The other day, I needed a cup of warm water for baking, so I turned on the tap. Of course, since the water didn’t warm up for a minute or so, a substantial amount of water just went down the drain, wasted.
Should I have microwaved the water? Or used the stove? Or the electric kettle?
Now, while the water was running, my emotional reaction to the situation involved a vague idea that I was having to choose between wasting water and causing greenhouse emissions–as if hot water from the tap required no energy to heat, which clearly isn’t the case. And there are much more efficient ways to stop global warming than worrying about micro-lifestyle issues anyway. But now I’m wondering which is the better way, environmentally speaking, to get a cup of warm water for baking?
The question ends up interestingly difficult to answer.
Part of the problem is that the question is vague and complicated. We need to simplify and focus in order to have any hope of finding an answer.
Start by ignoring the question of wasted water–there is no way to directly compare wasted water to carbon emissions, it’s an apples-to-oranges situation, so let’s just ignore the water question until later. Next, because all my appliances happen to be electric, I can re-state the question more simply as which appliance uses the least amount of electricity to heat a given amount of water? Finally, it’s true that running the tap involves heating more than a cup of water, since some of the water I let go down the drain was warm, it just wasn’t as warm as I wanted it to be. I’m going to ignore that not-warm-enough water for now.
There are a couple of ways to approach the question. I could warm water a variety of ways and use the electric meter to observe how much energy each method uses. Unfortunately, running a tap to get warm water while watching the meter would not answer the question–the water is already in the tank, hot, waiting to be used. There is no way to make a water heater heat only one cup and only to my desired temperature. I’d have to measure the amount of electricity needed to heat a whole tank and then run some sort of calculation accounting for lots of variables, and I am not going to do that.
Another option would be to look at which method of heating is most efficient. Remember that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so heating a cup of water to a given temperature requires a certain specific amount of energy because what you’re doing is putting energy (heat) into the water, and the energy has to come from somewhere. For example, heating a cup of water hot enough to make coffee requires 66880 joules of energy. And (according to these people), microwaves are 65% efficient, meaning that for every 100 joules of energy in the form of electricity that go into the machine, only 65 joules of energy are converted into microwaves. The rest are converted into heat (which doesn’t go into the coffee). Of course, not all of those joules of microwaves will be converted into heat in the water. If we knew the efficiency of this second transformation, we could use some arithmetic to calculate how many joules of electricity you’d need to start with to end up with 66880 joules in the water.
Of course, 66880 joules is needed for hot water for coffee. Warm water for baking would need less.
I’m not going to do any of this either.
Or, we can consider that because some energy is lost with each transformation (as per the second law of thermodynamics), the heating method that involves the fewest transformations is probably the most efficient. Electricity to microwaves to heat is two transformations. Electricity to heat (in the electric kettle) is just one. Our heat-pump water-heater sounds is if it ought to involve no transformations, only the transference of heat from the air in the room to the water in the tank, but of course the compressor that accomplishes the transformation runs on electricity and now I’m confused.
I could get un-confused. There is an answer to the question, and I could calculate it. I might do so, simply as an exercise. But there would be no practical benefit because by any method, because as long as we stay under a certain amount, our electricity is renewable–last I checked, it was generated by burning landfill gas. If that’s still the method used, then our electricity is carbon negative, as long as we’re under our limit.
So, really, the real way to approach the question is to consider whether warming a cup of water by any method will take us over our limit? And because our household usage usually does include many cups of warm water by various methods and never does go over our limit, I’m confident we’re good.
That means, the only difference is how much water each method involves. So yes, I should have heated the water in the microwave.
Does this seem like a dissatisfying post because I spent a lot of time deciding that the heating method doesn’t matter after all? Does it seem like a waste? It shouldn’t. Because I started out with a moment of vague anxiety of a type that’s probably pretty common among environmentalists–and I showed you what to do about it. You figure out how to get a real answer to the question.
Usually the answer is to stop obsessing about warm water and to vote for climate-sane political leadership, but it does help to find out for sure.
OK, Maryland has a primary election next week. Let’s go over the hopefuls from a climate perspective–while there ARE other important issues, none of the others are the business of this blog. And, you know, without effective climate action, none of the other issues are going to make much difference.
