Archive for the 'climate' Category

Revisiting the Riot for Austerity

admin April 25th, 2011

riot.jpg

Almost exactly four years ago, my friend Miranda Edel and I were discussing the recent IPCC report on Climate Change and George Monbiot’s book _Heat_ and the reactions that we got when we talked about about the sheer depth of the reductions in climate emissions that would be needed to stabilize the climate.  Whenever we began to discuss emissions reductions on the order of 80 or 90% (depending on your country of origin – for the US Monbiot’s estimate was 94%, although there are reasons to question that number now), the universal reaction we got was that it was impossible – impossible to imagine living in the developed world on so much less.  So impossible there was no point in even discussing or imagining it.
Miranda and I disagreed.  We felt that this critical inability to conceive of what was necessary was something that we had to – and have to – overcome.  Both of us were aware of material limits on a renewable energy build out, and the time frame for such a transition, and we knew that the evidence at the time increasingly suggested that we had to make our changes sooner than we could possibly imagine such an energy transition.  Moreover, both of us looked at this through the lens of energy and resource depletion as well as climate change, recognizing that there were forces driving us towards a life with less whether we like it or not.
Someone, we agreed, had to take the very first steps to conquering the underlying doubt that we can change.  Someone had to do the basic work of establishing a vision of a life in the Global North that doesn’t include conspicuous consumption of energy.  More importantly even, as long as we felt that our response to climate change and energy depletion had to wait on policy measures – to wait for the high speed rail lines and superinsulated new homes, to wait for carbon credits or whatever, we would not act.  We needed to find a way to show that you can act right now – and make not a little tiny difference by carrying your cloth bag, but a big and measurable one – a change that nobody else thought was possible. We stole from George Monbiot the wonderful line “Nobody ever rioted for austerity!”  He was right – no population in human history has marched and demonstrated to have less.  We figured we’d be the first.
Miranda and I set out to document our project and spend a year reducing our energy consumption by 90% over the average American’s. What we didn’t expect was that first dozens, then hundreds, and by the end, several thousand people joined us.  We had expected to struggle.  We hadn’t expected to find community, and most of all, to have fun.  Perhaps we should have, though – as historian Timothy Breen has shown, rituals of non-consumption replace rituals of consumption and are as satisfying to most people as the consumption.  That is, while during wartime, people might miss meat or sugar or drives in the country, that the communal exercise of substitution becomes a good in itself – so exchanging recipes for cakes that use less sugar and playing cards instead of taking drives becomes just as satisfying when you are acting together for a collective purpose.
We set out to cut our usage in 7 categories – Electricity, Heating and Cooking Energy, Gasoline/Transportation Energy, Garbage, Water Usage, Consumer Good Consumption and Food Energy Consumption (we were not, in fact, striving to reduce our food intake by 90% ;-) ).  We measured our baselines and ran the calculations.  A few months into the project, my wonderful friend Edson built a calculator for us, so that you could just plug in your elecric usage and know where you were.
People joined us from 15 countries – and did their own baselines and measurements.  We had people from cities and countrysides and suburbs, the elderly and families with multiple children, the healthy and the disabled, the rich and the poor.  We listened, shared strategies, argued about the best way to do things.  We tried things and failed.  We got frustrated when it seemed like it would never work.  We celebrated, as for example, when there was a Riot for Austerity wedding!
Some fundamental revelations emerged.  The first was that the first 50% reduction in energy usage isn’t that hard for most of us – that was heartening.  Most people could get big drops in energy usage by making changes that weren’t too difficult.  After that, of course, it got harder.  We also found that most of us had a Waterloo – a place where we found ourselves struggling.  Out here in the country it was transport energy.  In the cities, it might be food and consumer goods.  We shared our struggles, and thrilled when someone made it – our friends Larry and Gail dropped their electric usage to well below 90%.  Someone asked “do you even live in your house?”  Not only did they live there, they worked out of it too!
In June of 2008, my family had achieved 80% in all categories, at least at one point.  We had achieved our 90% goal with water usage, but slid back up again to about 60% down from the American average, as our climate became increasingly wet – our 60+ inches of rain annually simply meant we didn’t feel we had to reduce our water usage quite so much.  We were never able to consistently keep transportation energy down to 90% – my oldest, disable son’s busing and the distance from Eric’s job made that harder for us out here in a rural area.  We had to settle for using only 4/5ths of the energy used in most households.
