What’s Hot, These Days

Over the last month or so, while I’ve been preoccupied with disasters closer to home, a series of alarming articles have wafted across my social media feeds–articles with titles like:

• The Arctic Is Burning!
• The Arctic Is Melting!
• This Was the Hottest July on Record!

Alarmism? No, not at all. We live in alarming times, is all. But it’s high time I got caught up. I’ll catch you up in the process, just in case I’m not the only one who was more or less unavailable for a month or so. Then we can get on with talking about ideas, issues, and events in more detail.

News

Let me catch us up.

Fire in a Cold Place

The earliest article on the arctic fires I could find dates from July 13th and includes satellite images of smoke and fire taken that day. The article is a little vague as to exactly when the fires had started burning and whether the story was actually about a few large, long-burning fires or many brief, small fires operating, as it were, as a team. But the article did note that the burning has been extreme and is linked to climate change.

For more on the connection between fire and climate, please see my earlier post.

A somewhat later article from The Guardian provides more detail, confirming that the intense fire activity began in June and continued into July. Areas of Alaska, Siberia, and Greenland are involved. All told, it is the worst fire season the region has had in 16 years–which is as far as the satellite record goes back. Before then, it’s hard to know how many wildfires there really were, as the arctic is sparsely settled. The Guardian also confirms that in some areas the peat is burning. Peat, as you may recall, is organic material that doesn’t rot because it is normally waterlogged and highly acidic. The material builds up over thousands of years and represents a major carbon sink. That this stuff is burning is very bad news.

Other articles have covered similar territory over the past few weeks. More recently, NASA has explained why it is using its resources to study arctic fires; among other consequences for ecological function and public health, burning tundra has the potential to dramatically increase climate change. There are two main, and interrelated, mechanisms.

First, and most obviously, burning that peat releases a lot of sequestered carbon. But the other problem is that burning away vegetation and soil exposes the underlying permafrost to warmth, and it starts to melt. Without that ice, the ground can slump badly, and, of more global consequence, the organic matter previously trapped in ice can rot, releasing methane–a very powerful greenhouse gas.

So, on to the next bit of recent bad news.

Melting Records

This summer has broken global heat records, so it’s not surprising that the Arctic sea melted back to its second-smallest extent on record. Now, it’s important to be clear that sea ice is different from land ice. When glaciers melt (and that’s happening, too, of course), the water runs into the ocean and raises sea level. Melting sea ice does not raise sea levels because it was in the sea already. Put some ice in a glass, pour in enough water so the ice can float, and mark the level of the water. Let the ice melt, and you’ll see the water level stays the same. The sea works the same way.

Melting sea ice causes other problems, of course. Most obviously, polar bears depend on sea ice for hunting, but there are other issues. What makes the Arctic ocean distinct from the Atlantic is not geographic separation, but rather the ice, which both provides unique habitat and alters water chemistry and circulation. Without the ice, the Arctic ecosystem will collapse and merge with that of the Atlantic.

For example, the ice forms a substrate on which micro-algae can grow, sequestering carbon. Various animals eat that algae, notably copepods–an important food source for marine mammals. Copepods who don’t get eaten eventually die and sink to the ocean floor, taking their carbon with them. The Altantic has its own micro-algae and its own copepods, of course, but Altantic copepods are smaller and don’t carry as much carbon down to the sea floor.

The important thing to remember is that without sea ice, we’ll have one less ocean than we’re used to. The impact of that will be far-ranging.

This year has not been decisive. We knew the ice was melting before, and a significant amount of ice remains. This year’s heat is simply a reminder of what’s coming.

Heat

July was the hottest July on record–and the hottest of any month on record–worldwide. Before that, June was the hottest June on record, globally. The hot weather is the direct cause of the aforementioned melting and the indirect cause of the extensive fires. The heat itself is not caused by climate change; it is climate change.

Implications

I’m not saying everything is awful or hopeless–I wrote about hope last week, and Spock is still right. This is simply the world we live in, the context of everything we do. This is why it’s important for us to vote, to advocate, to educate ourselves and each other, and to protest.