Most of you are probably not in my voting district, or even if Maryland, so just consider this an example of how to look up information if you haven’t had your primary yet–and essentially the same process works for the general election.
Start by searching online for sample ballots for the relevant election. Ballotopedia is a good source. You put in your address and it figures out who will be on the ballot in your district. Ballotopedia also provides basic information on each candidate, but you can search for additional information. For any who have prior legislative experience, the League of Conservation Voters will provide a score on environmental issues. For those without a score, you can look up their campaign website (though of course campaign promises have to be taken with salt), or do on online search for news stories and articles about the candidate and climate change.
Presidential Race
There are five people listed for the presidential race: Joe Biden, Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, Nikkie Halley, and Donald Trump. The latter two are contending for the Republican nomination–although Halley has suspended her campaign. The other three are Democratic contenders. As far as I can tell, Phillips and Williamson are still in, which surprises me as I had not heard of either of them being in to begin with.
I am not going to bother profiling Donald Trump as he is a vocal climate denier, nor will I profile Halley, as she has dropped out.
Joe Biden
President Biden’s record on climate has been good but not great–though it’s worth remembering that his efforts have been significantly undermined by Congressional Republicans. His record would have been substantially better otherwise. His lifetime score with the League of Conservation Voters for his legislative work was 83%, which is pretty good. He has shown himself willing to listen to activists, taking stands on climate issues because environmentalists push him to do so. That’s a very good sign.
Dean Phillips
Mr. Phillips is a businessman from the Midwest who has served three terms in Congress and is running for president on a largely economic platform. His record with the League of Conservation Voters is good, and would have been better had he not missed a number of important votes because he was campaigning. While he has made votes that LCV considers “anti-environmental,” these have been very few. He appears to be a good Congressman, but as a presidential candidate he has attracted precisely no attention. I am not sure he is even still running, but his campaign website is still active.
Marianne Williams
Ms. Williams has no prior political history. Her campaign website does address climate change, asserting the importance of climate action, and laying out an ambitious series of admirable but extremely vague goals. It’s not clear she has any idea how to accomplish any of it. Again, her campaign has attracted no attention whatever, but her website is still active.
U.S. Senate Race
Maryland’s Senator Cardin is retiring, and there are NINE people contending for the Democratic nomination to succeed him, and seven for the Republican nomination. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t profile all of them but focus on those thought to have a serious chance of winning their respective primaries.
Angela Alsobrooks
Ms. Alsobrooks is the current County Executive of Prince George’s County. She has focused on issues including education, veteran’s services, and improving the economy. Her website’s section on climate change is short but concrete and practical, promising to support specific policies and programs. She has also been endorsed by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network Action Fund. She is a Democrat.
David Trone
Mr. Trone is currently a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. As such, he has an excellent record with the League of Conservation Voters, a 96% lifetime score. He is a self-funded candidate with deep resources of his own, and is proud of not needing to depend on donors. He is a Democrat, although he has also been supporting Republican candidates in other states.
Larry Hogan
Larry Hogan is a former governor of Maryland. He has no legislative record, but the League of Conservation Voters did do a detailed assessment of his governorship, giving him letter grades in four different areas. He got two Ds, a C, and a B-. The group also noticed that he made some strong, pro-environment statements but did not strongly follow up on them. He is not an anti-environment candidate which is why I am profiling him. He is by no means a climate hawk, but for someone voting in the Republican primary who cares about the issue, he’s your guy.
Other Republicans
There are several other aspirants to the Republican candidacy, but none of them have much to say about climate change.
U.S. House of Representatives
The District 1 House race–the one I vote in–has an incumbent in the person of Republican Andy Harris. There are two other Republicans vying with him to be the candidate, but neither appears to be attracting media attention. Mr. Harris has made pro-environment public statements, but his lifetime score with the LCV is two percent. One of his challengers is on record as saying environmental problems are best left to the private sector.
There are two people vying for the Democratic candidacy. Blane Miller III has not made any information about himself. Blessing Oluwadare has been somewhat more forthcoming, but nothing comes up related to climate change for either of them.
So these races will have to be decided on some basis other than climate concerns.
Here is a re-post of a book review worth a second read. Specifically, it’s a review of Undaunted, by Carolyn Baker, a fascinatingly bad book.