We have kept our energy levels down at the 80% mark for the most part, except for water and a home renovation project that put us well over the consumer goods limit one year.  By the end of 2008, a great deal of more data about climate change had emerged, and between that and the lack of political action that followed President Obama’s election, it became clearer and clearer that world action on climate change either had not or would not come in time (depending on whether you think we’re already past critical tipping points, which may be the case.)  While we’d never expected to change the world wholly, even the most dedicated families, the ones who had been living the Riot most passionately began to ask the same questions – why should I do this if it isn’t going to make any difference?
Meanwhile, my appearance in the New York Times as an advocate of carbon restriction had been played to create a new pathology – the Riot for Austerity wasn’t even mentioned, and I was classed in a story with other environmental activists as a “Carbo-rexic” – someone who was pathologically afraid to use their fair share of carbon.  The story did its best to portray me as a bad mother – taking several remarks out of context and implying that my children were freezing to death in their home (actually, when the article was run, the photographer wanted to take pictures of them under their blankets, but they declined because it was 80 degrees ;-) ), saying they “huddled together for warmth” (again, it was 80 – no huddling!) and implying that we didn’t let our son play baseball, the great American pastime because Mom is an environmental meanie.  For a couple weeks after we were bombarded with threats to call CPS, and we were afraid we would be investigated. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth about exposing my family’s experience in too much detail.
The Riot, born of the attention to climate change that followed 2006-7 emerged from a hope that it was possible to create a grassroots, collective response to climate change that would accompany other responses.  As it became more obvious that 90% wasn’t enough, that 350, not 450 was the target  and that we weren’t going to do anything about climate change, I shifted my focus towards adapting to energy and economic issues.  While we still used comparatively ilttle energy, we focused more on “Adapting in Place” than on Rioting for Austerity.
I have wanted to revisit the Riot for Austerity for a long time, but have been hesitant to do so, to start again, because I was struggling with a good answer to the question “Why do it?”  It isn’t that I think it is any less critical to learn to live on much less than it was in 2007.  It isn’t that I think cutting carbon emissions matters less – there’s a big difference between 550ppm and 800ppm.  It isn’t that I don’t believe that one of the central projects of dealing with both climate change and peak energy is to create a new American Dream, a vision of a life that can actually go forward into the world we have – a dream that requires less money, less energy, and that replaces the consumption at its center with something better.  I believe in these things, but I also understand why people ask “Why do with so much less if it won’t stop climate change, won’t delay an energy peak? Why live now like I’m going to have to then?  Why do the hard thing, when there’s so much hard coming?”
I’ve come to believe there are three reasons.  The first, is that it isn’t that hard – and that getting the most out of little is an art form, a pleasure, a life worth having and enjoying.  The second is the reason articulated by my old friend and colleague Dmitry Orlov, where he observes that if you are facing a fall out of a window, you’d probably prefer to fall out a first story window, rather than a second story window – that is, everything you can do to get yourself closer to the place you are going anyway softens your fall.  The third is that it is simply right.  Our narrative in which we in the Global North use so much more than everyone else on the planet implies that no one else minds, that such inequities are fundamentally normal and acceptable.  But, of course, everyone else does mind.  Our actions make their world less habitable.  Our consumption leaves less for our posterity.  This is wrong – and it is based on a fundamental lie.  We must find a way to change our lives, not so much because it might save us from the worst consequences of our behavior – might spare us the floods, the heat waves, the hurricanes, the tropical diseases – that’s just getting out of the logical consequences.  Instead, we have to change our ways because they are wrong, and we should do right instead.
So starting on June first, I’m revisiting the Riot for Austerity – my family is going to try and get back down in some of the places we’ve crept up, and we invite the rest of you – those of you who did it before, those of you who never to join us.  I’ll make some changes here – we’ll probably make our group go on facebook instead of yahoogroups (not 2007 anymore ;-) ), and I need to run a new set of numbers, as the data for the American baseline has changed, but the basic project is the same.  So is the basic goal – as long as most of us in the North feel that there’s nothing we can do but cling with both hands to a way of life that is doomed, we will both suffer the consequences of our clinging and also doom others with us.  The moment we can find a way out, a new story to tell, a new way of life, and the power to act on our own, we begin again.
There’s more to come, as with all new beginnings!
Sharon