Because climate change is real, and it’s not going away until we make it go away.

 

 

 

 

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Spock Is STILL Right

I’m going to need to research and write about the fires in the arctic, the rapidly melting glaciers, the latest legal/political developments and so on, but I still lack the time and energy for a well-researched “explainer” post. But I have reached a conclusion I would like to share with you; Spock is still right.

A Moment of Star Trek

About two weeks ago, I went over to the house of my sister and brother-in-law. My sister was asleep, but the others were watching an episode of Star Trek (the original series). It was the one where Spock and a shuttlecraft full of people get stranded on a planet with hostile natives–meanwhile, the Enterprise is urgently needed elsewhere and must leave in just a few days. The stranded group know they must repair their shuttlecraft by a certain deadline or there will be no ship waiting for them. The deadline comes and goes before the shuttlecraft finally makes it off the surface with only enough power for a couple of orbits. The Enterprise has already left. Things seem hopeless. But then Spock, the logical one, does something very odd–he ignites the last of their fuel all at once, producing a large, green flare, trying to signal the ship. He has no reason to believe the Enterprise is still close enough to see the flare, and using all the fuel means they will de-orbit and crash within a few minutes–and yet the Enterprise DOES see them (it was traveling much more slowly than it had been ordered to) and rescue them. Later, the other officers razz Spock on his illogical, emotional action. He insists he had acted quite logically. They tell him he is stubborn. He agrees.

“Spock is right, though,” said my brother-in-law, afterwards.

He explained that when you’re facing certain disaster, putting everything you have into an extreme long-shot possibility of survival is entirely logical. Given a choice between no chance and a small chance to get something you really have to have (like life!), the small chance is better than none–and it is worth all available resources.

I agreed, but I also understood the unspoken subtext. I knew that a hospice worker had come to visit that morning about my sister and that my brother-in-law was still researching possible cures.

Back on Earth

Last night, I found myself sitting on a Greyhound bus next to a talkative and friendly–but very drunk–thirty-something man who told me all about his dreams for his future, expressed interest in my new book, and paused about every twenty minutes to tell me how smart and wonderful he thinks I am. There was nothing scary or obnoxious about him. In fact, he reminded me very much of a young child, and I like young children. I gathered that he’s had a hard time of it lately, and that getting drunk and hopping on interstate buses in the middle of the night is probably not his normal mode of operation. I doubt I saw him at his best and I hope he ends up OK.

But somewhere around Dover we got to talking about climate change and he admitted that he is very sad and very scared. He wondered if it might be too late to do anything.

I told him it’s never too late to try, and advised him to study up and get involved. Maybe he will. If you ever find a food truck in South Carolina serving Spanish/Asian fusion and advertising organic, low-carbon-footprint, locally-grown food, tip generously and tell the owner I said hi.

You never know from where the help we need might come.

Endings

Spock was right to trigger the flare because the Enterprise saw it and saved the day. If the ending of the episode had been different, if the Enterprise had not seen the flare, would Spock have been wrong?

In fact, my sister never woke up that night. The Enterprise didn’t come back. The landing party are all dead.

Spock is still right.

Because the logic actually is impeccable. What else are you going to do, sit around doing nothing in the face of disaster? Why?

Hope is not a technique for making what you want happen, so when you act on hope and the thing you hoped for doesn’t pan out, it’s not that your hope didn’t work. But while to try is no guarantee of success, not trying does pretty much guarantee failure–and sometimes miracles do happen.

So is it too late to do something about climate change? You’re still alive, aren’t you?

Go ahead, give it what you’ve got. Make a green flare.

Still Can’t

I’m having a rough time. Some of you know why. I sat down to write a post today and an hour later nothing has been accomplished. So here is a re-post instead.

…………

Tilting Windmills

August 15, 2017 by Caroline Ailanthus 2 Comments

My friend says she’s sometimes not sure activism is worth it anymore, because the world is about to end. I don’t share that problem. My problem is I don’t know how to choose among the many possible forms of activism, when I believe they might all be fruitless anyway. Six of one one, half a dozen of doing not much. Also, sometimes I get so anxious I can’t do anything at all.