I don’t normally discuss my dislike of books in public, as the lives of authors are tough enough without negative press, but In this case I believe the author did a disservice to an important topic—and I am not being facetious when I say the book’s shortcomings were fascinating.
Synopsis
I’ll start off by simply describing the book.
Undaunted: Living Fiercely into Climate Meltdown in an Authoritarian World, by Carolyn Baker
2022. Apocryphile Press
Carolyn Baker thinks, not without reason, that the world as we know it, and possibly all life on Earth, is ending. She explicitly states that there is nothing we can do now to avert this catastrophe, but we can live fully and joyfully while our lives last by embracing, rather than rejecting, our grief, fear, and anger. Undaunted is supposed to be about how to do that.
A recurring theme is the inadvisability of various escapes from what the author calls “our predicament.” The escape she spends the most time attempting to close off is hope—hope that some technical fix or other last-minute miracle will avert climate catastrophe and save us. “Hope” is one of those words that can mean multiple things that differ both subtly and radically from each other, to the point that it is sometimes possible, even advisable, to both abandon hope and cling to hope at the same time.
It’s not entirely clear what Ms. Baker means by the word, hope, and her reasons for attempting to strip her readers of it (she explicitly states such as her goal) are not fully and clearly defined. However, I can list a few possibilities gleaned from her words:
Hope is a denial of reality as it now is, and as such presents us from dealing with reality effectively.
Hope allows us to think it’s OK to keep doing things that make the situation worse.
Hope blocks us from experiencing the personal and spiritual transformation that loss and grief would otherwise give us.
Besides hope, Ms. Baker also attacks several other unskillful states (a phrase she doesn’t use, but given her reliance on Buddhist and Hindu concepts in certain places, it seems appropriate). “Doom and gloom,” that is, an obsessive focus on the horrific details of climate catastrophe, comes under repeated criticism, not because Ms. Baker disagrees about the doom part (she doesn’t), but because such obsessiveness is both strategically and spiritually unhelpful—it blocks the spiritual gifts of loss just as hope does. Similarly, denigrating and dismissing as problematic the whole of humanity prevents us from accessing the meaning and richness of human relationships. Human connection is one of the primary sources of meaning in Ms. Baker’s view. Straight-up denial that a problem even exists is as bad as hope, and for the same reasons.
The various chapters—all short, competently written, and full of excerpts and references to other interesting works, address various thematically-related topics, such as the importance of consciously limiting one’s awareness so as to avoid getting too overwhelmed, or the importance of accepting and feeling grief and related emotions. Each chapter concludes with a list of “fierce practices,” mostly journaling exercises apparently designed to foster personal growth through awareness of loss and grief.
There are some real gems in the book, however, there is also a pervasive lack of focus, as though much of Undaunted were a cloud of thematically-related material, rather than a pointed, reasoned argument or a set of instructions towards a clearly-defined goal. Undaunted also suffers from reliance on highly-questionable source material, largely through her repeated references to Indigenous culture (note the counterfactual use of the singular) and her use of hospice as a metaphor for the current state of the Earth (she appears to fundamentally misunderstand hospice).
And then there’s Ms. Baker’s central premise, that the Earth’s condition is hopeless. That premise is, shall we say, questionable at best.
Opinion
Ms. Baker’s book is easy to dismiss on the basis of its many flaws, but it so very almost gets so many important things right. They say “almost only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades,” but an idea is close enough to being a hand-grenade that almost is worth paying attention to.
Grief is important. Despair is important. Giving up is, under some circumstances, important. Radical transformation can indeed follow radical loss, and even without such existential considerations, there’s something to be said for turning when you meet a wall instead of continuing to crash straight onto the bricks over and over. What we need to give up on, what kinds of hope no longer serve us, is an important topic to discuss right now. Ms. Baker is right as far as that goes.
I’m just not sure she discusses it well.
There are several important distinctions Ms. Baker either misses or appears to miss. Most critically, the fact that we can’t now escape from climate change undamaged does not mean that fighting climate change is pointless. It could still get a lot worse, and that means we still have the power to prevent it from getting worse. She also does what most writers on climate change seem to, which is to assume that our collective failure to take meaningful climate action is simply some permutation of either human nature or “Western” (that is, “not-indigenous”) culture—when actually climate inaction is the deliberate creation of very specific people with a very specific agenda, people who are still pursuing their agenda as we speak, people who are largely getting away with it.
