"To say that amazing work is being done to combat climate change and to say that almost no progress has been made is not a contradiction. It's a simple statement of fact." Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine contributor and author of the Sixth Mass Extinction
There has been some recent discussion here on Daily Kos on doomerism, specifically climate doomerism. I occasionally receive Kos emails with an attached link from other members on a new study finding that some tipping point is not as bad for the climate as they might seem. If we roll up our sleeves and get to work, things will only improve for us, the writers offer. We can pressure our elected officials to make the correct choices to limit carbon emissions; sometimes, that is true. But even the best climate defenders in power cannot resist the politics and power of the fossil fuel industry, the chemical industry, or the meat-packing industry. We saw what happened in Alaska's northern slope just a week ago; President Biden did not say no to the Willow Project, a massive oil and natural gas production where piping infrastructure must have energy from carbon sources to power the refreezing of the permafrost, so the pipelines stand upright. The legalities of why he made the decision are irrelevant to me. He did not fight it, knowing full well that is another dagger into the heart of the biosphere. The timing of the announcement was peculiar. It was announced after the bailout of Silicon Valley and Signature banks. Willow was buried and banished to the back pages; the announcement of the damage to the climate did not make the news. But it ultimately makes little difference. We have, as a species, chosen collective suicide. The reality is arriving sooner than it ever needed to.
Doomerism is the popular derogatory term for those of us that consider ourselves realists when it comes to the rapidity of the changes to the climate that I, along with millions of others, have fought to prevent. I have stated for years that we will unlikely survive the earth's rapid warming, overshoot, population explosion, ecocide, and extinction events. Some believe we as a species will not go extinct; the idea of being on my hands and knees digging for grubs and roots in a dying world isn’t a selling point that works for me. But to each their own. Everyone must come to emotional terms of rage, grief, anger, and despair because collapse is coming. None of us can continue hoping it away; when we feel the consequences of our inaction. And people will be very angry. It is, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhorn once said, an empty stomach knows no morality. Anger at whoever is in power at the time will be intense.
There is a conclusion from the paleoclimate record that pulls no punches.
When there’s been as much carbon dioxide in the air as there already is today—not to mention how much there’s likely to be in 50 or 100 years—the world has been much, much warmer, with seas 70 feet higher than they are today. Why? The planet today is not yet in equilibrium with the warped atmosphere that industrial civilization has so recently created. If CO2 stays at its current levels, much less steadily increases, it will take centuries—even millennia—for the planet to fully find its new footing. The transition will be punishing in the near term and the long term, and when it’s over, Earth will look far different from the one that nursed humanity. This is the grim lesson of paleoclimatology: The planet seems to respond far more aggressively to small provocations than it’s been projected to by many of our models.
The tangled web we are caught in can't be unspun and reassembled to its former glory. The problem is too vast and overwhelming across every science, knowledge, history, economy, and morality.
The IPCC's report on the sixth assessment stated that we are beyond fucked if we don't stop global warming at 1.5 C. We couldn't prevent that if we stopped burning fossil fuels today; that fact is the same for the 2.0 and 3.0 thresholds, despite extraordinary innovations and rapid implementation of green technologies over the past decade. It will happen because we will never put the dagger into the heart of the real problem, which is Capitalism.
From Resiliency.Org:
We all know what needs to be done: reduce carbon emissions. But so far, we members of global humanity just haven’t been able to turn the tide. The latest IPCC report documents that carbon emissions are still increasing, despite all the promises and efforts of the past few decades. The report tells us there’s only a narrow (and rapidly shrinking) pathway to averting climate catastrophe. That path requires us to cut emissions 50 percent by 2030, and to reach net zero emissions by 2050. So far, we’re going in the opposite direction.
Why is this so hard? Because it would require sacrifice. Why would it require sacrifice? Let’s walk through the logic:
- Lowering emissions requires reducing our extraction and burning of fossil fuels. But right now, 85 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and energy is what makes the economy go and grow.
- Replacing fossil fuels with low-emissions energy sources like solar and wind would still give us energy, but right now it takes fossil energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and all the other electrical infrastructure we would need to replace the fuel-based infrastructure we now have.
- Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term. And, in the early stages at least, most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels, because those are the energy sources we currently have.
- Again, the only way to reliably reduce emissions is to cut fossil fuel extraction and combustion directly and immediately. As we have seen over the past decades, just waiting for renewables to replace fossil fuels is too slow. Global emissions increased last year despite a record nearly 10 percent growth in renewables.
- So, if more fossil energy will be needed for the energy transition, but we need to extract less coal, oil, and gas overall, that means that, at least over the next couple of decades, much less fuel will be available for non-transition purposes—i.e., for transport, manufacturing, and food production, which are the mainstays of the economy.