A few days ago, my friend posted to Facebook, attempting to start an “informal dialogue” about how to cope with climate change psychologically. How to deal with the often paralyzing and exhausting fear that awareness brings, especially when the surrounding society offers so often the tempting narcotic of pretending it’s not happening, or is happening only in a distant and mild way. As if we had fifty or a hundred years to sort all this out. As if climate change weren’t especially important. It’s lonely, as she said.

I thought I can help! I have a blog about this very thing! But, when I looked, I saw no entries that really suggested a solution. And when I searched online, while I found confirmation that the discipline of psychology is, indeed, tackling the issue, I saw nothing of particular immediate benefit to me.

Enter the Man of La Mancha

Coincidentally, into my doom and gloom, came an email from another friend about something totally different. Among other topics, he referred to some of his own environmental work as “tilting at windmills.” Of course, that’s a reference to Don Quixote, the classic figure of fiction who deluded himself into believing he was a heroic knight and who attacked windmills, believing them to be fairy-tale giants. My friend is doing nothing in any way similar–the giants he is attacking are all very real–but he has a self-deprecating sense of humor.

But what occurred to me when I read his email was the following:

From: https://xkcd.com/556/

 

If you can’t see the comic I’ve pasted for whatever reason, it starts out with a picturesque landscape of modern wind turbines silhouetted against a peach-colored background. In subsequent panels, two people (rendered as stick figures, this is XKCD, by Randall Monroe, and he mostly does stick figures) admit that the turbines look disturbingly like the tripodal monsters from certain sci-fi stories–and the turbines promptly grow legs and become exactly such monsters, ravaging the landscape. Their huge legs pound the ground with calamitous thunder. The terrified humans despair–but a voice calls “stand aside!” and there, on a hill, lance at the ready, stands DON QUIXOTE!

The “mouseover text” is “The moment their arms spun freely in our air, they were doomed–for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane.”

When my friend mentioned “tilting and windmills” I also thought of Quixote’s story from the character’s own perspective. To others, he seems simply to be having a mental health problem–and that is part of the truth, as the book makes clear. But the deeper, more complicated part is that Quixote is attempting to live by the rules of a vanished, and perhaps always fictional world, a world characterized by honor, nobility, and bravery such as most people now ignore. He is not so much fighting against windmills as fighting for the proposition that there is something worth fighting for, that a man on a horse and with a sense of honor can make a difference in the world.

In the actual book, that fight is a losing proposition. Quixote’s attempts to be a hero all backfire, he helps nobody, and ultimately he regains his sanity and disavows all interest in the romantic stories that used to fascinate him. It is Randall Monroe’s contention, however, that crazy Don Quixote is still out there somehow, and that there will come a time in which we need him.

When we need precisely someone who is crazy enough to believe that he or she can make a difference, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Is the real question, then, how do we maintain ourselves as the right sort of “batshit insane”?

Some Provisional Answers

I’m hardly an expert on how to solve the world’s problems. There are days I can barely manage to clean the cat box. I’d be much more comfortable if I could have Googled up some DIY tips on how to fight the good fight, recommended by a successful activist with a background in psychology besides. But that didn’t happen. So, instead I’m presenting a couple of ideas of my own. After all, I’m going to be forty next week. I figure that after forty years (less one week) on this planet, I’ve learned a few things worth sharing.

1. You Can Only Do What You Can Do

A primary struggle for me is finding myself mysteriously unable to do things. I mean I intend to do it, I plan to do it, I mean to do it, and I don’t. “It” could be anything from losing weight to cleaning the toilet, but the most relevant example is the expansion of this site that I began soon after the election and have not yet completed. Why not?