Can we make a serious attempt to fight for climate justice while also honoring grief, learning from sadness, and meditating upon despair? I think so. And Ms. Baker doesn’t precisely say we can’t. But she doesn’t say we can, either.
My fear is that Undaunted will be just another excuse for good people to do nothing while evil wins. The author seems utterly unaware of several important facts, among them that “our predicament” really can get a lot worse than it is right now. Also, my suspicion is that the book offers the wisdom of the ages filtered through a heavy layer of unchecked privilege, becoming simply an unusually nihilistic version of same-old, same-old: privileged, mostly-white people once again making it all about them. Transform your Inner Self while Rome burns.
We need to do better.
Being the Change
I want to do the inner work Ms. Baker says I should. I agree with her there. But I will not accept her as my guide into what promises to be difficult, painful territory because the various shortcomings of her book mean she has not earned my trust. I need a guide I can trust, if I am to visit dark places.
Whom do I trust?
Ursula K. LeGuin (her novels, The Farthest Shore and The Left Hand of Darkness have been particularly useful in my contemplation of Undaunted). Terry Tempest Williams (read Refuge, if you haven’t yet). Charles Curtin. Elisabeth Curtis. Rowland Russell. Tom Wessels. Gary Snyder (notably Practice of the Wild). Me, quite possibly.
What might I say to myself, to you, about how to answer Ms. Baker’s challenge?
Stay Current
There are many possible paths of personal development and discovery that may be relevant to “our predicament,” as Ms. Baker calls it. These paths begin in or pass through Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, various practices that might broadly be called “indigenous”, psychotherapy, New Age, and probably a million other things. I have, at one time or another, felt the pull of several of these and borrowed tools from them, and I honor those that find one or another of these paths useful. But I am not, by nature, a devotee. I cannot focus on anything except the work I have in front of me and the individuals I care about or have a duty to care fore.
I need something very simple, very direct.
And I’m thinking about how easy it is to decide that whatever’s going on doesn’t count, that a loss or disruption isn’t that bad, is temporary, or is just plain not real. That we’re going to get back to normal, soon, so emotionally reacting to whatever current predicament we’ve got isn’t necessary. And indeed some problems are temporary, but others aren’t. And it’s hard to know which is which.
There are some corners of the therapy/recovery world where they use the phrase “getting current” to refer to a deliberate acknowledgment of emotionally salient reality. For example, you could start a therapy session by spending five minutes or so just checking in about how you’re doing, how you’re feeling, what’s been on your mind lately. Then, even if you spend the rest of your session talking about some other thing, you are grounded in your current emotional reality instead of whatever form of happy face you normally wear for whatever reason.
So “current,” getting current, being current, is a kind of technical term meaning to be consciously grounded in your current emotional reality—not that you’re enlightened or present or mindful, just that you’re not emotionally wrapped up in some pleasant fantasy-land. Your emotions are where you are.
So before attempting some sort of “journey” involving healing work and discovering the Self and making decisions about which types of hope to lose and which to keep, how about just get current. The world is what it is. Your life is what it is. How do you feel?
How do you feel?
Make Room
One of the things that most impresses me about those I consider wise is the ability to pause between stimulus and response. Somebody says something, and instead of getting defensive or angry or happy, or whatever else, you just pause. And in that pause you can notice that maybe you’ve misunderstood something or overlooked something. You can choose a skillful response, instead of acting on knee-jerk impulse.
I’d like to learn how to do this, to be less buffeted by my emotions, so I can learn things that upset me or talk with people who disagree with me without feeling the need to shut down or escape.
What about you?
Cthia
One of the things you may or may not know about me is that I’m a serious Trekkie especially interested in Vulcan culture. Vulcans are a species of hyper-rational aliens who have supposedly given up emotion in favor of logic—although fortunately certain writers have given this fictional species more nuance over the years, explaining that they don’t lack emotion, they just transcend it, and so on.