Oh, It Turns Out Climate Change is Still Happening…

admin January 3rd, 2011

I’m as shocked as you are.  Love this piece by The Onion:

The report further suggests global warming might be worth reversing, especially if mankind wants to avoid the unprecedented food shortage that an overwhelming majority of scientists and agricultural experts predict will happen within 85 years if global warming is not reversed.

“I was a bit surprised by our findings, because I, along with the rest of my colleagues, thought that the process of fixing climate change ended soon after [2007 rock concert] Live Earth,” CGD assistant director George Oliver told reporters. “But it turns out that the things needed to stop it, like substantive energy legislation, worldwide cooperation to reduce carbon emissions, and a massive cultural shift toward sustainable living actually didn’t happen at all.”

“We kind of just assumed that the threat of total annihilation spurred everyone into action back in ’07 and that everything got better,” Oliver added.

Who knew?

Moloch's Children: Do Climate Skeptics and Climate Change Activists Need to Agree?

Sharon November 30th, 2009

I’ve gottten literally dozens of emails begging me to weigh in on the East Anglia climate scandal, and for a while, I was reluctant to do so, because ultimately, paying attention to something so inane just gives it credibility.  We’re back, again, to the old battles over climate change – attention to trivialities in the absence of the central issue.

Anyone who made any effort at all knows that no, they didn’t lose or hide the data – it is still out there to be gathered by anyone doing the work.  Yes, they should have kept the raw data, but given that they had a tiny budget, limited storage space and were writing their own code, maybe cut them some slack – maybe some discredit is due the climate skeptics who have kept this subject so wildly underfunded?  Yes, we can still find raw temperature data at both the collection sites and at the several other compilers. 

Yes, the scientists said some stupid and imprudent things – but saying that they were responsible for politicizing the discussion ignores the tens of millions of dollars spent by climate skeptic lobbyists over the last decades to create dissension and attack the scientists.  Is there a religious-like orthodoxy of science that has exerted pressure on poor, hapless political leaders?   Sure…30+ years of not accomplishing jack-shit – wow, those mean and powerful scientists – where do they get their power?  Does an attack on four guys in England undermine all climate data?  Ummm…four guys.  Compared to tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers. 

What’s annoying about this nonsense is that it has overshadowed in the media the much more important news that the IPCC scientists did make mistakes about climate change – and some of that almost certainly due to the enormous pressure to *understate* the climate science.  Accusations of government pressures to soften the conclusion were rife after the IPCC report came out – reported by the scientists themselves.  The idea that political pressure exists only on one side is simply ignorant.  Now the Copenhagen update confirms what has been reported on this blog since before the last IPCC report came out – that in fact, the error has tended to be to understating the dangers of climate change.  We are facing much more serious and rapid climate change than was reported, and we have to respond more quickly.

That said, however, I know that I have quite a number of blog readers who will disagree with the above statements, and I’m fine with that.  I also know that disagreement on this subject makes a lot of people really, really angry.  I can understand their perspective – that is, I understand both why people who are worried about the cost of dealing with climate change are angry at those who understate that cost, and I understand why people who believe sincerely in climate change get angry when people resist their attempts to save lives.  I get the anger.  But I try really hard not to get invested or focused in the battle – for two reasons. 

Now I should be clear here – when  I speak of climate skeptics in this post, I am not speaking of the paid shills and the professionals whose job it is to throw up dust in the eyes of science – there are plenty of them, and I think that they deserve excoriation.  People talk about conspiracy in terms of climate change – ignoring that the track of money goes back to Exxon and Shell and a whole host of companies that have had an enormous interest in making extremely clear science unclear.  I am speaking, instead, of the vast majority of people who for good reasons and bad, disagree with me on the importance of dealing with climate change.

The first is simply that I’ve watched the battles of left and right, the old enlightenment political battles go on my whole life, quite literally, and mostly, I’ve watched scorched earth that left no one happy or satisfied.  Both sides have had their victories and defeats, some good and some bad has come out of this.  But the fixation on means here, rather than ends – that is, the fixation on alliances with political parties and traditional battles has done more harm than good, and cost us many good ends.  

And in fixating on the scorched earth battles, we’ve built up barriers of  anger and contempt to the radical loss of both common ground and perspective about what matters the most.   The perception that the old categories and divisions don’t work anymore seems to cross all political lines.  Evangelical theologian Dr. David Gushee said that we would be ashamed of ourselves later on for the issues that we have allowed to consume our lives while the world burns. 

But more importantly, I don’t believe that people can be easily and accurately divided into enlightment categories – I think they are mostly a distraction.  Nor do I think that the climate change debate exists in the terms that most climate activists frame it, between skeptics and activists/scientists.  There are certainly some people on both sides who come to this with a single, all-encompassing worldview that could be described that way, but mostly, I don’t think that’s accurate.  Instead, I would frame the distinction differently – that the populace is roughly divided into two groups – but not the ones you think they are.

The first, I’m going to call “Moloch’s Children” – which isn’t a very nice name, but it is, I think,  accurate.   By this I mean that like Moloch, they devour their own young.  I do not claim that the Children of Moloch do so intentionally – at worst, their seeming god is Mammon.  But the reality is that the worship of consumption leads to the cannibalizing of our future and our children.  

Who are these people?  The children of Moloch consist of the great mass of Americans and other rich world denizens whose central ideology is technological progress and consumption – Moloch is their god, the overarching center of their world is the urge for more and more comfort, more and more possessions, more and more wealth, more and more technology in complete disregard of the fact that these things are not possible.   They do not realize that they devour their own future as they consume.  I realize that most of the people I am describing would fervently deny that this is true of them – but they would mostly be wrong.  At the center of their value system is something empty and deeply wrong, and that emptiness stretches out and empties their world.  They do not know what is missing from their lives, so they seek out more to fill the empty space.

The Children of Moloch cross political, religious, cultural and ethnic lines.  That is, there are plenty of climate skeptics who believe that the climate probably isn’t changing and even if it is, we can just fix it with more free enterprise.  But there are equally many people in the same camp who believe that yes, climate change is a big problem, and someone really should do something about it, but not me, and nothing that impacts my mutual fund statement.   It is possible to be a devout Christian and still hold prosperity, comfort and your game cube at the center of your world in practice, while going to Church on Sundays.  It is possible to be a radical leftist athiest and still hold those same values at the center of your world.  Every shade of middle ground runs through the center.  Moloch knows no political bounds.

