Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Exposure of individuals’ investments to the carbon bubble

Further substantiation of the carbon bubble / stranded assets argument that if governments act seriously on their climate goals then a huge amount of fossil fuel investment will become worthless:

Nature Climate Change study: Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies

Guardian reporting: People in US and UK face huge financial hit if fossil fuels lose value, study shows

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Wray on the suitability of emotions in response to climate change

Pain is a natural outcome of being told—and experiencing—that wildfires, hurricanes, and floods are becoming more ferocious due to the climate crisis, and that droughts are getting more serious and lasting longer. It is reasonable to get worried when the World Bank foresees that 140 million climate migrants will be fleeing ecological catastrophes and the knock-on effects of social strife within Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and south Asia by 2050, while other estimates put the number at over one billion. It is normal to get anxious about mass migrations and resource scarcity increasing the risk of violence and war. It is appropriate to grieve when the UN reports that humans are driving up to one million species to extinction, many within mere decades. It is logical to be horrified when a study shows that most trees alive today will be killed in massive die-offs within forty years if we don’t dramatically change course. It is understandable to be scared when a different study finds that Arctic permafrost is thawing at a rate that was predicted to happen seventy years from now, that the Greenlandic ice sheet has already melted beyond a point of no return, and that unchecked climate change could collapse entire ecosystems as soon as 2030. Stress is a suitable reaction when scientists say that by 2070, one to three billion people will be living in hot zones outside the temperature niche that has allowed human civilization to thrive over the last six thousand years. It is humane to be gutted when you learn that air pollution caused the premature deaths of nearly half a million babies in their first month of life over a twelve-month period. It is fitting to freak out when the World Meteorological Organization issues a report on the global climate that states “time is fast running out for us to avert the worst impacts of climate disruption and protect our societies from the inevitable impacts to come.” It is sensible to get spooked when a group of leading environmental researchers publish a paper that opens with the words, “The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.” It is right to be pissed off when you learn that we’ve emitted more carbon dioxide since the UN established its framework convention on climate change in 1992—that is, since we have been making an intergovernmental effort to reduce our emissions—than in all the millennia before then. And it is decent to rage once you understand how deeply the fossil fuel industry has manipulated the political system and misinformed the public, valuing money over our survival. There is nothing pathological about this pain. It is an unavoidable symptom of a very sick society.

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At this late stage in the climate crisis—a scientifically proven anthropogenic phenomenon that’s been debated on baseless claims for decades—I would suggest eco-anxiety is merely a sign of attachment to the world.

Wray, Britt. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Knopff, 2022. p. 19-21

Wray on climate distress

Our study also showed that the psychological distress young people experience over the climate crisis isn’t just about the degrading state of the environment. Rather, it is linked to perceptions of government betrayal and being lied to by leaders who are taking inadequate climate change action while pretending otherwise.

Wray, Britt. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Knopff, 2022. p. 21

We are losing the global fight against fossil fuels

Three examples from today:

1) Coal shortage and heatwave spark India’s power woes:

The government says it is doing all it can do to ensure supplies. Coal India, the world’s largest coal miner, has increased production by 12%, “strengthening India’s energy security”, according to the federal coal ministry. It also despatched 49.7 million metric tonnes of coal to the power generating companies in April, a 15% rise over the same month last year. The railways have cancelled more than a thousand passenger trains to transport more coal to fuel-starved plants.

2) Hydro-Québec mounts last-ditch effort to revive stalled power line project through Maine:

The planned project would carry 1,200 megawatts of electricity over a 336-kilometre high-voltage transmission line between Thetford Mines, Que., and Lewiston, Maine. Of the 233 kilometres planned on the U.S. side, 85 kilometres would cut through a forested area. Clearing work was already well underway at the time of the referendum.

According to Maine Public Utilities Commission, the project would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 3.6 million metric tons per year — the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road.

However, the state’s largest environmental advocacy group, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, has expressed a great deal of skepticism about the real environmental benefits of Hydro-Québec energy, questioning whether the project would actually reduce GHG emissions.

3) Ontario energy grid emissions set to skyrocket 400% as Ford government cranks up the gas:

Since all renewable energy projects were cancelled when Premier Doug Ford was elected, the province currently has no other way to compensate for the looming shutdown of a major nuclear reactor in Pickering, responsible for roughly 16 per cent of province-wide power. Only natural gas is available to meet rapidly growing demand for electricity, according to the IESO projections.

The projections show that the province’s natural gas plants — which only operate about 60 per cent of the time now — will run non-stop by 2033. The additional annual emissions this will produce over the next 20 years are equivalent to a large Alberta oilsands project.

Meltdown

I watched the four-part Netflix series on the Three Mile Island disaster and found it to be well crafted and emotionally poignant, though only OK as an educational resource on the partial meltdown.

My technical complaint is that they explain almost nothing about why the accident happened and exactly what took place while it was going on. There is a lot of interesting material on how complex systems have interactions which cannot be foreseen, as well as user interface issues in the control room, which would have helped viewers better understand.

In terms of storytelling, my objection is with how the filmmakers basically set up two kinds of interview subjects: forthright and emotional local residents who suffered, and a few wicked representatives of the industry. They quote dismissive claims about culpability and the accident’s severity from the insiders, while uncritically quoting residents on how an unchecked disaster would have destroyed Pensyllvania or the East Coast. To me this all felt like too much handholding about who to believe, coupled with insufficient reference to credible outside accounts.