So, we are told, Cthia is the Vulcan word usually translated as logic, but this is a mistranslation– “reality-truth” would be better. The Vulcan Mastery of Passions is, in fact, based on the teachings of a man named Surak (most Vulcan male names are similar to his in tribute, don’t let that confuse you) who realized that people were hurting and killing each other out of knee-jerk emotional reactions, largely fear. He taught that once one had acknowledged and accepted one’s emotions fully, they could no longer dominate one’s behavior and perceptions. One could then choose instead to do the right thing—and the right thing to do could be discovered by rigorous attention to reality-truth (cthia) and an ethical system rooted in core concepts such as honor, duty, the celebration of diversity, and the awareness of unconditional joy.
The older I get, the more I find that all that actually works. It might be applicable to our “predicament.”
Some years ago, I posted a list of links to articles using the occasion of Passover to discuss climate change from a specifically Jewish perspective. I tried to re-post it, but a lot of the links no longer work. So I’m collecting more links. Just to be clear, I know very little about Judaism, which is why I’m not writing an article on it myself.
Links for You
Here is the list. It looks short, but four articles are actually a lot to sit down and read at once.
The Four Children of Climate Change. Suggests using the traditional image of four children, one wise, one wicked, one simple, and one who does not know how to ask, as a frame for discussing ways to do climate outreach.
Climate Disruption and Passover. Calls for empathy and consideration for climate refugees, since their experience is similar to that of the Hebrews in the Exodus story.
My climate change book group read How Civil Wars Start recently. At first glance, it doesn’t look like a good fit for the topic, but actually it’s perfect and important.
To briefly summarize– apparently there is a lot of scholarship out there on what countries have in common right before the outbreak of civil wars, the statistically-important risk factors. The more of these risk factors a country has, the more likely it is to have a civil war soon. There is some scholarly understanding of why these factors matter, but the factors are derived from data analysis, not from speculation. Anyway, the author, Ms. Walter, summarizes and presents this scholarship in a clear and accessible way, using various historical situations to illustrate her point–and also argues that the United States of America shows all the signs of being on the brink.
The full title of the book is How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, but the stopping them part is a short section at the end that contains nothing that isn’t obvious to someone who has read the rest of the book. For example, she says that a deterioration of government services is a risk factor, and so among the tips she offers at the end is Improve the quality of government services. OK, how? How am I, Caroline Ailanthus, supposed to do that? And even if I were in a position to directly change policy and procedure, it’s worth noting that America has not experienced a deterioration in services by pure accident–a great many people have fought hard to prevent the deterioration, and have simply been out-fought by people who wanted services to deteriorate. How should we who wish to prevent civil war deal with that? Ms. Walter doesn’t say.
It’s worth noting that her advice, unlike the rest of the book, does not appear to be based on statistical data analysis–she does not suggest anyone has looked for answers to countries that had the warning signs and avoided war, to see what they did. Have there been any such countries? I suspect the advice is simply tacked on as an after-thought to make the book more palatable. More on that shortly.
While I’m offering criticism, I should admit that while Ms. Walter’s central points seem solid, some of her secondary, supporting points are at best poorly-phrased. For example, every country can be placed somewhere on a continuum between autocracy and democracy, with a zone in the middle called anocracy that is particularly risky for civil war. Well, Ms. Walter states that the US is now closer to anocracy than it has been at any other time since 1793.
Really?
Now, our country well may be more something it hasn’t been since 1793, and I’m sure it’s not good, but on the face of it “closer to anocracy” seems like it must mean “less democratic,” and there is no way we are less democratic now than we have been at any time since 1793, given that in 1794 (and for many years after) there were laws preventing women, black people, poor people, and immigrants from voting.
But let’s talk about climate change.
There are several very good reasons why anybody concerned about climate change should also be concerned about civil war, particularly civil war in the United States.
There is NOTHING so bad that the mighty American war machine turned against itself will not make worse. Look up some stats on what happened last time and then consider that since then we’ve largely forgotten how to be polite and we’ve invented nuclear weapons.
More specifically, if the United States has a second civil war, do you really think there will be meaningful American climate action during the war? Do you really think the rest of the world can avert catastrophe without America’s participation?
If the United States has a second civil war, the people who get hurt the most will be the same people already most vulnerable to climate change. The hurts will multiply.
