Under a White Sky

I really need to write about all the issues I mentioned last week, but this week I’m running behind, so I’ll write a quick book review instead.

My climate book club just read Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert. Somewhat atypically for a book about climate change (and other topics, in this case), I have no bone to pick with the author. She did a fine job. Now, it’s true that the book was a difficult read–not that the reading itself was hard, it’s a perfectly accessible and engaging text, but it offers no hope nor any suggestion as to what to do. But Ms. Kolbert is a journalist. Her job is to provide information, not to tell her readers how to feel or what to do. She did her job quite well.

Anyway, the climate authors who have told me to keep my chin up have mostly failed to cheer me as I don’t believe their sources of hope.

I hope, when I hope, for other reasons.

Ms. Kolbert’s premise here is that the distinction between nature and humanity has blurred and will continue to do so. She takes as her topic various people attempting to control natural processes on a large scale in order to fix problems caused by other people attempting to control natural processes–whether such attempts can do anything other than create larger problems yet is a question she asks but does not answer. She does interview several people who argue that at this point we have a moral obligation to try. I’m not sure that’s right. Neither is she.

To be clear, the nature/humanity split has always been fuzzy at best–the idea that humans are not natural or outside nature has always been an illusion. We are no more outside nature than we are outside physics. But it is true that we are changing things that we didn’t used to be able to change. There is nowhere in our biosphere now that is not being influenced or altered by humans to some degree, and that degree is growing all the time. We are at a point where we must acknowledge our collective power and make decisions about it–if Ms. Kolbert has a message beyond the purely informational, that is it.

Years ago, my dad remarked to me that when he first became a home-owner, he found himself in the position of, every day, having to decide whether or not to kill trees. Not that he thought daily about whether to kill them–most days, of course, the possibility of killing trees didn’t enter his mind. But every day he did have the option to call up a tree service and have any of the trees on his property cut down, so that every day he did not do so was an act of mercy on his part, whether the decision was conscious on his part or not.

Once you have the power to do a thing, not deciding ceases to be an option.

(Of course, my dad co-owned the property with my mom, so the image of Dad-as-sole-arbiter-of-tree-life is a bit inaccurate, but that wasn’t his point then, and it’s not my point now)

We, or at least some subsections of we, can now do things like fill the stratosphere with reflective particulates so as to cool the planet by dimming the sun. Whether we should do that, and other things like that, is no longer an avoidable question.

Each chapter of Under a White Sky takes as its topic a different attempt to fix a human mistake at large scales. The first involves invasive Asian carp and the various attempts to prevent their spread and to remove them from where they already are. The story gets pretty weird in places (did you know there are canals that have been electrified as a barrier to fish? There is lots of interesting detail and vivid scenes, much for various species of geek to enjoy. But the scale of the stories covered increases, chapter by chapter, always aiming for the biggie: climate change and the possibility of geoengineering.

Were enough particulates sprayed into the stratosphere to cool the planet, the sky would turn white.

Personally, I think some of Ms. Kolbert’s interviewees may be correct in that the political will to radically reduce emissions doesn’t exist, and that sooner or later geoengineering is likely to become politically unavoidable. Unless the emissions stop, though, that won’t be a solution.

The idea that geoengineering will be part of the solution in any scenario, instead of just another, even bigger, problem, depends on a lot of very optimistic assumptions for which we don’t have good evidence. Of the proponents of geoengineering I would ask why are you picking those optimistic assumptions rather than a different set? As long as we are assuming things….

Ms. Kolbert quotes some people as stating that the emissions just won’t stop, so we’ve got to find other solutions. But that’s not quite right–the only barrier to stopping the emissions tomorrow is political–it is technically feasible. The technical challenge is to stop the emissions without causing disaster, but that’s probably doable. It keeps not getting done because of a lack of political will. It’s important to remember that. There are literally people who would rather the rest of the world burn if it means keeping what they have. It’s important to remember that.

To those who think we can’t reduce emissions without causing widespread human suffering, I say that if we don’t reduce emissions steeply and fast there will be (with or without geoengineering) widespread human suffering. They may be, in some cases, different humans.

I suggest being very careful about making optimistic assumptions that have the effect of deciding which humans get to be collateral damage.

Do It

Photo by Ben Mater on Unsplash

I’d like to put a bug in your ear.

As some of you know, it’s been bothering me for a long time that there aren’t climate marches anymore, at least not in the United States, where I live. I mean big, well-publicized marches in major cities that are designed to attract thousands of people.

What protests have occurred in recent years have been of two types.