I’ve tried on a lot of explanations, mostly revolving around quirks of my brain that really do make a lot of things harder for me, but none of those explanations suggested a solution. I suspect I’ve simply been engaging in my own version of what my mother does–calling herself lazy when she finds she can’t work more than anyone humanly could (she’s retired now, but still busy with four grandkids and a big house and yard, plus volunteer commitments). Both of us are under the persistent delusion that we have super-powers, and we set goals and priorities for ourselves accordingly.

I mean, here I am, working as a free-lance writer to pay the bills, plus maintaining three unpaid blogs and writing multiple novels all at once, and I’m down on myself for not also building this site into a major online resource for activists?

Maybe if I sat down and made an honest assessment of what I can do, and then re-prioritized, I’d be more successful at meeting my goals.

I’m not just talking about time management, here. I’m talking about energy. I’m talking about money. I’m talking about resilience in the face of stress. I’m talking about physical and mental health. I’m talking about ability, which, yes, does vary. All of this varies, from person to person and from day to day, often for reasons we do not and cannot know. To some extent we may be able to change our reality–I may be able to do things tomorrow that I can’t do today–but we can’t just wish it away.

If you only have ten minutes a day to devote to saving the world, then accept that and make your ten minutes count. Develop a plan you can actually enact.

2.Don’t Ask Whether You Can Do It–Ask How

I realize this point and the previous one look like contradictions, but I’m actually addressing two different aspects of “can.” There is choosing an achievable goal, and there is choosing a workable method.

For many years I confused the two. When I despaired of achieving something and people told me to believe in myself, I thought they meant I should make like the Little Engine That Could and motivate myself to the top. And that just made me feel worse, because while strong motivation can indeed unlock hither-to un-guessed-at possibility, I knew that real limitations exist also. Sometimes, even the Little Engine can’t.

Maybe that’s what they did mean–the idea that attitude is everything is a very common fallacy, and it results in people not only feeling terrible for not being good enough, but also torturing themselves with the thought that somehow they must not have wanted it badly enough.

But eventually somebody nudged me into realizing that there is a better way to think about goals; don’t ask whether the goal is attainable, assume that it is–then ask what method is workable.

Maybe the Little Engine can take a different way up the mountain.

There is no logical reason whatever to waste time and energy wondering whether we can still prevent climate change disaster. We know that this goal is worth everything we can throw at it, and that if we are to succeed, we must throw everything at it. We will get up that hill or we will die trying, because the alternative is to die without trying and that is worse.

The real question is how are we going to try getting up that hill?

3. Just Pick Something

Ok, but how are we going to attack that hill? Let’s be honest; there are days when each of us thinks we may be facing a no-win scenario, here. And when you believe that you’ll fail no matter what you do, how do you pick a thing to try to do anyway?

I have lots of experience with this conundrum, because I have a really hard time making seemingly arbitrary choices. There are days I do no housework at all because I can’t decide whether to clean the kitchen or the bathroom first. Based on my extensive experience, I can offer two suggestions:

1. Pick something. If it doesn’t matter which you pick, then you can’t pick wrong.
2. Once you pick, do something to make it seem less arbitrary, like investing money in your choice, or commiting to a friend you’ll stick with it.

4. The World Usually Doesn’t End

This one’s pretty simple. Yes, it seems plausible that everything we hold dear is about to be destroyed, especially this week, as the leaders of two nuclear-armed nations engage in what might even charitably be termed a pissing contest. But the end of everything has seemed plausible before and the world didn’t end. It usually doesn’t.

5. Don’t Dis Despair

Another friend of mine insists that despair is a useful state, not to be resisted. I don’t really understand this. I trust him to be wise, however.

I do know that temporarily giving into despair can be useful if only in that it allows a rest from the work of resisting despair. Rage, cry, curl up in a fetal position, and then pick yourself back up and get on with things again. I also know that giving up on one thing can be the first step to trying something else–a different, more workable method, perhaps.

How to…?

So, how to keep it together in the face of climate change, or at least fall apart in a useful way? I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t found anyone who can tell me. But at least part of the solution, in my experience, involves the following:

1. Honor your own situational and personal limits
2. Choose ambitious, pie-in-the-sky goals and practical means of reaching those goals
3. If no course of action looks better than any other, choose randomly
4. No matter how bad things look, remember the world usually doesn’t end
5. And if you do get caught up in despair, give in to it occasionally–you might find something useful down there in that pit.

