The following is a re-edited version of my Thanksgiving post from last year. It’s still timely.
“It’s that time of the year again,” warns a cynical-sounding blogger, “when warmists try to link Thanksgiving and climate change.”
Nice rhetorical trick, isn’t it? The thing is that of course anything in human life can be linked to climate change because everything we experience either depends on climate in some way or influences it. Most writers seem to cluster around one of two main narratives: Thanksgiving as an opportunity to talk about climate change and agriculture (as in turkeys could get more expensive as feed prices rise because of recurrent drought); and Thanksgiving as an opportunity to talk about communication (as in what you have to do with your climate-skeptic relatives). These are excellent points and I’m not going to try to make them all over again.
Instead, I want to talk about gratitude. I want to talk about abundance.
Have you ever thought it strange that we give thanks by eating a lot? If anything, American Thanksgiving sometimes seems more a celebration of greed and gluttony, with a perfunctory discussion of life’s blessings thrown in among the other topics at the dinner time. And yet, it is precisely abundance that serves to remind us of what we have to be grateful for. Thanksgiving provides the illusion of infinite, inexhaustible resources because there is more food on the table than the assembled eaters can consume. It is that illusion we use to evoke and celebrate our abundance.
And it it is an illusion. There is no such thing as an infinite resource; use enough of anything for long enough and eventually you will run out. Even “renewable” resources are only sustainable if you use them slowly enough that they can replenish themselves. We know from sad experience that it is indeed possible to run completely out of precious things that once seemed all but limitless. Passenger pigeons, for example. And in fact we are running out of pretty much everything we need for life and everything we need to give life beauty and meaning. Often, the depletion is hidden by ever more efficient usage that keeps yields high even as the resource itself runs out. We see this with fisheries, with soil health, with oil…. It’s not that we don’t have enough of what we need yet (hunger is usually a distribution problem, not a supply problem; there are more overweight than underweight humans right now). The problem is that we are using so much that the world is warming under the pressure.
See how big we are, relative to the rest of the biosphere? Humans already use more than the entire ecological product of the entire planet. That is possible because we are, in effect, spending planetary capital, reducing Earth’s total richness a little more every year.
I’m not trying to be gloomy for the sake of gloominess, I’m talking about the physics of the environmental crisis, the details of how the planet works. I’ve gone into detail on this before, but the basic idea is that the planet has an energy budget and that when part of the planet (e.g., us) exceeds this budget, the planet as a whole destabilizes. The biosphere actually shrinks and loses energy and diversity. One way to describe global warming and all its awful permutations is as a complex system being pushed into an entropic state.
We got into this mess by treating the entire planet as the thing a Thanksgiving feast is meant to simulate; literally endless bounty. And because we did that, our descendants will have a smaller, leaner table to set than our ancestors did–and the more we use now, the leaner that future table will get.
Does that mean we shouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving? Of course not.
Real, literal feasts are never actually about unlimited consumption. We know perfectly well that the Thanksgiving table may groan, but it’s not actually infinite. It just feels that way, and it is that feeling that is important. The illusion of physical abundance is a needed reminder of the truth of spiritual abundance–which is the actual point of the holiday, the thing we’re supposed to be celebrating on a certain Thursday in November.
The psychological power of the illusion of abundance does not depend on vast resources, something families of limited means understand well. By saving up and looking for deals and cooking skillfully, it is possible to produce a sumptuous feast that feels abundant and actually sticks within a fairly modest budget. The spiritual value is accomplished.
That’s what we have to do as a species. We have to find a way to live within our ecological means–the first step is to get off fossil fuel–and yet work with what we have so skillfully that what we have feels like more than enough. By staying within a budget we can stop worrying about running out, which is true, if paradoxical, abundance. Then the planet will have a chance to heal. The biosphere will grow again. And it is possible, just possible, that our descendants will live to see a more bountiful feast than we will.
And that will truly be something to be thankful for.