There have been coordinated swarms of small, local protests, the idea being, I suppose, to get huge numbers of people involved all across the country–except the events are, individually, too small to make the news or to otherwise gather any attention at all. I’ve been to several, and they feel pointless. I suspect they are pointless, which is why there haven’t been any lately.

There have also been outbreaks of street theater, thanks to groups such as Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise movement, but these are also localized and get no media coverage–and since they are more or less designed to get participants arrested, there is a limit to who can afford to get involved. Although such tactics have gotten some real traction in Europe and perhaps other places, they don’t seem effective in the United States.

Were the big marches effective?

I don’t know, but they may have. There is evidence that large protests can have indirect effects by acting as rallies and networking opportunities around a cause. More directly, then-President Obama did become more of a climate hawk towards the end of his tenure, when there were a lot of such marches, and PBS Newshour started covering climate issues without bringing climate deniers on air for “balance,” and important shift. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

And I just watched an American Experience, “The Movement and the Madman,” that showed how two Vietnam-era anti-war protests had an effect far beyond what was visible to the public at the time. After all, the President publicly stated that he was ignoring and would continue to ignore the anti-war movement, and it must have seemed like he was doing just that. The war didn’t end for another six years, not until after President Nixon resigned partway through his second term. That his championing of the war didn’t cost him the election must have seemed very disheartening to the protestors. And yet, we now know that President Nixon was seriously considering escalating the war and had an escalation plan that included the option to use nuclear weapons. The main reason he didn’t was those two protests.

So protests can make a difference, and they can make a huge difference even when they seem not to.

so why aren’t we protesting?

Let’s put that question anther way: why don’t we protest? This coming Friday, say?

Proposal

So this is the bug I’m putting in your ear–go protest. Go by yourself, if need be.

Get a big sign and write CLIMATE! or some similar thing, on it, and go wave that sign in some publicly visible place for at least an hour this week. See what happens.

Do it again the next week, and the next. See if you can convince other people to join in, either by standing with you or at their own place and time. Post to social media that you’re doing this. Tell people. Make it go viral. Maybe something will come of it. After all, Greta Thunberg started by herself.

I’m doing it. I’ve decided. I’m getting a sign. Weather permitting, I’ll go wave my sign on Friday, since Fridays have already been a designated day for climate protests for a while, now. If weather is a problem, I’ll do it a different day.

This won’t likely go viral because I wave my sign, though. What I do tends not to catch on–I am not “contagious,” so to speak. But maybe YOU can make it catch on. Maybe you’re the seed that will sprout.

I really only need one to get this going.

How It Works. Maybe

First of all, I’d like to point out that this blog of mine has gotten hundreds of additional views this week above what it usually does, but for some reason none of them have been views of recent posts. So I have no idea what is going on or why, but if you’re new to this blog, welcome, and I hope you keep coming back.

Second, I want to tell you, briefly, about this thing my mom and I are doing. Maybe you can do something similar.

Last year, Mom and I decided that we need to do more about climate change, but both of us are easily distracted by day-to-day life. So we decided to set weekly action goals and hold each other accountable for meeting them.

Pretty quickly, we discovered that we were both feeling pretty overwhelmed–it seemed like everything we could think of to do about climate change either seemed too small to count or too big to do. For example, we can make lifestyle changes and email our elected officials, and we both do that, but it doesn’t seem like enough. On the other end of the spectrum, a global cap-and-trade system with an enforced and progressively lowered cap would be really great, but what are the chances of us making it happen? Not zero, but not good, either. So, yeah, we were feeling overwhelmed and discouraged, and it’s hard to get anything done when you feel like that.

Eventually, we came to the conclusion that neither of us knew very much about the relevant issues at the scale where we are most likely to be able to make a difference–our own communities.

We launched a joint research project to learn about local issues relating to transportation, construction, electricity, food production, open space preservation, community planning, and waste disposal, all areas that are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and are at least partially regulated or organized at the town or county level. We were looking first to educate ourselves, but also to find a problem that we could hope to solve within a relatively short time-frame. Something manageable. And it had to be a problem other people cared about, even if they didn’t care about it for climate reasons. For example, reducing tail-pipe emissions to save the polar bears is necessary and noble, but seems rather abstract to a lot of folks–but reducing traffic congestion by getting a functional public transit system up and running is very tangible (and also reduces tail-pipe emissions).