That’s what I’ve got. Let’s see how it works.

Three Views of Life on Earth

Stuff is happening in the world–fires in the arctic, notably, though there is other important news to cover. But for me to cover it myself would take time that I don’t have free this week for sad reasons that some of you already know. So instead I’m giving you this repost of a piece originally written for college some years ago but posted here back in April. I find it relevant today.

-C.

Just before Yule this past year, I was chatting on the phone with a friend of mine, Robert, while doing some sewing. I turned to do something in the kitchen only to discover upon my return that my cat, her ulcerated tumors bleeding again, had covered my workspace, including my dress pattern, with irregular, red spots. I hustled around trying to separate my patterns so they could dry and protect my fabric without interrupting the flow of conversation, whose subject seemed bizarrely civilized under the circumstances; we were discussing the genome of the grape and the proper ways to serve different kinds of wine while I stared, transfixed, at the red, Rorschached blotches like footprints, stalking, taking, slowly, my cat.

Here, observe, three views of life on Earth.

One:

Saturday morning in January, warm, hot as May; the breeze moves, gentle, as I stand on the sidewalk waiting for the bus by the Ethan Allen furniture store and St. Phillips Lutheran Church, chickweeds growing in delicate riot by my feet, so far so good, but also dandelions, clover, greening grass, while the trees stand mute above like skeletons. This isn’t right; though the air is pleasant on my simple skin I can’t enjoy it. This weather is as apocalyptic as last summer’s heat waves when I lay, sick and dreaming, too hot to work, all thought, all feeling driven off by the eternal, heavy, heat, save one; this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, but this is the way it is going to be, more often now, because of us. A funeral procession drives by, headed by slowly flashing police escort, dozens and dozens of cars of mute, hard-eyed people. Most of the cars have only a single passenger, or at most, two. An oil truck cuts through the line to make a delivery to the strip mall behind me, its presence as lyric to the day as a line of poetry. I wonder, whose funeral is it?

Two:

My cat wants to go out, and I can deny her nothing, except for all the things I have denied her and all the things it simply isn’t mine to give; this leash, for example, is a compromise between her exuberance and her body, too sick to take a rabies vaccine. She has never gotten fully comfortable outside and never developed her body to its feline potential; as far as I know, she has never climbed more than a few feet up a tree. Probably, she never will, now. Maybe she might have if I had simply let her out and hoped she didn’t get bitten, or maybe I should have gone out with her more, for longer. Who am I to draw this line here? Who am I to bring a cat in out of the sun just because I have something else I need or want to do? These are judgments I do not feel competent to make and I never have felt competent to make them through these long years of one kind of leash or another hanging between us, yet make them I must. Nothing that I gave her could ever have been enough to absolve her of further desserts. We walk, and she pauses to scent-mark the bottom twig on the lilac bush, rubbing it with her nose, her gums, sniffing it delicately. I sniff it after her and compare the scent to that of one higher up, above the reach of cats and foxes. I fancy I can detect a difference. She stalks a bird in the ivy bed, and I flatten myself out behind her, trying to move forward without frightening her quarry, giving her as much range as possible with the leash, my arm, and the length of my outstretched body. The bird must have flown while neither of us noticed, for now it is no longer there. The day is fine and high and blue, and she doesn’t seem to know she’s sick. Or, at least she doesn’t favor herself, she goes full-bore, always, along her small, plucky way. I mean, what else does she have to do? It’s not like she’s going to get better, it isn’t like she has time to spare in self-pity. She just plays the cards she’s dealt. This animal is a carnivore, whose kind prune and in so pruning, create the reproductive exuberance of small rodents and birds. Fed on organic ground beef through the agency of human loyalty and partisanship, this cat has lived almost nine years. In that time, how many steers have died young for her?

