Thinking Like a Planet

This is not simply a wildfire phenomenon; each climate threat promises to trigger similarly brutal cycles. The fires should be terrorizing enough, but it is the cascading chaos that reveals the true cruelty of climate change--it can upend and turn violently against us everything we have ever thought to be stable. Homes become weapons, roads become death traps, air becomes poison. And the idyllic mountain vistas around which generations of entrepreneurs and speculators have assembled entire resort communities become, themselves, indiscriminate killers--and are made, with each successive destabilizing event, only more likely to kill again.

I've read some books have a positive outlook about the state of things and hope for the future, so I guess it's time to add one that has a much more dire view. It's where the quote above comes from. But first, just to open with hints of that hope, brief mentions of a few positive ones that come to mind.

Of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari, from The Fictions That Give Meaning to the World:

The basic premise: the great challenges of the twentieth century were overcoming famine, plague, and war, and in the most general terms those pursuits have been successful. They were aimed at safeguarding the norms of human existence. With those goals met, we have moved into the new territory of surpassing those norms, and thus the new projects of the twenty-first century are gaining immortality, bliss, and divinity.

Of Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World by Rutger Bregman, from Telling a Different Story of Work:

In this book, Bregman tells this story and many others in the hopes of changing our controlling narratives about work and the role of government. He makes a convincing case that the world now has more aggregate wealth than ever before in history and living conditions are better than they have ever been, and provides plenty of evidence that if we simply found better ways to share--to redistribute--that wealth we would all be better off. As predicted, machines are gradually taking over most labor and most jobs aren't really needed except as ways to create unnecessary wealth.

From Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World--And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling in The Power to Make Them See:

Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.

 - - - 

Here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.

If the predictions from the book below come to pass, all of that is likely to be cancelled, so maybe our best hope lies in the belief behind Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger. From Tribal Connections:

During disasters there is a net gain in well-being.

A brief, deeply researched book that expands on an article Junger wrote, it examines the evidence that people seem to feel more meaning and contentment during times of catastrophe and war than during ordinary times. Junger's contention is that this is so because it's in these moments people feel most connected to each other. The barriers and classifications that keep us apart in standard society are gone, and we become freer to identify with each other and work together with common purpose, which makes us happier. Whether we know it or not, people want tribes to belong to. Junger makes his case clearly and strongly--though leaves room for a companion volume exploring the implications of the conclusion and what we should do with the information.

And with that counterpoint in place, here is the point of this post.

Of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells:

If you don't understand why Greta Thunberg is so worked up, this book is for you. If you want to know why organizations like the U.N. keep publishing reports that feel so grim, this book is for you. If you want to lose all hope and completely despair about life in the future . . . well, I'll just say that halfway through the book Wallace-Wells writes, "If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader."

Wallace-Wells is not writing to debate the facts of global warming or report on the science of what has already happened, but to report on what is going to be. The process is already started and there is no way to completely stop or reverse it; the best we can hope for is limiting how bad it will get. So he considers different scenarios, starting with bad, working through terrible, and going to catastrophic.

Because nature is a complex system, he writes, all of the different elements will cascade upon each other in worsening cycles. Section II, "Elements of Chaos," devotes a chapter to each of the areas that will bring their own versions of catastrophes: heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, extreme storms, drought, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues and pandemics, economic collapse, and wars. The second half of the book focuses on the human elements that have led to and are resulting from warming--the things we ostensibly have control over, though so far we haven't made any significant changes that will be beneficial.

It is a grim work. Thoughtful, researched and resourced, comprehensive. And scary. But also necessary. We are not entirely helpless. And, at the very least, it gives us perspective and helps us be prepared.

My only real complaint is that Wallace-Wells' writing is much more long-winded than it needs to be. Not in terms of content or breadth, but style. He could be just as complex, nuanced, deep, and thoughtful yet still be much more accessible. Aside from that, though, I'm glad I read it.

Excerpts:

If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it. But you are not merely considering it; you are about to embark on living it. In many cases, in many places, we already are.

In fact, what is perhaps most remarkable about all of the research summarized to this point--concerning not only refugees, health, and mental health, but also conflict and food supply and sea level and all of the other elements of climate disarray--is that it is research emerging from the world we know today. That is, a world just one degree warmer; a world not yet deformed and defaced beyond recognition; a world bound largely by conventions devised in an age of climate stability, now barreling headlong into an age something more like climate chaos, a world we are only beginning to perceive.

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The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley--in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them--every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.

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"Thinking like a planet" is so alien to the perspectives of modern life--so far from thinking like a neoliberal subject in a ruthless competitive system--that the phrase sounds at first lifted from kindergarten. But reasoning from first principles is reasonable when it comes to climate; in fact, it is necessary, as we only have a first shot to engineer a solution. This goes beyond thinking like a planet, because the planet will survive, however terribly we poison it; it is thinking like a people, one people, whose fate is shared by all.