According to Ms. Walter, crises often escalate to war through a process of mutually-reinforcing polarization wherein factions form, and each faction becomes convinced that the other poses an existential threat that must be defended against–and the defense further feeds other faction’s fear, which in turn…. And very few people who get involved in this process understand what is happening until it is too late. In America, concern about climate change has largely been consigned to a single side of what is increasingly an us/them divide. To the extent that we treat that divide as real–that we identify as “us,” opposing and opposed by “them,” we prepare for and foment civil war.
It’s possible to argue–and I have argued–that the present political movement towards autocracy and fascism in America has as its primary and ultimate aim the prevention of meaningful climate action.
Simply put, if America has another civil war, it will be fought over climate action (whatever the people who first start shooting think they are shooting about), and the climate will lose (regardless of what the people who emerge victorious say they want). And our good intentions alone will not prevent us from making the situation worse or being used by others to make the situation worse.
Ms. Walter doesn’t know how to stop it. I don’t either. But, like her, I consider reading up on how civil wars start a good place to begin.
The other day, I was telling a friend that sometimes it feels like the best thing I can do for the planet is to write novels. It doesn’t make sense. It feels almost like an admission of despair. But it’s also a kind of desperate, audacious hope.
To my surprise, she said the same.
In fact, we are writing about very similar themes and ideas, though in different ways. I’d known that. I hadn’t known about why she was doing it.
“I’m hoping to be the opposite of The Turner Diaries,” she said. “As much bad as that book has done, that’s as much good as I hope my book does that much good.”
“I hope mine is kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” I replied. “When Harriet Beecher Stowe me Abraham Lincoln, he said ‘so you’re the little woman who started this big war.'”
So, if we’re both being audacious, maybe we’re not far off?
So, the thing is that WordPress gives me some kinds of information about who is reading my stuff, but there is other stuff that they don’t tell me. And right now, I can’t actually tell that anybody is actually reading this blog. So if you ARE reading, please let me know by leaving a comment.
Technically, this is last-week’s post. I mean, it’s a re-post from previous years that I should have re-posted last week but didn’t because I was busy being way too anxious. Enjoy.
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Easter is the commemoration of the death of a political prisoner at the hands of the State. I’ve always found the thought of Jesus-as-activist much more intriguing than the possibility of His resurrection–which might be because I’m not Christian, but I know dedicated Christians who seem to feel the same way. It’s a fact that being a good person can be dangerous. It’s also true that we keep having good people anyway.
I’ve decided to honor the incontrovertible miracle of bravery in the face of persecution by acknowledging climate change martyrs–scientists who are being harassed, even threatened, because of their work on climate. Some may be murdered, if the problem persists. They keep working.
The harassment goes back to the mid-1990’s, but has been increasing in recent years. Examples taken from the various articles I read for this piece (and have linked to) include: threats to “see to it” that a scientist would be fired; vague threats on a scientist’s children’s safety; the deposit of a dead rat on a scientist’s doorstep; the display of a noose by an audience member during a public talk by a climate scientist; and multiple, spurious accusations of fraud or other wrongdoing on the part of climate scientists.
That last may seem less frightening than the physical threats, but it’s actually much more sinister. After all, it is illegal to physically attack someone, so the chance of anyone actually making good on a death threat are very low–but it is not illegal to file so many Freedom of Information Act requests or legal challenges over the use of government money that the target cannot conduct research.
Some researchers are becoming afraid to speak out on climate change, sometimes asking that their names not be associated with their work. Others labor on behind locks that have been changed and phone numbers that have been de-listed. This is happening.
Curiously, the problem is largely American. Australian climate scientists have also been harassed, but not on the scale of what their American counterparts have had to deal with. And while Canada has had a serious problem with high-level climate denial in the past, it never bubbled over into organized harassment of scientists. Britain and continental Europe and Japan have seen little of the problem, although scientists there are very concerned for their American and Australian colleagues. Climate-denial in general is specific to the English-speaking world, at least in part because organized climate denial is propagated largely by American organizations–that speak English. That the United States is at the center of the problem should, perhaps, not be much of a surprise. After all, the United States is key to global climate action–without American leadership, meaningful emissions reduction is unlikely to happen. With American leadership, we have a chance. And since the only way to accomplish meaningful emissions reduction is to stop burning fossil fuel, if I owned a boatload of stock in the fossil fuel industries and had no conscience whatsoever, I’d try to take out American interest in climate. Wouldn’t you? And, clearly, attacking American climate scientists is part of that effort.