So we spent a few months studying the issues for the area where Mom lives. We hit a lot of dead-ends, a lot of places where learning much of anything would require a serious trip down multiple rabbit-holes. But we did learn three important things:

1. The local public transit system is non-functional. That is, there is a local public transit system, but it’s so bad that nobody uses it who has any other option, and as such it is an insult to those who don’t have other options.
2. There is no existing effort underway to substantially improve the system, except for one new program to be rolled out soon that does not appear to need our help.

We seemed to have hot another dead end. That local transit has problems–and will likely still have problems once the new program rolls out–we couldn’t tell what specific things need to be fixed. There is no easy way to find out what the complains are, what people other than ourselves actually want from public transit.

But when you can’t find an answer, it’s time to pursue the question.

If we’re having a hard time getting this information, so must other people be, and THAT is something we can address. Because I know how to build a website, and Mom knows how to publicize it.

The website will be a central source of information on public transit for the area, plus a place where people can discuss (ideally by a chat feature, if necessary by comment threads) the problems they are experiencing. Hopefully, the site will build community around the issue and help people find short-term solutions while giving Mom and I information on what problems need to be solved long-term.

If all goes well, we could improve local public transit and thereby lower local greenhouse gas emissions, while also providing a model by which other communities can do the same thing.

We can make a difference.

So can you.

Car, Car

The title is a reference to a charming Woody Guthrie song that has nothing to do with this post other than that both concern automobiles.

The thing is that last year my husband and I set out to use less gas. To that end, we recorded our monthly usage for the better part of a year to get a baseline, derived an average monthly figure from those records, took ten percent off that, and called it our goal for the next year.

We are not on track to meet it.

That is, we have met or exceeded our goal in some months, but our average monthly figure is now almost certain to be too high. And since we’re keeping records of our driving, we not only can see that we’re not on track, but also we can see something about why. The problem is that we can’t cut our usage simply by cutting back on driving that seems unnecessary to us because we weren’t doing unnecessary driving anyway. To cut back on usage, we’d need to change our definition of “necessary,” a fundamental, rather than a superficial, lifestyle shift.

I put that in the conditional (“we’d” rather than “we’ll”) because it’s far from obvious whether such a shift even makes sense. Let’s look at what we use our vehicles for.

Occasionally (perhaps once a year, on average), we take long trips, such as up to New England and back. We left those out of our goal-setting calculations because they are outliers that would otherwise obscure and distort the patterns of our usage. After that, the bulk of our car usage is trips to visit my family or his, each about two hours away. Before COVID, we sometimes went to Washington, DC for political marches. Someday, we’ll do that again. In the spring, much mileage was also taken up with Chris volunteering at vaccination clinics–local trips, but several a week. We also make one or two local trips per week to go shopping, take the garbage to the dump, take one or the other animal to the vet, or similar things, sometimes with a detour to a trailhead or a restaurant added on to the loop. That’s about it.

Of these, which should we cease doing? Should we stop seeing friends and doing volunteer work in New England? To be clear, between the two of us we gave about 470 hours of our labor to a national park in Maine this year, in addition to enjoying ourselves and the place very much. Should we not? Should Chris stop volunteering locally as an EMT? Should he stop seeing and helping out his parents? Should I stop seeing and helping out my nieces and nephew? Should we not take our dogs to the vet anymore?

Yes, there may be a mile or two we could cut out every week on average, a purchase or a visit or an errand or an adventure curtailed, but why? Would such a small savings be worth our becoming recluses?

It’s not that Chris and I don’t have a carbon footprint worth shrinking, it’s that much of our footprint is likely embodied in things we don’t have direct control over, such as food and clothing that just isn’t made locally and that unavoidably comes in plastic, because everything comes in plastic, now. And so on.

This is the limitation of personal lifestyle change.

There are people who could indeed dramatically reduce their carbon footprints simply by cutting out luxuries and inefficiencies that they won’t even miss. They should do so. Most probably won’t. For the rest of us, lifestyle changes are an exercise in awareness and a practice in dedication and not much more–if they are even possible. The farther down the socioeconomic scale you go, the less power you have to change the circumstances of your life.

If personal lifestyle change were going to save the world, it would have already. It’s been how many years we’ve been doing this?

We need political leadership. We need to come together through the medium of our elected government and make the changes that we can’t make individually. Some of those changes are going to be unpleasant for some people, mostly but not exclusively the very wealthy (who have the resources to adjust and will basically be OK). But if we do not make those changes, and make them now, the result will be unpleasant and worse than unpleasant for a great many people, mostly but not exclusively the poor and the disenfranchised (who lack the resources to adjust and are not going to be OK). To organize collective action on the part of the people is what a democratically-elected government is for.