Three:

Walking through campus I can see that the remaining old elms are dying; they have brownish yellow stripes running up the grey and furrowed trunks. My Dad told me about Dutch elm disease when I was little; I have never known a time when its inundations were not part of my history, but as I’ve been watching, over the better part of thirty years, the pandemic has progressed and more of the great cambium fountains have come down. When I was little, I remember, the elms met over the walkways, across the greens. I remember walking, on Community Day, a visceral memory; the smell of cotton candy and funnel cake, a grown-up hand—whose? I only remember the hand—in mine, and above an arching green roof full of multicolored balloons escaped from the careless hands of other children. The greens are open, now, the places of most of the giants taken by smaller trees, another kind of elm, I think, their stems slowly thickening into adulthood. My friend, Robert, is an ecologist who is busy mapping the community types of my state. When I brought him here, on the way to a coffee shop, he remarked that the campus probably counted as Modified Meadow or Modified Hardwood Forest. He’s grasping at straws; this isn’t altered, this is new: American Collegiate, typified by dying elms, manicured grass and a fauna of Frisbee players, grey squirrels, and playful dogs. No matter how aberrant this slow death of trees seems to me, the elms would never have died in such numbers if they hadn’t been planted unnaturally thick to begin with.

Humans are capable of a certain impartial perspective, but at heart we’re partisan animals living in a non-partisan world. Global warming and human-associated habitat destruction are surely no more radical than the asteroid that marked the KT boundary. Life recovered, growing even more diverse in time, and will again; nothing stays the same for long. Similarly, the birthrate of any given species is adjusted to its mortality rate; if it takes three dozen mice born per one that makes it to adulthood to keep even with the hunger of cats, then that is the number that mother mice produce, yet every pup is an individual. One could say each mouse deserves a full and happy life, just as every cat does, but it is the nature of both cats and mice, in their fullness, to produce more than can so live; to lower the mortality rate would require lowering the birthrate which would change the nature of the animals’ lives. Anyway, which individuals don’t get born in that case? Isn’t it better to live for at least a little while? Like climate change and disaster, death and even personal tragedy are just part of how things work; if these things did not exist, life as a whole would be different and probably the poorer for it.

Yet we are partisan, and we must behave in partisan ways; we act, we do one thing rather than another, and so we must make choices based on some judgment, some assessment of value, even if the value is a purely private priority. Mass extinctions happen, and in the grand scheme of things may not actually be a problem, but I must throw my small weight either for this one or against it, and I do not want a mass extinction on my watch, on my conscience. Plants, animals, and diseases do invade each other’s territory; humans may be causing an unprecedented invasion, but we are not causing the only one. Communities adapt and change. Diversity will recover. Nonetheless, I want my trees not to die of some imported disease, even if their gothic branches were themselves an artificial presence. And I want my Gertie to have not had cancer to begin with, I don’t care if she’s no better or worse than a mouse or a beef steer–or me, for that matter, I wanted this one, this particular one, to get the proverbial sun, moon and stars. That I, a mortal human, couldn’t reach them for her does not reduce the injustice any less.

We live in a world of change and transformation; one thing eats another, one thing subsumes another, one thing takes another’s place. Even if it were possible to pick sides, once and for all, on moral grounds, it would not be possible on physical grounds, for not only does the success of a predator mean the failure of a prey animal–and vice versa–but it is the very opposition, the very dynamism of the system, that makes the system in the first place. Under whatever happy façade of civilization or rationalization, we are incontrovertibly members of a system where things break and change and die as an inevitable matter of course, without violating the integrity of the whole. Under whatever veneer of educated perspective, however, we remain organisms who fight and try to win.

Candidates for President on Climate, Part V: Independents, Third-Partiers, and Republicans

I spent some weeks discussing the many hopefuls for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States–the review took up five separate posts (click here and here and here and here and here). But there are more people running than just Democrats, and we need to think about them, too.

I should reiterate that I’m talking only about climate, here. There are many other important issues that bear on the election, but climate change is the focus of this blog and the one issue we have to get right or none of the other issues can possibly turn out well.