The truth is that if you could meaningfully divide the world up into climate skeptics and climate believers and use that information politically, then we’d already be acting on climate change.  The fact is that you can’t – the vast majority of people who believe we should do something about climate change believe that we shouldn’t do anything very difficult, expensive or inconvenient – pretty much what the skeptics believe.  They are different in that if it doesn’t cost them anything substantive, they’d be happy if the problem went away.

The second group I’ve called several things over the years – anti-modernists, sustainability folk (before that term came to mean “people who buy green prada”)…  For this purpose, though, I call them “People of the Center” – that is, anyone who has something other than Moloch at the center of their world: a hope for the future, an investment in the past, the love of a G-d, the love of humanity in general, an ethical paradigm that actually trumps the desire for more –  and thus perceives, sometimes instinctively, sometimes after long study, that we cannot go on this way, and must find something else. 

And this category too crosses all political, cultural and religious lines.   There are devout Christian homesteaders in this group, and indigenous native farmers, radical leftists and radical rightists.  There are aging hippies and crunchy cons.  There are Quakers and Amish, Hasidic and Liberal Jews, Moslems, Buddhist Nuns and Catholic Nuns, Neo-Pagans and Athiests.  There are people who believe that climate change is no problem at all, or not their problem, but who deeply and profoundly believe they are called by their faith or taste or commitment to another principle to live ethically.  There are people who believe that climate change is everything and come to the same conclusions.  And in the end, what matters here are the ends- the conclusions and the life that follows them.

Here, then, I see the people who are already beginning to live the life necessary.  They may think I’m a complete raving loon on the subject of climate change – but they recognize the need to grow their own food.  They may not care at all about peak oil, but they know they need to cut their energy use and energy budget.  They could be, on the right political grounds, supportive of far more radical political changes than most of the moderate people who accept climate change, because their basic premise is that the future is worth preserving.

The truth is that even without acceptance of climate change, tens of thousands of people recognize the essential emptiness of our center and are looking for a better way.  The truth is that even if we disagree on peak oil, or on the face of the financial collapse, we have things to speak about.   Even if we fight over important (I do not claim they are not important, just perhaps not as important as preventing the worst outcomes of our future) issues that are simply secondary – the traditional battleground issues of left and right, for example, we can recognize their secondariness. 

Even if we have nothing in common except our commitment to creating a future for human beings in the world, we can work together at least in some measure – and I would argue that the People of the Center have more in common with one another than they do with the Children of Moloch, regardless of  their opinions on gay marriage and health care funding.  All of us in the center in some measure know, that wherever the disaster comes from, it is coming.  We know that if we do not change, change will be thrust upon us, and will be more terrible than if we step forward and claim our future.

There are a lot more of Moloch’s Children than there are People of the Center, and the odds are good that there will be until the things at the center of their world fall away – until poverty and a changing world unseat their center and leave them seeking something else.  But the truth is that there are converts every single day away from Moloch – not just a few, but thousands of them. I meet them every time I speak, I get emails from them every day and others get even more – “I just realized what we were facing” “My family and I only just became aware” “We’ve been doing this for a year or two…”  The stories overflow – and the paths they take are not all the same.

There are two ways to look at this steady and growing stream of converts – the first is that we are too few.  The second is that it is astounding, given the power of the other side, the place of advertising and wealth and luxury and technology in our world, that so many fall away, and go looking for a new center. 

 They find their place, their center in different ways – some turn back to an old faith, some cast their faith away.  Some place the emphasis in different places, some return to the old ways of their people, or go seeking a new set of old ways.  They agree on remarkably little.  But they are finding their way to something, a place, a center, through a remarkable number of portals – and their commitment to some of the same ends is sufficient to build something upon.  The edifice of our creating is fragile, tenuous, and sometimes the ground yaws forth when a new chasm between us arises.  But there is something there.

In political terms, I imagine there will be shouts of protest at this post – if we give up the battle for the hearts and minds of people on climate change, we’ll fail, I suspect they will say.  Well, the truth is, we’re failing now.  Yes, 57% of the world takes climate change seriously – seriously enough to want some kind of low-grade agreement, maybe, if it isn’t inconvenient.  But the truth is that we’ve failed miserably to explain what exactly would be involved in dealing with climate change – we’ve pandered to Moloch so long, told people that they’d be driving around in electric cars and just as rich as before so long that we’ve lost the battle.  Because people know that it isn’t true – look at the Copenhagen update to the IPCC – even if we dropped emissions to zero by 2030, unless we make radical cuts in the next decade, we’re still past the 2 degree mark.  Anyone think that’s going to happen?  Seriously?

The political reality is that going at this on enlightenment terms has failed miserably – and will continue to fail.  As long as we fixate on what we believe, rather than on the common sense that things are coming down around us, on means rather than ends, there’s no chance that our response will do what it needs to – give the best possible results we can get now *and* simultaneously serve us as well as possible if, as seems likely, we fail.  That is, we’ve been shooting all along for the wrong goals with the wrong allies, painful as that is to admit, and now we need new allies, and new goals – goals that operate to soften the blow as well as try and prevent it as best we can.  Maybe we would have failed had we started with the right allies – but no worse than we have failed now.