Get involved in politics and VOTE.

Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash

Choosing the Future

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

 Throughout the enforced quiet and solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic, the planet has gotten something of a break. Greenhouse gas emissions have dropped, smog has cleared, and animals have felt free to reclaim places they normally cannot go. Of course, the news is not as good as it may appear; as I’ve discussed before, polluting industries are likely to make up for lost time later, and meanwhile the public health crisis provides convenient cover for the erosion of many important environmental protections.

For a disease to force an end to pollution, it would have to be much more severe than COVID-19 is likely to be.

But what COVID019 cannot force, we can freely choose. We’ve breathed cleaner air, seen clearer water, known a greater intimacy with wild animals and, in many cases, with each other. Do we want to go back? Or do we want to go forward?

Forward!

OK, but how? Clearly we can’t stay in lockdown forever—some of us never locked down in the first place, either by choice or through economic necessity or civic duty. Others are being driven into poverty at this moment, struggling to survive with little or no income and no reduction of rent and other demands. We might be able to stick with it long enough to beat COVID, but it’s not a permanent solution.

So what we need to figure out is exactly which aspects of lockdown are good, environmentally speaking, and of these which can we maintain long-term without too much trouble.

I had wanted to do this article as a research piece, but the information I would need is not easily available and I already have one master’s degree and don’t need another. So instead this will be a post more about asking questions than about answering them.

Photo by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird on Unsplash

 First Question….

Exactly how does the lockdown yield environmental benefits? What aren’t we doing now, and which gives us our best bang for our buck? It’s a good and important question. If you find and answer, please let me know. My guess involves the following:

• We’re not flying. We’re not flying much, anyway. Air-travel continues, but at a much-reduced rate.

• We’re not driving. Again, we haven’t stopped driving entirely, but as most of us aren’t working, taking our kids to school, or going much of anywhere fun, there is much less traffic. So I have heard, anyway. Our local roads actually look pretty normal on the rare occasions I go out.

• We’re not buying stuff we don’t need. Stores are closed, we’re encouraged to stay out of them, and most of us don’t have much money anyway, so we’re mostly only buying essentials. Cutting back on inessentials reduces demand, which slows production, which reduces industrial emissions. So I gather, anyway.

I have not heard any reports of lockdown closing factories directly (the cutting of supply despite continued demand) except in meat processing—sadly, I have heard nothing to suggest that the meat industry has reduced its production of animals to adjust to the closing of some meat-packing plants. Animals who reach their slaughter size without a facility ready to slaughter them are killed to make room for new animals coming in, the meat and their deaths wasted. Aside from the ethical dimensions of that situation, the meat that isn’t being eaten has the same large carbon footprint as the meat that is.

Second Question

Let’s try an equation:

A – B = C

A is the emission reduction achieved by reducing a given activity (such as driving) to lockdown levels, B is the heartache and difficulty caused by the reduction, and C is the advisability of continuing the reduction after lockdown ends.

For any given activity, what are the values of A, B, and C?

Because as much as some of us like to instinctively just do without stuff for the good of the planet, there is nothing inherently helpful in asceticism, and too much denial is bad for the movement and, arguably, bad for the soul. We have to figure out what’s worth giving up and what isn’t.

We can approximate these figures by looking at carbon footprint estimates—something with a big footprint is likely to have a big value for A—but we can’t be sure. For example, we know flying has a large footprint, but a slight reduction in the number of flights combined with a drastic reduction in number of passengers (meaning planes flying almost empty) could actually lead to a higher per-passenger footprint for air travel.

Third Question

How much of the heartache we’re dealing with has less to do with what we’ve given up and more to do with how we’ve given it up—suddenly, with little time to prepare, either as individuals or as a society? And to what extent are some aspects of lockdown making others harder than they otherwise would be?

For example, mass transit has been limited or reduced in many areas, meaning that while we’re not on the road as much, when we are on the road we’re in individual vehicles, blunting the benefits of traveling less. Similarly, the community spirit many people have discovered is limited by the demands of social distancing. If we stayed home together and could actually be together that would be better yet for our communities, wouldn’t it?

As a related issue, the fact that we’re all staying home and apart because of a pandemic means that we don’t just stay home when it’s boring or inconvenient, we also stay home when it’s dangerous or otherwise awful. Domestic violence seems to be up. Child abuse could be, too. Masks make communication harder for people with hearing problems or auditory processing problems, and life shouldn’t be harder for them. Single parents trying to work from home find themselves also responsible for their kids’ academics.