The Field of (Candidate) Dreams

The remaining field of candidates includes Republicans, third-party candidates, and independents (except no independents have declared, yet)–and even a few more Democrats.

Republicans

There are currently two candidates seeking the Republican nomination for president. A third is seriously considering it. It’s interesting to note that while neither potential challenger to President Trump is a climate hawk, both are on record as believing climate change is real and should be dealt with. They are where Democrats were just a cycle or two ago. This is progress.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump is running again, but since we already know he’s terrible from a climate perspective, and climate is the whole perspective of this blog, he can be safely eliminated from consideration; even if you liked everything else about him, his policies, and his performance as President, if you care about the climate and everything that goes with it, you can’t let Donald Trump win a second term.

Bill Weld

Bill Weld is making a serious attempt to challenge President Trump for the Republican nomination. He is currently practicing law, but has political experience (he was governor of Massachusetts in the 1990’s) and has run for national office (vice-president, on the Libertarian ticket, in 2016). He is, in general, a small-government fiscal conservative who favors liberal-to-progressive social policies. Despite his Libertarian connections, he not only calls for climate action, he supports rejoining Paris.

His record on climate is both minimal and a little mixed. As a Libertarian candidate in the previous election, Mr. Weld said humans were “probably” changing the climate and expressed concern about “needlessly costing American jobs and freedom,” but did support “regulation that protects us from future harm,” and he did have a good environmental record as governor. But there are signs his views continue to evolve. The primary thrust of his campaign appears to be a specific rebuttal of Donald Trump, and he has strongly criticized Mr. Trump’s anti-environment policies in terms suggesting that Mr. Weld understands climate change fairly well and accepts its seriousness–and he has invoked Teddy Roosevelt as an example of what he wants his party to be.

Is Bill Weld the Republican environmental leader the country needs? I have argued before that the US does need such a leader, since something as important as climate action should not be left to a single political philosophy. I have not been able to track down any specific policy proposals on his part relating to climate, besides rejoining Paris, but he does appear to be at least a semi-viable option.

Putting my political commentator hat on for a moment, I don’t like Mr. Weld’s chances. Aside from the fact that primary challenges to incumbents are extreme long-shots at best, Mr. Weld’s mix of policy positions puts him in a bad position. He is pro-choice, meaning he essentially cannot compete for the votes of the religious right–precisely those Republicans who might most object to Mr. Trump on moral grounds. Voters who do want a pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, pro-climate action president are likely to find a stronger candidate on the other side of the aisle, in, say Elizabeth Warren.

But I wish him luck.

Mark Sanford

Mark Sanford is not yet in the race, but he is seriously considering it. He is more conservative, more simply Republican, than Mr. Weld, and thus may have a somewhat larger impact on the primary process, if he jumps in. He has more recent political experience, having been governor of South Carolina just a few years ago. And he wrote an op-ed calling for Republican climate action back in 2007.

Unfortunately, I haven’t heard of him saying anything at all about climate since.

Democrats

Yes, of course we’ve already covered Democrats. In fact, one of them, Eric Swalwell, has already dropped out. But Joe Sestak hopped in while I was writing the posts, and somehow Mike Gravel escaped mention though he’s been in the race since April and is now making noises about dropping out. Tom Stayer has also recently jumped in.

Mr. Sestak has some modest but real climate credentials and favors a carbon-fee-and-dividend system, plus rejoining Paris. Mr. Gavel has several strong environmentalist positions, but has a history of sometimes breaking with environmentalists. He has supported a carbon tax, and can discuss the economics of fossil fuel thoughtfully. But he doesn’t seem to have said anything about climate in some years. Mr. Stayer is a billionaire who has made a name for himself in climate advocacy, although as a candidate his major focus has been not on climate but on getting corporate money out of politics.

There are still a few others about whom buzz has developed and who have not yet ruled out a run.

Greens

The Greens have not yet entered their candidate-selection process, and do not have any high-profile hopefuls. It’s almost certain that the Green Party candidate for president will have excellent climate credentials; the question will be what his or her other credentials are and how the campaign influences the rest of the race.

