This included running it past anyone I knew who would listen…which ultimately prepared me for what I would be facing. But it did not deter me.
The end result is what I published in January 2022.
Then in August, in response to Angmar’s “Climate Brief” post, I immediately wrote a second diary,
Perhaps the most important information of all time and hardly anyone is listening.
with links to my original post, Angmar’s diary and The Hill Opinion piece. Although this fared a little better, it was still subject to reactive, ill-conceived rebuttals, all of which could be immediately undermined by the facts of the Pandemic shutdown itself. I had long since realized that ‘shutdown fatigue’ was shutting down open-mindedness, which in turn blocked potential acceptance.
(At the perceptive suggestion of a friend, I stopped using the label ‘shutdown’ as a descriptive few months ago, because it has become subconsciously abhorrent and people react to it in a Pavlovian manner with rejection. So I’ve replaced ‘shutdown’ with ‘reboot’, which is descriptively more accurate. Same product, different packaging.)
Since my first diary from January 2022, I’ve continued to reference this idea in numerous comments and even a third diary comparing them to Geo-engineering.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/11/2168728/-Solar-Geo-Engineering-is-a-Trojan-Horse-w-Pandora-s-Box-inside-We-can-choose-better
During this same period, I’ve reached out to a number of environmentally concerned individuals and organizations. These included Jay Inslee, AOC, Bill McKibben, Earl Stanley Robinson, UN IPCC reports research panels and others. I’ve heard back from no one, which I suspect is a simple matter of my messages not getting through the thicket of ‘more pressing business’.
Over time, as climate collapse has become increasingly manifest, the reactions to this idea on DK have shifted from pushback to tentative acceptance. Recently, in a comment, Gardening Toad waded into these ‘waters’ but didn’t jump in. On July 10th she wrote this:
“Look at how quickly emissions decreased during the early months of COVID.”
“This shows the effectiveness of individual action aggregated into a mass of people doing the same thing. Change in a positive direction could happen so quickly. Currently no-one (government or corporation) is stopping us from making these changes.”
Although her point dealt with the power of individuals as a collective to act as agents of change, she came very close to giving voice to the great lesson of the Pandemic shutdown.
In a similar way, each time I read about climatologists calling for us to reduce CO2 emissions ASAP and referencing the Pandemic shutdown as a model, they also stop short of suggesting the most obvious and, for now, only way of doing that, with pre-tested environmentally safe results.
A couple of weeks ago, another friend made me aware of an article dated July 16th in The New Yorker magazine by Bill McKibben titled “Big Heat and Big Oil”. In it he advocates for a rapid end to gas and oil production and use:
“Many scientists predict that we will at least temporarily pass the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase that nations vowed, in the Paris Climate Agreement, to try to avoid. But how much higher is still an open question: a rapid end to burning fossil fuel would arrest the heating; and that rapid end is possible, because solar and wind power and batteries to store it are now cheap and available.” ( my boldface added)
Since the main drivers of CO2 reduction during the shutdown were the severe restrictions on vehicular traffic and the moratorium on air travel, as well as a partial shuttering of business and manufacturing, what he is calling for could be quickly achieved by emission ‘reboots’ which would arrive at the same destination, but faster.
There are obvious pros and cons both to curtailing fossils fuels rapidly or doing so incrementally. Despite my ‘investment’ in ‘reboots’ I am fully open to either, as my concern is with results first and then the best way to achieve them. Nevertheless, the biggest liability with incremental progress remains the fact that it still shows no signs of reaching our goal in time. Only reboots have that demonstrated potential.
Furthermore, “a rapid end…” involves taking on Big Oil directly which, as we know, has its obvious drawbacks, so reboots may benefit from employing a method that while certainly threatening the fossil fuel interests, is packaged in an approach which doesn’t single them out, but absorbs them into a greater movement involving an emergency response. This is essentially what happened during the Pandemic that enabled that shutdown. The power and money interests pushed back, but were overridden. Some of this may have been due to a reluctance on their part to ‘fight the tide’, with the incumbent risk of increasing the optics which already stigmatize them as ‘the bad guys’.
On the other hand, cutting fossil fuel use incrementally doesn’t mean these bastards can’t be brought to submission. That will be relative to public pressure and resulting governmental response.
The reality is that while reboots have a better likelihood of getting results faster and therefore giving us much-needed time, their main purpose will be to insure our incremental efforts toward sustainability reach fruition, for ultimately the goal is to bury fossil fuels permanently.
While, as we now know, a reboot would produce almost immediate results, its Achilles’ heel is the collective will necessary to impose them and sustain them. Once it has been implemented, there also remains the very real threat that as ‘fatigue’ sets in, so shall the danger of dereliction, such as that which prematurely ended the Pandemic shutdown.
If over the course of its ‘visit’, El Nino doesn’t create sufficient resolve to overcome these obstacles and steel us for the trials that lie ahead of us, it may be that ‘slow but steady’ will be our only remaining option.
Unfortunately, for now, that is still a ‘lame horse’.
________________________