I don’t know if the only or rightest way to do this is to concentrate on creating more people of the center, in wooing people away from Moloch.  I know only that the old way, and the old divisions have not worked – that the casualties of those battles are stacked up for miles, and that a new way is needed.  I don’t suggest that this is easy, or that the other battles, the old enlightenment ones I seem to abandon so easily are actually easy to step away from.  But the truth is that we will have little territory for fighting those battles left if we allow the worst outcomes of all our troubles to come to pass – what we need now is a place to stand and build.  I get angry when I see someone believe passionately in something I think is deeply wrong – but I am adult enough to know that what matters is not that you believe as I do, but that we find a way to live and go forward into our common center.

Sharon

Peak Energy Vs. Climate Change: Stupidest Debate Ever

Sharon November 16th, 2009

Kjell Aleklett should really pretty much stop talking about climate change, because he looks like a fool when he does.  And that’s not a good thing, given that he’s not one - on energy he’s done deeply important work, and I’d hate to see people dismiss it because he says dumb things about the climate.

Here’s a good example from his screed:

“How will our well-being be affected by the expected growth in population? How will this affect our food supply, our climate, our economy and our hopes for peace? In Copenhagen the hungry will prioritise more food on the table before an unaltered climate. The poor nations want economic growth and we all know that this requires more fossil energy use. To see this we only need to study the development of China or India, or even Sweden from 1945 to 1970. In Copenhagen, this will mean that they will not want to sacrifice economic growth on climate’s altar. Ultimately, it comes down to we, the wealthy nations, not wanting to bear the cost of all the carbon dioxide waste we have dumped into the atmosphere without the poor and hungry also paying out.

In Copenhagen global emissions of carbon dioxide will be discussed and, for the sake of our future climate, it would be a good thing if emissions were reduced. However, according to the human well-being equation, it is not carbon dioxide but, rather, energy that is needed to produce food and to turn the wheels of the economy. By clever marketing of unrealistic future scenarios the IPCC has blinded the world’s politicians – particularly those in the EU – to these facts. Light was shone onto this issue when President Obama noted the importance of energy in a speech some days after his inauguration. He said, “No single issue is as fundamental to our future as energy” and I with many others began to hope for a brighter future when the Nobel prizewinning physicist Steven Chu was appointed as the USA’s Secretary of Energy.”

There’s not a single citation in this article, so, for example, his observation that we use a lot of energy to produce food now is left to stand with his presumption that we will require the same amount of energy to produce food in the long term.  In _A Nation of Farmers_ Aaron and I observe that low-input agriculture has largely kept approximate pace with high input agriculture, and that in periods of climate instability, low input agriculture that improves soil actually does better than industrial agriculture.  So no, we don’t need as much energy as we have been using for food.  Will we have a hard time feeding ourselves?   Undoubtedly, but “we use this much now, which means we must use more later” assumes that we can keep industrial society going on the same track – and even Aleklett knows we can’t.

We’ll also note that Aleklett simply doesn’t believe climate change is a serious issue, and has said so.  He seems, in the article, to be implying that he does, but he’s been more explicit in other writings.  He claims, again completely without evidence that the IPCC scenarios are “unrealistic” – which they are – but in the wrong direction.  All the material evidence – and by this I mean not-up-for-debate stuff like “how fast the ice is melting” which you can see by looking at it, or by fairly simple measures – suggests that the IPCC scenarios are unrealistic in that they *understate* the rate at which climate change *is happening* – not is projected to occur.  He gives lip service to the fact that we should put out less carbon, but then goes on to suggest we need more carbon sources.  

But the biggest and dumbest gap in this is that Aleklett doesn’t seem to have any recognition that addressing climate change *is* about food.  At the simplest levels, countries that are underwater don’t grow a lot of food.  Neither do countries who depend heavily on meltwater from glaciers that dry up and disappear (again, this isn’t a hypothetical, you can go see it).  Aleklett doesn’t seem to be familiar with research that higher temperatures will dramatically reduce yields of wheat, rice and corn, the staple crops that provide the vast majority of the world’s calories.  And desertification (in part caused by climate change, but also caused by the very oil-infused agriculture that Aleklett says we desperately need to preserve) will take large chunks of grainland out of production.  Copenhagen will almost certainly fail, but the idea that people in Copenhagen don’t get that this is about food is just laughably ignorant.  It is Kjell Aleklett who doesn’t seem to grasp that this is very much about food.

But more importantly, and the reason I’m being so hard on him, is that this represents two sides of a strain of thought that I think is truly destructive to the agenda of both Peak Energy and Climate Change.  On the one side, you have peak energy thinkers, frustrated that climate change gets all the attention, who falsely believe that they have to poke holes the fairly iron-clad science of climate change, because they are competing for attention and resources.  On the other side are climate change advocates who ridicule or simply minimize the importance of peak energy, because their assumptions all presume a stable economy and energy supply to build upon.  There’s a “we’re only allowed to have one big central problem, and we have fight over it” attitude, that presents a completely false dichotomy - a dumbass logical error  that a freshman in high school should be able to dissect.