I wouldn’t especially recommend the series to either people who know a lot about nuclear energy or those who know fairly little. The former are likely to be annoyed at how anecdote-driven the whole thing is, while the latter may be given a false sense of confidence about the correctness of the view expressed. Unlike the remarkable 2019 series on the Chernobyl accident, this is one that can be safely missed.

For better explanations on TMI, I would suggest Nickolas Means’s talk (which also contains some fascinating discussion about what human error means in the context of major industrial accidents and how to investigate them after the fact) or this Inviting Disaster episode from The History Channel.

350 Canada and grassroots organizing

Sources writing about the fossil fuel divestment movement sometimes seem to think that 350.org and “Fossil Free” are distinct organizations, despite the footer at https://gofossilfree.org/ reading “Fossil Free is a project of 350.org”.

In part, this may be because of how easy it can be with 350.org to confuse branding with organizations. The clearest example which I know of is “350 Canada”. It’s an organization in the sense that you can sign up for a newsletter and track their social media channels and other publications, but not in the sense that you can attend a meeting, see the internals of how their strategic planning happens, or take part in that planning yourself. When they hold calls that people from their mailing lists can attend, it is for them to be told what to do using a pre-determined plan and messaging. Their work is grassroots in implementation, and in terms of the aesthetic that motivates 350’s staffers in Canada, but not in the sense of actually giving influence or input to movement members at the ground level. To me, this seems at odds with the long-standing slogan: “350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis”.

That’s by no means entirely a bad thing, since developing a coherent and well-developed political strategy isn’t something amateurs are great at (witness the failure to cohere around a genuinely popular and effective agenda in the Occupy movement). I also don’t think hypocrisy is necessarily a productive thing to focus on. At the same time, an organization controlled by a small group of staff members who share many of the same assumptions and preconceptions about what kind of change is desirable and how to achieve it risks ending up talking only to itself and core supporters, without much influencing the mass public or mainstream political dialog. Being in a vanguard can usefully let you get ahead of the public on an issue they haven’t properly come to terms with, but it can also isolate you from the public in a way that is hard to perceive from the inside and which inhibits the organization’s prospects for achieving real-world change.

Progressive politics and “defunding the police”

While outside the area of climate change policy, the concept and slogan of “defunding the police” is revealing about important dynamics between progressive activist politics and policy-making by those who actually win power.

As The Economist reported in 2021:

The critical division is over whether or not the plan is a pretext to “defund the police”. Opponents insist it is sloganeering masquerading as policy. Shortly after Floyd’s murder, a majority of the city council appeared at a rally at Powderhorn Park on a stage in front of which “DEFUND POLICE” appeared in gigantic block letters. “The narrative all along until maybe five months ago, six months ago, was that they would be defunding the police and allocating the money elsewhere. The only thing that’s changed is the political winds,” says Mr Frey. He insists that alternatives to policing can still be funded without modifying the city charter, and that, if anything, more funding for the police is needed: “Right now, in Minneapolis, we have fewer officers per capita than just about every major city in the entire country.”

Advocates for reform have adjusted their language. As with the civil-rights movement, “those farthest on the left are what pushed the movement…we shifted the narrative from reform to defund,” says Sheila Nezhad, a community organiser running for mayor who is posing a stiff challenge to Mr Frey. Having contributed to a report on policing that argued that “abolition is the only way forward”, Ms Nezhad now avoids such rhetoric on the campaign trail, preferring words like “reinvest”. Kate Knuth, another candidate for mayor who supports the reform, says: “My vision of a department of public safety absolutely includes police,” funded at the same levels as today.

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Public opinion in favour of “defunding” police departments was never high. The increase in violent crime has made it even less so.

In June 2020, 41% of Democrats told survey-takers for the Pew Research Centre that they wished to reduce local police budgets. By September 2021 that had shrunk to 25%. Among the general public, support declined from 25% to 15%.

I would say the dynamics of this movement mirror many of those in the progressive, intersectional, anti-capitalist climate justice movement. People who are sympathetic to the kind of analysis and solutions within the movement embrace them enthusiastically and selectively surround themselves to people who agree, losing touch with public opinion and losing the ability to influence people who don’t mostly agree with them already. This leads to policy proposals that over-reach what is politically plausible (abolish global capitalism!) but, because they feel swollen with moral superiority about their analysis and policy preferences, activists reject the public rather than revise their proposals. They end up powerless and isolated, but feeling like the moral lords of the universe. Because they see their opponents as so contemptible, the idea of developing an approach with broader electoral support is rejected both pragmatically and emotionally, in the first case because they can’t see how cooperating with such awful people will lead to an outcome they want, and in the second case because their revulsion and contempt makes them reject cooperation before even considering what it would involve.

The biggest thing we need to achieve to have a chance against climate change is to split the conservative side of the population between those with respect for empirical truth who won’t dismantle climate change protections to try to win popularity and the fantasists who either deny the reality of climate change altogether or dismiss the need to act on it. The latter would then hopefully be a small enough rump to be politically marginal. Something comparable on the left may be a helpful parallel development, characterized by the rejection of the idea that everyone who disagrees with progressivism can be ignored or converted. Recognizing that multiple political perspectives can be simultaneously valid is the basis of pluralism and the foundation of the central democratic concept that the defeated must acknowledge the legitimacy of the victors. Without that, politics becomes an anarchic ideological contest in which any tactic can be justified and where a coherent and effective agenda serving the public interest cannot arise.

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