So, they want to build a natural gas pipeline in New England that would likely involve taking some land through eminent domain and would certainly involve exposing more land and water to contamination from leaks. Remember that, even if the chance of a pipeline leaking in any given year is low, if the pipeline runs for enough years the cumulative chance of an accident rises. The bottom line is, pipelines leak–we don’t know where or when, but we know the leaks will happen.
Now, there are those who say this risks are worth it for the greater good in order to meet the energy needs of the region. I have not examined the situation in detail, so I am not in a position to judge one way or the other except that I am inclined to object to all fossil fuel infrastructure. I don’t like pipelines, to be honest.
But what I like or don’t like is not in itself important. I will look into the situation and make an informed decision as to whether to weight in, and so should you; Google “pipeline in New Hampshire” to start with and you’ll find plenty of information. But my point at the moment is to question how we as a society make these kinds of decisions. Are the things we stand to gain from pipelines like this really worth the things we have to lose?
Is building new fossil fuel infrastructure really a good idea, when our time, money, and ingenuity desperately needed elsewhere? In getting ourselves out of fossil fuel, rather than further into it?
Because I wrote a full post on Tuesday, I’m just doing an update today. Specifically, I’m updating you on the upcoming climate demonstrations on the 29th of this month.
The idea is to hold coordinated demonstrations all over the world in order to demonstrate political will ahead of the Paris talks next month. As such, it is critical–the Paris talks must must must must result in a meaningful, binding agreement. Literally, the future of our species is at stake. So we all have to go and show our elected leaders that this matters to us.
The problem is that the organizers don’t seem to be doing very much. There are, for example, three separate demonstrations planned for Washington DC and two out of the three have no contact information listed for the organizers. My concern is that we will get hundred or even thousands of demonstrations that each attract a few dozen participants and that none will draw any serious media attention at all. That could be catastrophic.
So, your mission (and mine) is to pick a demonstration to attend, talk as many people into attending with you as possible, and also contact your local and regional newsmedia and ask them to cover the event. Then check to see if they do–if they don’t, write or call in and complain.
Also, contact your elected representatives and make sure they know you are going and why.
That should help. To find an event near you, click HERE.
Ok, so a couple of days ago a group of people variously blew up and shot up Paris in order to make everybody feel exposed and vulnerable. And in that they succeeded.
I always find these events frustrating and worrying, and not for the obvious reasons. No, I don’t get sad. There are too many people for the tragedy to feel real to me–if you want to get me to cry, tell me a story about one person in terrible circumstance, like a boy I saw interviewed some years ago–his family had fled a war-torn somewhere (Syria, I think) and he was in a refugee camp telling a reporter about the bomb that had gone off in the house next door–his neighbor’s head hand landed in the boy’s lap. Just the head. This poor little boy, telling his story, completely calmly. I will not forget that child. But tell me about 129 dead people and I don’t see the people, I see the number, 129. and I don’t get emotional about numbers. I also don’t feel especially vulnerable because it’s not news to me that there are people who want to kill other people and sometimes succeed. The world did not change for me this week.
But I am aware that the world is changing.
Everybody with a political bandwagon is trying to hitch it to Paris this week, including Mr. Trump’s bizarre insistence that more guns would have improved the situation. The governors of a number of states (including, sadly, mine) have tried to block the arrival of Syrian refugees, an act of reflexive xenophobia eerily reminiscent of our country’s reluctance towards Jewish refugees prior to WWII. People die from such policies. And predictably, we have calls for tightened security, increased militarism…I am worried that, as with 9/11, the Paris attacks will become an excuse to suppress dissent as unpatriotic–the thin edge of the wedge of fascism. That is one facet of my worry.
I was pleased to note the reluctance of Bernie Sanders’ campaign let the recent Democratic debates focus on the attacks–it suggests that he, at least, is not interested in public exhibitions of patriotic fear. He even, quite correctly, identified ISIS (or, more properly, Daesh) as a side effect of climate change, something I’ve addressed here before. I was definitely not pleased that climate change did not otherwise come up in the debate (except that one of the other participants stated, correctly, that “we all believe in climate change”).