In suggesting that some aspects of lockdown should continue, I don’t mean they should continue like this. I mean that some of us are noticing advantages, and we have the opportunity to find ways to keep some of those advantages without so much of the difficulty.

We can achieve it through creative problem-solving and a willingness to try new ways of accomplishing what we need to. For example, while some work really shouldn’t be done from home except as an awkward stop-gap, maybe we can use the tools we’ve learned to cut back on commuting and business travel?

Forward?

Photo by Thomas Le on Unsplash

 What lockdown is giving us is a chance to examine our lives both individually and collectively, a chance to stop business as usual and make some decisions about what we want to do next. Yes, of course, where lockdown is causing problems for you I wish you godspeed in getting rid of those problems—personally, I don’t think it has to be as difficult as it is. Our society could do a better job at taking care of our people than we do. But those of you who are really OK, or those of you who are OK with some aspects of this new normal, even if not with others, now you know something important. You know that your “OK” is more flexible than you thought it was.

The future isn’t going to look like the past. Climate change assures us of this– “unsustainable” means can’t be sustained, after all. We have a choice. We can either allow increasing severe weather, more fires and pandemics and plagues of all sorts to change our lives for us, or we can come together and decide what we want to change.

Achieving sustainability will require giving things up, but they don’t have to be the important things—and what we get in exchange could be sweet and heart-warming and lovely.

Look, I don’t have any illusions that COVID-19 is going to automatically trigger any kind of new, eco-conscious lifestyle, not any more than it will fix and other of the societal ills it has made so glaringly obvious in the past few months. In fact, economies are already opening back up, some parts of the world are returning to normal, or trying to, and skies are doubtless starting to re-darken with smog.

But they don’t have to. If you like clear skies and clean waters and sharing driveway concerts with your neighbors, and you don’t want to lose these things again you don’t have to,

Strike!

For years, now, I’ve been wondering why nobody’s organizing climate demonstrations. Seems a bad time to let the pressure up. Or am I just out of the loop? Are demonstrations happening without me? As far as I can tell, in recent months, most of the energy has indeed not been going into marches but rather into “direct action,” either strikes or deliberate attempts to get arrested in a good cause. And unfortunately, I’m not really available for either. The nature of my work means that for me to strike would hurt only me; writers occasionally change the world by writing, but never by not writing.

But now, apparently, there’s a march scheduled–lots of them! All over! On September 20th!

To find an event near you, please click here.

I have to say this one looks a bit odd. For one thing, they’re calling these events “strikes,” when they are clearly demonstrations or protests. The difference matters.

To strike is to walk off the job in order to force change. We’re most familiar with strikes against specific employers, where workers cease work en mass in order to shut down the company until management agrees to workers’ demands, like pay raises and better working conditions. A general strike shuts down an entire economy for the same reason. For a strike to work, it has to hurt, or threaten to hurt, somebody with the power to make the changes the strikers want. It is a species of force, like boycotts and sit-ins, a non-violent means to take control of a situation and make someone else comply. Such force can be countered with force–not all strikes succeed–but cannot be ignored.

In contrast, demonstrations and protests can be ignored. When they succeed, it is because someone in power decides the protestors are right, because someone in power takes the demonstration as a warning that force will soon be used, or because someone uses the political cover provided by the demonstration to seize power.

Both work–but which one are we doing on the 20th?

Of course, there will be some of each. I plan to demonstrate. I may take the day off work to do so, but none of my clients are likely to stop climate change if I miss a deadline, so I won’t miss any. Others will doubtless suspend work for a day, and some strikes may be genuine applications of force, while others will be symbolic. But I’d like to see the distinction acknowledged as a matter of strategy–because demonstrations don’t always make good strikes and vice versa. And we need both to work right now.

The question is further complicated by the fact that, strategically speaking, the children’s strike for climate is itself a demonstration–for kids and teens to walk out of class doesn’t hurt those in power, it simply grabs their attention. Grabbing attention can be a very powerful thing to do, though. Demonstrations have toppled dictators. They have started wars–and ended them.

Either way, all of us need to know what our mission is on that day, and how what each of us is doing contributes to the whole.

I’ve written before comparing the children’s climate strike to the move, “Amazing Grace and Chuck”. In that movie, children quit their extra-curricular sports in order to demand nuclear disarmament–an effort that, in the movie, eventually proves successful. Now, in our real children’s strike, Greta Thunberg is our Chuck.

My guess is that our objective on the 20th is to flush out Amazing Graze.