This long section echoes many things in Utopia for Realists:

That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes, who predicted his grandchildren would work only fifteen-hour weeks, and yet never ultimately fulfilled. In 1987, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Robert Solow famously commented, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

This has been, even more so, the experience of most of those living in the developed world in the decades since--rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being. It is probably one explanation for contemporary political discontent--a perception that the world is being almost entirely remade, but in a way that leaves you, as delighted as you may be by Netflix and Amazon and Instagram and Google Maps, more or less exactly where you were before.

The same can be said, believe it or not, for the much-heralded green energy "revolution," which has yielded productivity gains in energy and cost reductions far beyond the predictions of even the most doe-eyed optimists, and yet has not even bent the curve of carbon emissions downward. We are, in other words, billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started when hippies were affixing solar panels to their geodesic domes. That is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.

Over the last twenty-five years, the cost per unit of renewable energy has fallen so far that you can hardly measure the price, today, using the same scales (since just 2009, for instance, solar costs have fallen more than 80 percent). Over the same twenty-five years, the proportion of global energy use derived from renewables has not grown an inch. Solar isn't eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it's just buttressing it. To the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide. We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we were just in the year 2000.

And energy is, actually, the least of it. As the futurist Alex Steffen has incisively put it, in a Twitter performance that functions as a "Powers of Ten" for the climate crisis, the transition from dirty electricity to clean sources is not the whole challenge. It's just the lowest-hanging fruit: "smaller than the challenge of electrifying almost everything that uses power," Steffen says, by which he means anything that runs on much dirtier gas engines. That task, he continues, is smaller than the challenge of reducing energy demand, which is smaller than the challenge of reinventing how goods and services are provided--given that global supply chains are built with dirty infrastructure and labor markets everywhere are still powered by dirty energy. There is also the need to get to zero emissions from all other sources--deforestation, agriculture, livestock, landfills. And the need to protect all human systems from the coming onslaught of natural disasters and extreme weather. And the need to erect a system of global government, or at least international cooperation, to coordinate such a project. All of which is a smaller task, Steffen says, "than the monumental cultural undertaking of imagining together a thriving, dynamic, sustainable future that feels not only possible, but worth fighting for."

On this last point I see things differently--the imagination isn't the hard part, especially for those less informed about the challenges than Steffen is. If we could wish a solution into place by imagination, we'd have solved the problem already. In fact, we *have* imagined the solutions; more than that, we've even developed them, at least in the form of green energy. We just haven't yet discovered the political will, economic might, and cultural flexibility to install and activate them, because doing so requires something a lot bigger, and more concrete, than imagination--it means nothing short of a complete overhaul of the world's energy systems, transportation, infrastructure and industry and agriculture. Not to mention, say, our diets or our taste for Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO₂ each year as a million transatlantic flights.

The more we advance, the less we use it to improve in ways that matter.

And I simply like this short statement without the need for context.

What may sound like stoic wisdom is often an alibi for indifference.

Sometimes I really wonder what kind of life I have doomed my children to by bringing them into existence.

I'll close with a couple of related things that have come across my feed recently.

I find this fascinating:

Watchers of the Earth

Indigenous peoples around the world tell myths which contain warning signs for natural disasters. Scientists are now listening

Shortly before 8am on 26 December 2004, the cicadas fell silent and the ground shook in dismay. The Moken, an isolated tribe on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, knew that the Laboon, the ‘wave that eats people’, had stirred from his ocean lair. The Moken also knew what was next: a towering wall of water washing over their island, cleansing it of all that was evil and impure. To heed the Laboon’s warning signs, elders told their children, run to high ground. . . . 

When relief workers finally came ashore, however, they realised that the death toll was skewed. The islanders who had heard the stories about the Laboon or similar mythological figures survived the tsunami essentially unscathed. Most of the casualties occurred in the southern Nicobar Islands. . . . 

Humanity has always courted disaster. We have lived, died and even thrived alongside vengeful volcanoes and merciless waves. Some disasters arrive without warning, leaving survival to luck. Often, however, there is a small window of time giving people a chance to escape. Learning how to crack open this window can be difficult when a given catastrophe strikes once every few generations. So humans passed down stories through the ages that helped cultures to cope when disaster inevitably struck. These stories were fodder for anthropologists and social scientists, but in the past decade, geologists have begun to pay more attention to how indigenous peoples understood, and prepared for, disaster. These stories, which couched myth in metaphor, could ultimately help scientists prepare for cataclysms to come.

Perhaps, if we're lucky, we'll gain some of their wisdom in time to be helpful.

Small signs of slow evolution:

For the First Time, Wind Power Eclipsed Both Coal and Nuclear in the U.S.

Wind power in the United States reached a new milestone last month.

On March 29, wind turbines produced more electricity than coal and nuclear, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an agency that collects energy statistics for the government, says.

In the past, wind-powered electricity has gone beyond coal and nuclear on separate days, but this was the first time wind surpassed both on the same day. Natural gas is still the largest source of electricity generation in the country. . . . 

But wind taking the No. 2 spot may be short-lived.

The agency says electricity generation from wind on a monthly basis has been lower than natural gas, coal and nuclear generation. According to EIA projections, wind is not expected to surpass any other method in any month of 2022 or 2023.

While I will hold out hope we can learn to think like a planetary people, I guess I'll start preparing to find a livable tribe.