The truth is this – we know for a fact that peak oil is real.  Why do we know this?  Because we’ve seen it happen right here in the USA.  No matter what technologies we use, no matter how much we invest, the US hit peak oil in the early 1970s, and hasn’t passed Saudi Arabia since.  We can look at all the other countries who have done the same.   It is a geological fact of life – and the preponderance of the evidence, slowly, solidly coming in is that the world is at or past its peak, that Saudi Arabia has been fudging its numbers with seawater. 

We know that other resources are going to peak too – and many of them soon.  We’re not sure exactly how much coal there is, but we do know that North American Natural Gas, for example, is a likely near-peak.  We know that we are already seeing high energy price volatility, we know that it is affecting our economy, not to mention our ability to get by personally.  We’re never going to know, year to year, how much food (tied to energy) and heat are going to cost us.   We know that if it isn’t going to get worse in the near-term (which is the more likely scenario, IMHO, since it is already happening), it is going to get worse in the long term, and ethically speaking, screwing the next generation is how the last couple of generations have handled this, and is not ethical.  So there’s not much doubt about this – we’ve got to deal with an energy decline, and rapidly.

The same is true of climate change – the climate is changing.  We know this – we can look at the pictures of glaciers in 1950 and glaciers now.  We can look at the arctic ice.  Anyone who lives near an ocean can go see the houses, once comfortably back from the sea’s edge, now hanging precariously.  We can look at flower bloom, and bird migrations and climate (not weather) patterns and see a consistent and substantial alteration over a very short time.  This is not rocket science.

We also know why the climate is changing.  The Greenhouse effect is not controversial – if it didn’t exist, the earth would be a lifeless rock, so cold it couldn’t support life at night, so hot it couldn’t support it during the day, just like the moon.  We know without any doubt that the gasses in our atmosphere are what warm the climate.  We know that there are more of them.  We know that more of them correspond with warmer periods in history from ice core samples.  We know that each gas has demonstrable warming effect, and we can demonstrate that their concentrations are growing.   You can certainly get more complicated than this, but again, it isn’t rocket science. 

There is no question that climate change is going to radically impact our lives – and soon.  It already is, if, say, you live in a low-lying area, or if you rely on meltwater, or if you are noticing more heat waves and drought or worried about the health consequences to you or your asthmatic daughter or you aging mother.  And just like it is wildly unethical to pass off our energy problems to the next generation, it is even less ethical to pass off our climate problem – because both effect basic things like whether we’ll eat or not.

In both cases, there are sensitive bits up for discussion – precise climate sensitivity, and exactly when the peak is/was.  Nothing is perfect, but overwhelmingly, the debate on both subjects is effectively over.  And that means that the scientists and thinkers on both sides of who are sitting there waving their hands saying “My problem is more important!  No, Mine!” are wasting a lot of time and energy on the false idea that we can’t have two central problems at the same time.  This is dumb – and it delays creating an appropriate response.

The truth is that we have at least two central problems (the economic one is tied to both in the long term), and only people who can get their mind around the combined difficulty will have anything useful to offer.  Yes, we need to know how what fossil fuels are in the ground – and we also can’t burn them rapidly.  Yes, we need to address climate change – and we need to stop lying and claiming that we can have it all – a happy growth economy based on renewable energy, yada yada. 

Thankfully, ther are people doing good work on both issues – people who really get it, like James Hansen and Richard Heinberg.  They haven’t fallen into the false dichotomy.  They haven’t missed that this really is all about “who eats” – and that we can’t see the whole picture of our future just looking through one eyepiece of a pair of binoculars.

Dreaming a Life

Sharon September 22nd, 2009

A few months ago, I had an email exchange with Bill McKibben about the commonly perceived but, we both agreed, false distinction between lifestyle changes and political acts.  Those of you who have read _Depletion and Abundance_ know that I spend a good bit of time on just this subject – on the idea that our ordinary daily activities are not political acts, or that we can resolve our problems in a way that isn’t whole, that doesn’t include our personal way of life *along* with our political and community activism.  Bill expressed it rather more concisely (I quote with his permission), saying, “I find the split between working on politics/working on lifestyles to be frustrating as hell. the lifestyle-centric can’t do math, and the political-centric don’t understand how culture works.”  
 

The reference to not being able to do math was an articulation of the fact that we don’t have time to change the world “one lifestyle at a time.”  And that’s completely true.  But also isn’t necessary – lifestyles, if nothing else in the world, are never changed one at a time, past a certain critical mass. Instead, they are changed en masse, as people’s dream of what constitutes a good life changes.  And this is the central point that those who disdain lifestyle alterations (and by life changes I do not mean “oh, wow, last month I started using a cloth bag and next month I’m going to change my lightbulbs” – there’s a case to be made for taking baby steps, particularly at first, but the reality is that babies walk, and then run – a few baby steps are enough to get you moving.) miss - is that much of what we do is based upon our dreams of what kind of life our actions move us towards. 