Last week, just out of curiosity, I decided to research what would happen if we stopped causing greenhouse gas emissions. What I found spooked even me. Basically, there is a large chunk of this problem that we don’t have the power to stop anymore. Seen against this background, the reticence of the debate moderators, the general failure of even many environmentalists to take the problem seriously, all of it is extremely worrying.
Seriously? Terrorism is a serious problem, but no matter how abusive humans get with each other, the future always contains hope–peace and security can always return. Climate change, by contrast, is casting a shadow thousands of years long. The decisions we make today will, for better or worse, shape the options of generations. Why isn’t dealing with this everybody’s top priority?
The pictures making the rounds of Facebook over the last few days have been calling attention to the recent attack on Beirut and the sad fact that American media does not treat the tragedies of brown or non-Christian people as quite real. The point is well taken. I saw a documentary recently on brain function that described an interesting experiment: human subjects were wired to brain sensors and then shown video of hands being stabbed with needles. The participants’ brains registered an empathic response; the pain centers lit up, almost as though they had been stabbed themselves. But when the hands were given labels, like “Christian” or “Muslim,” the empathic responses stopped, unless the label matched the participants’ own identity. In other words, a visceral response, the ability to respond to the pain of others as if it were our own, can be short-circuited by the thought “that is not one of my people.”
Je suis Paris, but je ne suis pas Beirut, apparently. Je ne suis pas Syrian refugee.
The Karmapa Lama, a Buddhist teacher similar in stature to the Dalai Lama has framed climate change as a moral as well as a scientific and technical crisis–specifically that we are seeing a failure of empathy, a refusal to believe that the people being touched by the problem are really real. Such people include those affected by the killer heat waves in Asia, the firefighters lost out west, and the victims of the civil war in Syria and of Daesh. How do you act when a loved one is under clear and immediate threat? What hope might hinge on a single person being willing to stop at nothing? We need to act that way now.
What would happen* if we stopped causing climate change tomorrow?
It’s a fantasy, obviously, though an appealing one. It’s also food for a lot of interesting thought. What would life be like? What kind of climate would we be left with? Would climate change stop right away, or would there be residual change? Here, I’m going to explore the climate part of the question; if humans stopped producing greenhouse gas emissions right now, how would the climate respond?
For simplicity, our scenario is that all humans everywhere simply vanish and that all our machinery shuts itself down safely at once–I’ll ignore complications caused by unattended machinery blowing itself up and so forth. I want to be clear that I do not actually think my whole species should go extinct, I just don’t want to get pulled off topic by an overly complex scenario.
When do greenhouse gas emissions stop?
Emissions of different greenhouse gases stop at different times in our scenario. These gases are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and two groups of related gases, the chlorofluorocarbons and the hydrofluorocarbons (CFCs/HCFs), plus water vapor. I’m going to ignore water vapor here because the primary way its atmospheric concentration varies is not from emissions but from changes in the hydrologic cycle.
So, in our scenario, fossil fuel use and its carbon dioxide emissions stop immediately–but that’s only 57% of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by weight. Another 20% of the total is carbon dioxide from other sources, such as forest fires or aerobic decomposition. 14% is methane, 8% is nitrous oxide, and 1% is CFCs/HCFs. These gases come from different processes and some of these processes would continue a while.
Nitrous oxide comes largely from the production and use of nitrogen fertilizer. Its emissions should therefore drop off pretty quickly in our scenario. CFC/HCFC comes from industry and refrigeration and would therefore drop off much more slowly as abandoned refrigeration units slowly broke down and leaked. But the real issue would be methane and non-fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide.