That’s why we can’t just do it. That’s why, when governments get to decision points like having to approve or deny permits to drill for oil in Alaska, the decision often goes in favor of more fossil energy extraction.
The Age of Climate Optimism
The first signs that the mood was brightening among the corps of reporters called to cover one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced appeared in the summer of 2021. “Climate change is not a pass/fail course,” Sarah Kaplan wrote in the Washington Post on August 9. “There is no chance that the world will avoid the effects of warming—we’re already experiencing them—but neither is there any point at which we are doomed.” Writing in the Guardian a few days later, Rebecca Solnit highlighted a paragraph from a recent report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that said carbon-dioxide removal technology could theoretically “reverse . . . some aspects of climate change.” Though she admitted this was “a long shot” that would require “heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation, and visionary commitment,” Solnit nevertheless concluded, “It is possible to do. And we know how to do it.”
In the media, writers and editors have also been uncasing their instruments. Last May the Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee announced an expansion of the paper’s Climate Solutions vertical, an initiative designed to highlight people and organizations “offering hope for the future” while at the same time “empowering readers to understand how they can make a difference.” To date, the section has run stories on the effort to ban plastic utensils and a Milwaukee-based reward program for informants of illegal dumping. More recently, the Post debuted Climate Coach, an advice column “about the environmental choices we face in our daily lives.” In the Los Angeles Times, the energy reporter Sammy Roth embraced the can-do turn in climate coverage. “Anyone who reads my stories knows I’m biased toward climate solutions, and my reporting flows from that,” Roth wrote. The happiest warrior of them all, the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, weighed in with a column titled “Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think.” With global solar power capacity anticipated to nearly triple in five years, a breakthrough in the development of nuclear fusion, and advancements in battery storage, Kristof wrote that we were experiencing a “revolution of renewables”: “Progress is possible when we put our shoulder to it,” he concluded. “Onward!”
The sea change culminated last October, in the form of the New York Times Magazine’s annual climate issue, which featured comic-book-style depictions of “The New World” that climate change would create, illustrated by Anuj Shrestha and annotated by David Wallace-Wells. “Not very long ago,” Wallace-Wells wrote, some scientists believed that emissions “could cause four or five degrees Celsius of warming, giving rise to existential fears about apocalyptic futures.” Now a two-to-three-degree range was more likely, “thanks to a global political awakening, an astonishing decline in the price of clean energy, a rise in global policy ambition and revisions to some basic modeling assumptions.”
The article notes that the above time frame was not what reporting on climate was like after Trump was sworn into office. What changed? Certainly, not the trajectory.
For over two decades, the IPCC’s work on cutting emissions (what experts call “mitigation”) has been dominated by a particular group of modellers who use huge computer models to simulate what may happen to emissions under different assumptions, primarily related to price and technology. I’ve raised concerns before about how this select cadre, almost entirely based in wealthy, high-emitting nations, has undermined the necessary scale of emission reductions.
In 2023, I can no longer tiptoe around the sensibilities of those overseeing this bias. In my view, they have been as damaging to the agenda of cutting emissions as Exxon was in misleading the public about climate science. The IPCC’s mitigation report in 2022 did include a chapter on “demand, services and social aspects” as a repository for alternative voices, but these were reduced to an inaudible whisper in the latest report’s influential summary for policymakers.
The specialist modelling groups (referred to as Integrated Assessment Modelling, or IAMs) have successfully crowded out competing voices, reducing the task of mitigation to price-induced shifts in technology – some of the most important of which, like so-called “negative emissions technologies”, are barely out of the laboratory.
The IPCC offers many “scenarios” of future low-carbon energy systems and how we might get there from here. But as the work of academic Tejal Kanitkar and others has made clear, not only do these scenarios prefer speculative technology tomorrow over deeply challenging policies today (effectively a greenwashed business-as-usual), they also systematically embed colonial attitudes towards “developing nations”.
With few if any exceptions, they maintain current levels of inequality between developed and developing nations, with several scenarios actually increasing the levels of inequality. Granted, many IAM modellers strive to work objectively, but they do so within deeply subjective boundaries established and preserved by those leading such groups.
This diary was inspired by the VOX article Against doomerism, highlighted yesterday by GoodNewsRoundup in The Saturday Good News Roundup.
Now I will be challenged about what I am doing to stop climate change despite raising the issue on this site. I rarely drive my ICE; I have not flown in over twenty years, I never reproduced, I keep the temperature in my apartment to temperatures where I dress in layers, and my diet consists mostly of vegetables and fruits. I vote green.
And no, I don’t know how to stop it. No one does if we were honest with each other. Everyone is baked into this problem, and there is no easy way to get out of the loop in modern life.
I want to see fossil fuel executives charged with crimes against the planet. I want the Fossil Fuel industries nationalized and taken over to wean ourselves off oil as quickly as possible. Most importantly, I want justice for you and me.