And this is something that worries me about our present course of climate activism – as we move towards Copenhagen, I’m thrilled to see a rising tide of activism and commitment among those who understand the urgency of our climate situation.  I’m obviously far less thrilled to see the retreat of governments from serious commitments – Chinese officials recently claimed that trying to keep warming under 2 degrees was not “realistic” – never mind that China itself will suffer enormously if we cross that tipping point.  And only last night, news came out that the Danish Prime Minister may be backing out of a climate treaty.

Why, when there is so much new attention to climate change, so much scientific consensus and so much activism, are governments so reluctant to act.  It isn’t because of lack of knowledge of the long term consequences.  My own take is this – that it is simply because they recognize what many climate activists have not – that their own people may agitate for climate change action now, but they do not fully grasp what it will entail – a change in way of life.  There are plenty of other reasons – business interests and political realities, but the truth is that we will continue merrily on our way to disaster if the world’s politicians believe that the people don’t want them to act – not really.  And it does not take a great deal of critical thought to realize that the average person, at this stage, would like, all things being equal, for politicians to take care of climate change, along with all the other of the world’s problems, without inconveniencing them, but are far less clear on what inconveniences they might be willing to tolerate.

The reason that people don’t grasp what addressing climate change will entail is in large part the fault of climate activists themselves who have been afraid to utter the words “sacrifice” and “radical change” – instead, they cite studies that say that we’ll be richer if we just convert to renewable energies – never mind that those studies are almost always done on much lower emissions targets and over longer time frames than the science supports.  They cite studies that suggest small changes, or that ignore other, equally pressing crises like global dimming and energy depletion; or that leave out the methane that is already leaking out into the atmosphere.  They might talk about 350 targets, but they don’t use research that takes those numbers into account – or they still talk about the politically motivated 450ppm.

Even climate activists who mostly get it, often do not get their attention drawn to the incongruities between their way of life and their actions.  Coal, for example, is one of the world’s most pressing climate issues, and much activism centers on shutting down coal plants – a truly good and noble idea.  But at demonstrations and such that I’ve attended, I find myself asking people what they believe is going to replace the electricity powered by coal.  They generally mention solar plantations or vast wind farms – assuming, comfortably, that something will.  But there’s plenty of research pointing out that we can’t replace the near-half of our electricity produced by coal with renewables rapidly – that means closing coal plants will mean higher electric prices and must lead to vastly lower usage. 

Were it not for the stakes of the issue, I couldn’t blame climate activists for not pointing out “you do realize that as you are trying to close down this coal plant, this means really you should be giving up your a/c” much less the high costs and lifestyle changes that are the logical outcome of truly dealing with climate change on the scale to which it needs to be addressed.  For a long time, before we realized that climate sensitivity was much greater than expected, before we realized that the time window for action was growing much shorter, it seemed just possible to imagine that addressing climate change could be done without radical lifestyle shifts, or at least, that we could work up to them gradually.  Once it became obvious that this was completely false, the urgency of the work of addressing climate change rose, and the need for a political consensus to match the scientific one became more acute – and it was more terrifying to imagine trying to get that consensus through a language of self-sacrifice and radical changes than by selling the idea that we can fix the climate and still stay rich and comfy.

But it is hurting us now.  Because it is not possible to honestly tell people that they can have much the same life they wanted.  In George Monbiot’s superb _Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning_ he argues “By ‘feasibility’ I mean compatibility with industrial civilization…whether or not we enjoy the soft life…it is politically necessary to discover the means of sustaining it.”  Monbiot makes a very nearly credible case for a means to stabilize the climate and simultaneously maintain a near-normal life.  It involves virtually no air travel, a completely different shopping model, a lot of money invested very quickly and a lot less concrete, electricity and heat.  That he leaves out agriculture, responsible in some way for nearly a third of all climate gasses is the book’s big weakness, and why I do not think he quite succeeded.  But in a sense, it doesn’t matter – because the climate target that Monbiot used, while cutting edge for 2006, has now been superceded.  If he could just-barely-but-not-quite pull off a maintenence of modernity with a 450ppm carbon target, what are the chances of doing it with 350?  None at all, I fear.

And other analyses are equally problematic.  It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that radical lifestyle changes are coming, whether we like them or not – whether they come from adapting to a deeply damaged climate or from addressing the crisis, whether they come from adapting to depletion or from enduring it, our lifestyle will not be the same for very long.   And the danger of telling people that they can have all the things they want – a future for their children and an affluent present now – is that when they realize (and they are realizing right now) that this is not true, that there’s not enough money, or time or alternative energy to provide it, people will be very, very angry indeed.  It is not pleasant to tell people hard truths.  It is less pleasant to deal with people facing hard truths who believe they have been lied to.  I believe we are seeing the early stages of the political unrest that will accompany this sense of being lied to, of having lost more than is being accounted for on both the left or the right, and I also believe quite strongly that unless a true and comprehensible story is offered, false ones will be taken up, and used as bludgeons.