The recent rise in harassment dates to over ten years ago, when two events occurred in quick succession: the release of the 2007 IPCC Report, which seemed on the verge of triggering meaningful climate action in the United States; and the election of a black man as President of the United States. The latter made possible the rise of the Tea Party, a movement that is demonstrably fueled by racist resentment rather than ideological concerns about government and yet is funded by the Koch brothers (plus Rupert Murdock), oilmen whose personal racism (do an internet search on “are the Kochs racist?”) is obviously less important than their investment in preventing climate action–they also fund the Heartland Institute, which is a major driver of American climate denial.
That the American version of hostility to climate action became deeply enmeshed with suspicion of government over-reach at the same time that the government was headed by a black man may not be a complete coincidence.
I do not raise the specter of racism simply to discredit climate deniers, but rather to suggest a mechanism whereby American conservative populism may have been hijacked and made to serve an anti-environmentalist agenda.
Some attacks on climate scientists–and by “attacks” I mean everything from threats to legal action to deliberate bureaucratic nonsense–have been perpetrated by individuals, others by organized climate-denier groups. Some of the most frightening, to me, anyway, come from government officials, including Lamar Smith, the (now former) Chair of the Science Committee of the US House of Representatives, and (now former) Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli.
Scientists themselves are not passive before all of this, and are fighting back, both individually and collectively. The Union of Concerned Scientists particularly is taking action, but needs money, and possibly other support. They need money with which to fight spurious lawsuits and stave off equally spurious bureaucratic demands which, together, might otherwise stop American climate scientists from working. I’m posting a link to their request again, here. Please support them.
Silencing inconvenient people is not an American thing to do–and when it happens anyway, the American thing to do is to stand up and do something about it.
I chose “Ideas Are Bullet-proof” as title for the original version of this post. It’s a quote from the movie, V for Vendetta. The bad-guy has the hero riddled with bullets, and yet the hero does not fall but ultimately triggers the fall of the corrupt and authoritarian government–because while the hero is not personally immortal, ideas cannot be murdered. I had occasion to remember the quote recently–a friend of mine, a political organizer and activist and a deeply religious man, wrote something on Facebook that, knowing him as I do, reminded me of the ultimate futility of trying to erase ideas by attacking inconvenient people.
I have just asked his permission to share his post with you:
A few minutes before Easter. I love this annual celebration of the underlying reality that empires can’t kill the Spirit, and that a spiritual wholeness is resurrected every time we take loving and wise action in the world around us. I see the life of Jesus as one of the most powerful patterns and examples of radical faithfulness. Miracles continue to happen. Blessed be.
I first posted “A Family Expecting” shortly after the birth of my nephew. I have re-posted it occasionally since then, and rewritten it at least once under a new title. I’m re-posting again now for reasons that should be obvious to friends and family–and I figure now is also a good time to remind people that what we’re doing really matters. Although this story is a fantasy, it is based on the published results of climate models. Please check out the original for the research links posted at the bottom.
Yesterday, my first nephew was born. He is small and wrinkled and has acne on his nose. He has wispy black hair and silvery-blue eyes. He knows the voices of his family and the scents and sounds of the hospital. He does not know about his home, going to school, or getting a job. He doesn’t know about casual friends, mean people, or birthday cake. He doesn’t know what the world will be like for him.
Neither do we, obviously, but if he lives to see his 89th birthday then his life will touch the end of the century, spanning the same period of time across which many climate models dare to predict. He comes from farming people in the Piedmont of the Mid-Atlantic. If he stays here and inherits his parents’ farm, as he might, then his life will also be the life of this landscape. What will he see?
This child will go home soon, and become the son of the land. He’ll rest in a cradle on the floor of a barn, his mother rocking him with one bare foot as she directs customers picking up vegetables in June. In two or three years, he’ll carry handfuls of squash guts as gifts for the chickens and a rooster as tall as he is will look him in the eye and decide he’s ok. He’ll listen to his parents worry about droughts. He’ll learn to hope the heavy rains don’t rot the tomatoes and that rising gas prices don’t break the bank. There will likely be more such worries as he gets older. Summers will be hotter. His mother will say it didn’t used to be like this, but grown-ups always say that.