If the world were simple, then after our piles of wood and paper and other biomas finished burning or rotting (that might take a few years), atmospheric carbon oxide levels should stabilize. The only remaining emissions would be from natural wildfire or decay and that carbon would be taken up again as other plants grew. But the world is not simple. One of the things climate change is doing is shifting some places from forest to savanna. It’s unclear how much of that shift has happened yet, but it’s quite possible that some of our forests are essentially dead trees walking, so to speak. They won’t get the rain they need to survive and when they die they will be replaced by grass, shrubs, and the occasional tree, not forest. In that case, their carbon won’t be recovered, driving the atmospheric concentration up. One of the nightmare scenarios we’re looking at is if climate change caused by forest dieback becomes enough to cause further dieback–a runaway positive feedback cycle in which the planet starts warming itself.
If that nightmare feedback loop has not started yet, I doubt it would under our scenario, given the substantial emission cuts from the end of fossil fuel use. But elevated CO2 emissions will persist at least as long as it takes those forests doomed by climate change to die and rot or burn.
Methane levels might actually not drop in our scenario. Methane occurs as a fossil fuel and is also produced by anaerobic decomposition at the surface. Agriculture is a major source, mostly from rice cultivation and animal husbandry, and these emissions would probably taper off pretty quickly. Our vast herds of cattle are not going to survive us for very long. But landfills and leaky fossil fuel facilities will keep producing methane for a long time–only we won’t be here to capture and burn off those emissions (burning converts methane to carbon dioxide, which is actually a good thing because methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas). So those emissions could actually increase without us. I do not have enough information to calculate what the net result would be. And the nightmare scenario is that melting permafrost liberates enough methane to warm the planet enough to melt more permafrost and release more methane….
So, what we’re looking at is that if humans vanished and neither nightmare cycle has begun yet, total greenhouse gas emissions would drop immediately by somewhere around 60% and then probably decrease further over a period of years. When the system would reach equilibrium seems unclear. The relative contributions of each gas would change dramatically as well, with methane becoming co-dominant with CO2 by weight. Since methane is both more powerful and less persistent in the atmosphere, this shift would be very important to anyone running climate models of our scenario.
How long will the climate keep warming after emissions stop?
Even if the atmospheric concentrations of all the greenhouse gases stabilized today (which under our scenario they would not), the global climate would continue to warm for a period of years. This lag between cause and effect is actually a very familiar principle; if physics didn’t work this way, cooks would not have to use timers because food would become fully cooked the instant it went on the stove or into the oven. Earth’s climate has a longer lag than it might otherwise because we have oceans and water can swallow a huge amount of energy before changing temperature, but basically things just take a while to warm. The experts aren’t sure, but Earth’s lag is probably around 40 years–which means we are now experiencing the consequences of the greenhouse gas emissions of the 1970’s.
In our scenario, then, the loss of humans does not start to show on our climate for another couple of decades. Only then will the planet start responding to the dramatic decreases in emissions.
How long will sea level keep rising after the warming stops?
Here is another familiar principle: ice takes time to melt.Glacial dynamics are a bit more complicated, since they receive new snow as well as lose meltwater and they move, but when scientists say a certain amount of melting is “locked in,” that basically means that a certain amount of ice already has the conditions necessary to melt. It’s like an ice cube set out on the table at room temperature; that ice cube is going to melt away to nothing even if the air in the room does not get any warmer. Because glaciers are very big, some of the melting now locked in might take thousands of years–or it might go faster. Scientists aren’t sure, and of course the rate of melt is likely to increase because the temperature will keep rising (for at least 40 years!), but however long the process takes, the melting we have already triggered will cause at least three feet of sea level rise, probably more.
How long will greenhouse gas levels stay elevated?
Under our scenario, and assuming those cycles of viciousness aren’t in operation yet, greenhouse gas levels would level off as soon as emissions stopped and then eventually start falling. How long would it take for the atmosphere to return to something close to what it was before? The answer depends on which gas you’re looking at.
CFCs/HCFs and their kin vary a lot. Some can stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, some for less than a year. I do not know how many of each kind we have up there and in what proportions, but we’re looking at a process that begins immediately and lasts for a very long time. Nitrous oxide breaks down in the stratosphere and takes just over a century to do it. Methane is quick, lasting only about 12 years (my source does not say what any of these chemicals becomes afterwards–I am suspicious that methane may become carbon dioxide, a complicating factor!).