The breaking of false idols is good, honest work.  But in the wake of iconoclasm, there must be a truth to set in the place of the shattered idols.   Telling the truth itself is not enough – nor is portraying the disaster we face and leaving people to imagine the alternatives themselves. 

Even if it were possible for this to happen organically in some places, we cannot forget that at every moment of our lives, each of us is being bombarded with dreams that we did not manufacture, and that these collective, advertised dreams of what constitutes a decent life are going to be more powerful for most people than autonomously created private narratives of goodness.  All of us live in the world, and most of us want others to approve of us.  Moreover, quite honestly, most of us aren’t all that creative in our dreaming – we imagine ourselves as unique because we choose among a large range of commercial options – we can decorate our kitchen with baby ducks, pigs or flower; can choose between coke or pepsi, can decorate our bodies within a range of a dozen or so arbitrated “personal styles.”  Given the sheer number of commercial choices, it is perhaps no wonder that we imagine that this is sufficient to constitute an identity and a dream.  Nor is it any wonder that ecological programming on television seems poised to offer us the purchasable green lifestyle as one of these alternatives - you too can have an e-bike, a set of solar panels and an eco-mattress. 

But this, of course, is the commercial version of this dream, and people buy it – a lot of them literally buy it, and more accept that this is what constitutes a viable future – lower toxicity, recyclable cell phones for everyone, your personal hybrid vehicle in your choice of designer colors, mascara that doesn’t give you cancer and organic cotton undies.  But no real changes, no alteration in our basic consumer patterns.  Never mind the fact that there will never be a society in which everyone can have mascara, much less a personal hybrid.  Never mind that even the rich having them is a disaster – if all the world but North America and Australia were simply to vanish tomorrow, we’d still cross the 2 degree mark eventually without substantial lifestyle changes.  The math is really clear – there’s not enough climate leeway, not enough water, not enough food, not enough money, not enough oil, not enough gas, not enough dirt, not enough phosphorous, not enough rainforest…. not enough left in the world to avert disaster if we have rich people, who see themselves primarily as consumers in a consuming world, and who live as we do now.

Which means we need an American (and European and Australian and Japanese…) dream that can work – and we need it fast.  Because the reality is that we are increasingly close to having to confront our crisis.  For all that people are heated up by issues of justice and politics, what people really, deeply care about is the future of their own lives, their own children, their ordinary hopes and dreams.  You simply cannot live a life on “this will prevent your grandchildren from starving someday” – that’s important, it is part of the story, and it works for a short, concentrated period.  But everyday life depends on a dream, on a set of hopes and imagined futures that are “a decent life, a happy future.”  And as long as people in the rich world have no way to imagine a happy life and decent future without wealth, without constant striving and consuming, without more and more and more, in the end, the politics of this is bound to failure. 

All of us need beauty in our lives, all of us need to believe that we are working for something that matters.  For the last many decades, what mattered was consumption, the achievement of greater wealth.  For the last of many decades we have sought, as people always have, to give our children better than we ourselves had.  The problem, of course, has been figuring out what “better” means in a world where the average household has two cars, four tvs and a wardrobe sufficient to keep them dressed for the rest of their lives.  It can’t mean three cars and six tvs, right?  

It is a counter-intuitive, and thus difficult thought,  that after a certain critical mass of affluence, better comes from less, not more.  A better future for our children comes not from greater affluence, but less, and the preservation of resources for the future.  A better life for us in the present involves fewer hours of work, and thus, more freedom – and fewer possessions and less affluence. 

In order for a majority of the world’s rich people (and here I mean rich by world standards) to choose less, to actually recognize that giving their children better means choosing a life of less, there has to be a vision of what the life constitutes – and it has to be immediately accessible. It cannot require vast creative energies, because honestly, most people don’t have them.  It cannot require that everyone go against the grain, because, quite honestly, most of us go with the grain.  It cannot require that we build an imagine entirely internally – you have to be able to go look at it.

It isn’t as shiny as political activism, and it is harder, of course, because there’s not much money in selling non-consumerism, radical simplicity and not buying stuff.  It isn’t going to show up on HD-TV anytime soon, except, perhaps as a comedy show.  And yet it is essential – the beauty and accessibility of an ordinary life, without the trappings of industrial consumerism has to be modeled, it has to be offered up, and it has to be available.  It has to be because otherwise, we can never say to people “shut down the coal plants” without them noticing that they’ve been betrayed into iconoclasm without any truth to take the place of the false idols.  But with a dream – with a sense of the beauty of simplicity, with a dream of an ordinary human life that is both good and humane and uses vastly fewer resources, you can say to people “we must shut down the coal plants” and the answer comes back “we weren’t using them anyway.”

Note: Of course, this essay is deeply derivative, I’m hardly the first person to think of this.  The always-thoughtful Risa has a post up at her blog showing just how derivative, and it is well worth a read – Plato doesn’t guest-post everywhere, so don’t miss this one: http://risashome.blogspot.com/2009/09/unlimited-accumulation-of-wealth.html
Sharon

Next »