According to the IPCC, by the time he’s a teenager, temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic will average maybe two degrees higher than they did during his mother’s childhood. That does not sound like much, but averages rarely do. One degree can turn a pretty snow into a destructive ice storm.
Warming, in and of itself, will be good for the crops; only a local rise of about five degrees Fahrenheit or more hurts productivity. That’s unlikely to happen here until my nephew is a very old man. But the Great Plains may warm faster, enough to cause a problem; he could study the shifting agricultural economics in college.
Our area could either get wetter or drier. Parts of northern and central Mexico will almost certainly get drier, maybe dramatically so. These areas are dry already, so I imagine a lot more people will start heading north. My nephew will discuss the refugee problem with his friends, lean on his shovel in the morning sun, and wonder if the United States has a responsibility to keep Mexicans from dying when Congress is already deadlocked over how to pay for the flooding in New England. Seems you can’t keep a bridge built in Vermont, anymore. He takes off his sun hat and scratches his thinning hair.
Years pass. My nephew thinks about his upcoming fiftieth birthday, and also about New York City, where three of his grandparents grew up. It’s turning into a ghetto. It’s not under water, exactly, though the highest tides creep slowly across abandoned parking lots in some neighborhoods, spilling over the older seawalls. The problem is this is the second time it’s been stricken by a hurricane, and now no one can get the insurance money to rebuild. The same thing has happened to New Orleans and Miami. Boston may be next. Those who can get out, do. Those who can’t, riot. They have a right to be angry. His daughter is pregnant with his first grandchild. My nephew cannot keep his family safe indefinitely, but he’s glad his parents taught him how to grow food.
More years pass, and my nephew turns sixty-five. He proud of his skill as a farmer, especially with the way the rules keep changing. The farm seems to be in Zone 8, these days. He’s got new crops and new weeds. He has friends in southern Maryland who haven’t had a hard frost in two years. Maybe this year they will; Farmer’s Almanac says it’ll be cold. Last year, he and his wife took a trip through New England and let his kids take care of the harvest for once. They stayed at romantic little bed-and-breakfasts and took long walks in the woods, holding hands. There was white, papery birch-bark on the ground, here and there, the stuff takes a long time to rot, but he knew he’d have to go to Canada if he wanted to see one alive. The American white birches are all dead, killed by a changing climate. It’s sad.
Eventually, my nephew becomes a very old man, a spry but somewhat stooped 89-year-old, mostly bald, with great cottony billows of hair spilling out of his ears, his breathing deep and slow and marred by occasional coughs and rumbles. He has lived long enough to see more change than any prior human generation has, and that’s saying something. A lot of the change is environmental, but not all of it. Major technological shifts have reworked the country yet again, and the entire political and economic center of gravity has pulled away from the coasts. He is aware of this upheaval intellectually, but viscerally he is used to the world he lives in. He lives well. He is loved and he is useful. No dramatic disasters have befallen him–the worst-case scenarios have not played out, but mostly he’s just been lucky. Plenty of disasters have happened to other people. My nephew is sympathetic. He writes his Congress-people and gives generously through his church whenever he can. But a lot of good that could have been done decades ago wasn’t.
I saw my nephew tonight. He’s at home now, wrapped in a blue blanket like an animate dumpling, slowly fretting against the swaddling. His wrists and ankles are as thin as my thumbs. He’s too young for baby fat. He doesn’t know what his future holds. And neither, really, do we.
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I wrote the above fantasy several years ago and many of my predictions have already come true. For example, Manhattan was hit by a major storm-surge (Superstorm Sandy) and Miami Beach now floods regularly due to sea-level rise. I don’t think my nephew knows it, but the years of his life thus far have seen consecutive global heat records broken, two successive record-breaking tropical cyclones (Haiyan and Patricia), rumors of “jellyfish seas,” a major climate-related refugee crisis, the possible California Megadrought, and dramatic, unprecedented fires in Canada, the United States, and Indonesia. Among other deeply worrying developments.
Come on, people, put your backs into it, whatever we make of the future, my nephew will have to live there.
I’m feeling better now, so I do hope to be posting more extensively soon. But I have to admit to feeling unmotivated because I am extremely pessimistic about the state of the world, now. If any of you want to write a guest post about hope, give me a shout, and I’ll seriously consider posting it.
The Climate in Emergency 