Carbon dioxide is the tricky part, since it can leave the atmosphere by several different means. Much of it is absorbed into the ocean pretty quickly, where it no longer causes the greenhouse effect but instead causes ocean acidification. Also, this mechanism only works if there is more CO2 in the air than what the water near the surface can absorb. The upper layers of the sea are getting “full” now, meaning that not much more CO2 will go into the water until ocean mixing brings new water up to the surface. Chemical weathering of rocks also absorbs CO2, as does, of course, photosynthesis. And that last is the complicated one.
If the distribution of plants across the globe is roughly stable, then carbon sequestration by photosynthesis will be roughly matched by carbon emissions from fire and decay. But reforestation–and the re-establishment of wetlands–could become a powerful force for carbon sequestration with humans out of the way. Unless environmental damage has in some way precluded regrowth, which is possible, and unless the nightmare cycle has begun.
Without factoring in regrowth, somewhere above 65% of our carbon dioxide will be absorbed by the oceans in the next 20 to 200 years and the rest will drop very gradually, finally reaching equilibrium after a few thousand years. If plant regrowth proves significant, the process could go faster, maybe much faster–there is evidence that reforestation following the conquest of the Americas caused the Little Ice Age. In our scenario, it would be the entire world regrowing.
So what’s the scenario?
Bringing all of this information together, we can fill out the details of this scenario.
Humans either vanish or somehow become ecologically negligible in November of 2015. Right away, that very month, greenhouse gas emissions drop by about 60% and then continue dropping gradually over a period of years. Atmospheric concentrations of these gases also start to drop right away, though more gradually. Within a few years, meaningful reforestation begins in some areas, possibly balancing out climate-related deforestation elsewhere.
But the global average temperature keeps climbing–and it’s climbing faster than ever because the oceans have absorbed enough energy that now they’re warming rapidly, too. Extreme weather gets more so. If there are any humans left, they are having a very rough time of it. Somewhere around 2055, the climate begins to stabilize, although what it looks like by that point is anybody’s guess.
But by that point the atmospheric concentration of methane has fallen and leveled off at whatever its new normal is. Carbon dioxide levels are starting to fall meaningfully. I don’t know whether there is the same lag on cooling as there is on warming, but by sometime around the turn of the century I’m guessing the planet has started cooling again–and the cooling gradually accelerates over the following century as nitrous oxide starts to break down and as more and more carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans and by growing plants.
All this time, the sea level is rising. Water creeps gradually across the hurricane-ravaged ruins of many of the world’s major cities and upstream into previously fresh areas of the world’s rivers. Oysters grow on the streets of Manhattan.
I’m guessing that the cooling will take much longer than the warming, because greenhouse gas levels will stay somewhat elevated for thousands of years. The planet would also see a lot of delayed effects of the warming–along the lines of changing plant growth patterns or changing ocean salinity triggering various feedback loops. I don’t know what those loops would be or when they might occur. At some point the pace of change would slow enough that the biosphere will start to recover–but recovery from a mass extinction takes about ten million years.
Feeling depressed?
I don’t mean this as an exercise in pessimism. I mean it as an illustration of what optimism looks like at this point, what we can look forward to in the best possible scenario we can anticipate. If being limited to this as optimism bothers you, consider how the next generation will feel if we do not get our butts in gear right now.
Note: After writing this, I’ve thought of a bunch more complications that might change the details of the picture I’ve given. I stand by my factual statements, but my suppositions might be muddy. Creating a detailed, accurate climate projection is not my intention, though–that requires a supercomputer I don’t have. The point is to draw attention to the questions, to the issues of lag and lingering emissions–to provide food for thought.