Libertarians

There is a large field of Libertarians vying for their party’s nomination. Since even the eventual nominee will be an extreme long-shot, I’m not going to discuss them individually here. It’s also worth noting that Libertarian values are at odds with a President exercising much leadership in climate action anyway–when the US pulled out of Paris, the Libertarian Party Chair said that the content of the Paris Accord was less important than the principle by which such decisions are made–and that the President should not have the power to make the Paris Accord to begin with.

The political philosophy here, according to Chairman Sarwark, is that once the government is out of the way and no longer distorting the market, market forces will prevail and individuals will do the right thing (switch to renewables).

The problem here is three-fold.

• First, market forces are inherently amoral. Even assuming the relevant body of economic theory is correct, the “invisible hand” of the free market serves only to ensure economic efficiency in the face of consumer demand–and what consumers demand is not always the same as what citizens want for their country, even when the “consumers” and the “citizens” are the same people.
• Second, we all know that many individuals do not do the right thing in many different life contexts. Climate action is not necessarily an exception.
• Third, government power is not the only form of concentrated and potentially despotic power that exists. Removing government power will not result in a free society unless there is also some mechanism to prevent the concentration of power through either money or physical force. Such a mechanism could be developed, on that subject this blog remains neutral, but one does not exist yet–and moneyed would-be despots with an interest in preventing the switch to renewables already exist. Removing government from the equation will only result in their operating directly rather than through government proxies.

A Libertarian President who refrained from exercising leadership on climate would be little different, in practice, from a President who actively opposed climate action.

Independents

Somewhat surprisingly, I have not found any confirmation that anyone is actually running for the U.S. Presidency as an independent yet. Most of the likely contenders have either announced they won’t run or declared as either Democrats or Libertarians. Even Vermin Supreme is running as a Libertarian this cycle, according to his Facebook page (although his Mandatory Tooth-brushing Policy would seem to be antithetical to Libertarian principles). Of course, with the election still more than a year away, there is plenty of time for someone to declare.

The Big Picture

The big picture is that for the first time, climate is being placed at or near the center of the agenda by the candidates of one major party, and at least some candidates from the other major party also have climate messages. It’s where we should have been a decade ago, but at least we’re here now.

From a climate perspective (remember, this blog is neutral on all else), I’d be comfortable with any of the Democratic front-runners, and not too uncomfortable with several others in the race. But if you’re looking for an endorsement, Elizabeth Warren has it. She combines serious, thoughtful dedication to the issue with true political grit and real electability.

Now we just have to get some climate sane person in.

Note

Hi, all,

This week has just gotten horribly busy. I’m preparing to launch my second novel on Monday, and that takes a lot of time. So, stop by my book launch party if you would (it will be on Facebook LIVE, if you can’t make it to New Hampshire) on Monday, if you would, and I’ll post here again on Tuesday.

-best, C.

Pledging Our Sacred Honor

Did you have a good Fourth of July? American Independence Day, of course, a day I tend not to get terribly excited about as I’ve lost my taste for fireworks, but I do still like to listen to the annual reading of the Declaration on NPR. What struck me this year was the phrase “our sacred honor,” something we don’t hear much about these days. The courage and commitment of the Founders–their various moral shortcomings notwithstanding–is also remarkable. Remember, they didn’t know they would win. They weren’t the Founding Fathers, yet. They were making it up as they went along.

So are we.

When in the course of human events it becomes obvious that the people in charge do not wish you well, and in fact have as their stated and consistent aim your failure and the destruction of all you hold dear, then by God you have a right–even a duty–to do something about that. You know where I’m going with this. I’ve argued in years past that the failure of American leadership on climate constitutes a kind of treason, a selling out of American interests to those of certain other countries. It’s time, and more than time, to take our power back.

This is the first election year in which climate change is a major campaign issue. It has become such because people are committing themselves, pledging their sacred honor, to the issue. Political leaders seldom do the right thing because they are asked nicely–didn’t work on King George–but because the people stand up and demand it.

Declare yourselves.