I first posted “A Family Expecting” shortly after the birth of my nephew. I have re-posted it occasionally since then, but he’s getting old enough now that I figured the piece was due for a major re-write. So, here it is, edited for length and clarity, and with a new ending. 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 Peidmont 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. Or, he might prefer the shifting flights of birds, since many migrants head south based on conditions in Canada, and Canada will warm faster yet. Should be interesting.
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, 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.
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’s got 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. It’s sad.
My nephew lives 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 rework the country yet again, and the entire political and economic center of gravity pulls 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 befall him, the worst-case scenarios do not play out, but plenty of disasters do happen 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.
——————–
I wrote the above fantasy several years ago and many of my predictions have already come true. My little nephew has indeed learned about birthday cake (I hope he does not yet know about mean people) and does indeed share his farm with chickens, though he prefers the company of the goats and can imitate their voices. More darkly, 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 he 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 have written a lot of posts on the Keystone Pipeline over the past few years. This one might well be the last; today President Obama formally and finally rejected the project. Obviously, I’m pleased, but not so much because of the pipeline itself–as I’ve discussed before, the importance of Keystone XL has been primarily symbolic. One pipeline more or less is not going make all that much difference in terms of climate change–what is going to make a difference is who gets to frame these kinds of issues, who gets to decide what energy and land-use questions means. And a victory on Keystone is an encouragement to and a vindication of those people of think the environment–and especially climate–matters.
Today we got that victory.
And the thing I’m really excited about is the way President Barack Obama explained his decision. You can read the full text of his speech on the subject here. It’s not very long, you should click on the link and read it.
But the thing about that got me going is encapsulated by just two passages:
Now, for years, the Keystone Pipeline has occupied what I, frankly, consider an overinflated role in our political discourse. It became a symbol too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties rather than a serious policy matter. And all of this obscured the fact that this pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others.
And
America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change. And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face—not acting.
Isn’t that interesting? That he said both that the pipeline is mostly symbolic and that rejecting the pipeline is a critical part of exercising–and deserving–global leadership on climate change. What does this apparent contradiction mean? In means that that Mr Obama is making a symbolic statement. He intends precisely to give those who care about climate change a victory.
Which means we have to use that victory, act on it, take advantage of it and expand on it. We need to keep the momentum up–to stand behind the symbol and make sure that the United States really is willing and able to lead on that. How?
Vote.
Volunteer and donate for the campaigns of candidates with strong climate platforms.
Continue to insist that the media take climate change seriously.
And show up for demonstrations–demonstrate to our elected leaders that if they lead on climate we will have their backs. Show them that if they commit to real, radical change in Paris next month we will support them. There is another global day of action coming up on November 29th. Click here to find and join an event near you. Let’s make this one big.
(Note: the title of this article is the creation of my husband, Chris Seymour. He wanted me to mention that)
For this update, I’m going to direct you to an article by George Mionbot about the forest fires in Indonesia.
In case you can’t see that link, here it is again, right HERE.
Basically, there are massive wildfires going on right now, burning through huge areas of forest that are home to critically endangered animals, including orangutans. The smoke from the fires is also causing major air quality problems in the region, to the extent that thousands of people, especially children, may die. And those fires are now a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Forest fires are themselves not usually a big problem–forests that burn regularly adapt themselves to fire, and areas that burn are recolonized by organisms from areas that did not burn. The carbon dioxide emitted by the fire is taken up again as the forest grows back. But Indonesia’s forests have apparently been mismanaged for a very long time and that, combined with a serious El Niño-related drought, has allowed material to burn that otherwise would not have–releasing carbon dioxide that had been sequestered for a very long time and will not be easy to soak up again. Not to mention the fact that when habitat is already fragmented by logging and the palm oil industry, there might not be any left to spare to a forest fire So this isn’t a normal fire; it is a very serious situation which humans essentially caused and which is essentially being ignored (the story is being covered by big-name news agencies, such as NPR and the New York Times, it’s just not making the kind of headlines the scale of the problem deserves).
Read the article. And make some noise about the palm oil industry.
The Climate in Emergency 
