Casaubon’s Book

Sharon December 30th, 2008

I have been very fortunate in the response that I’ve gotten to my writings.  After all, you can pretty much sum up my analysis as “you are going to have to live a radically different life than you are now, let’s get at it.”  You’d think that I’d get a lot of shit for it - and I do get some, of course.  But for the most part, people are extremely nice about the fact that I am telling them something that isn’t a lot of fun to hear.

Now many of the people who are kindest and most supportive of my work, are also people, who, to be blunt, have absolutely no intention of making radical changes in their lifestyle.  It is quite common for me to hear someone tell me just how much they love my work, and for it to become absolutely clear in our conversation that while they may well believe in some ways that lives may change, that I may have a point, at a fundamental and deep level they know that they will not be one of those people struggling, and that their ecological impact and choices are perfectly reasonable, and that there is no reason whatsoever to discuss them. 

Now I am a normal person, and perfectly capable of hanging out with people who respect my work but don’t necessarily agree with everything I say, or who aren’t ready to implement my ideas.  Everything takes time, and people come to ideas in their own ways.  But I admit, it worries me.  I recognize that there isn’t much I can do about the people who outright reject my thinking, or think I’m a complete whack-job, but I find myself genuinely concerned by people who cannot fully imagine themselves among those who need to grow food to eat, or really unemployed and without a safety net.

Don’t get me wrong - I think some people will be ok, and that some people are acting from perfectly reasonable assumptions.  At the same time, I think it is worth noting how rapidly we are watching institutions and people who we once were sure were completely secure simply fall apart - Bernie Madoff ‘fesses up, and one day there are a bunch of old ladies who are pretty much destitute.  One day we are certain that nothing could bring down X or Y business or bank - only to find that six months later, it is in the process of vanishing without a trace.  The fact is, our sense of security as it exists now can be undermined rapidly - and the time to prepare for such an evaporation is when it seems barely possible, not after it has happened. 

I get nervous when people email me and say that they know that they are secure because they work as a teacher or for X or Y business.  They may be right, of course, but it seems increasingly like that states and municipalities may not be able to pay the bills, or that businesses that seemed recession proof, aren’t.  I worry when people tell me that they feel like their investments are probably ok, because we’re near a bottom, or when they say they are sure their house will still sell, or that if they just refinance at the new low, they’ll be ok.  I don’t argue - I might well be wrong, after all, but it worries me.

And because of that worry, I’m just going to ask this.  As you go through and make your resolutions to be a better person next year, consider this one.  Resolve to spend five minutes a week asking “what if I actually had to not just say Sharon might be right, but act it, live life like I meant it?”  You can still think that I’m a little over the edge, I don’t mind, heck you can even praise me less and complain about me more for making demands of you.  But I admit, I’d sleep better knowing that you’d covered yourself, just in case.  Because somehow the strange scenarios don’t seem quite as strange any more. 

I don’t mind if you think I’m crazy - in fact, I’m fine with that.  But if there’s a little part of you that thinks that just possibly I might not be, try, for a bit, to live it like you mean it.  I’ll let you yell at me later if I wasted your time, promise ;-).

 Sharon

• future
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Sharon December 19th, 2008

I’m sorry, I’m having a bit of trouble getting all outraged about Bernie Madoff and his ponzi scheme.  Yes, I’m shocked.  Shocked and appalled.  You mean, someone was offering a scheme in which you pay present day participants with the funds of those who come in later, and then it fell apart.  Gosh, that seems so unprecedented.

Yeah, I feel bad for those who were taken in, particularly for charities that lost their funds.  But no worse than for those who lost their 401Ks or their pension funds on the stock market, for cities and states that can’t sell municipal bonds, and I feel far worse for the poor, who never had a glimmer of getting to participate in the get-rich-quick ponzi scheme that was a stockmarket that everyone said could have perpetual growth forever. 

Madoff may be a criminal, but he’s a criminal in large part because he’s engaging in a particular form of ponzi scheme that we look down upon, one small enough to be called illegal.  In general, we’re pretty comfortable with ponzi models -we live, quite happily, in a ponzi economy, one in which the concept of perpetual economic growth is sold, divvied up again and resold.  We live in a Ponzi ecology where we borrow constantly against the future to pay for our present affluence.

Is this truly a Ponzi scheme?  I think the answer is yes - a Ponzi scheme never really generates new wealth, it simply relies on a constant stream of new money.  And since the eco-Ponzi economy relies most of all on reducing the capacity of future generations to live well - because natural resources and associated wealth are already drawn down, I think that it does meet the criteria at both the economic and ecological levels.

 Most of us have been putting our money into 401Ks and Mutual funds,  and now that money is disappearing - and it is disappearing again, because we live in a Ponzi economy, one in which new funds can, for a while, conceal the bankruptcy of a society that draws down its natural resources and leverages both its ecology and economy past bearing.  Thus we get the mantra, as Bob Waldrop wisely observes, investing is saving that we all belong in the stock market:

“Lie the First: Money in the stock market is “savings”.

Reality: Money in the stock market is “speculation”. You buy a stock on the speculation that it will go up and you will sell it later at a profit and in the meantime, maybe get a regular dividend. It can also be considered casino gambling. It is not savings as we generally define the term, since it can be here today and gone five minutes later.

Lies the Second and Third: Everyone should be in the stock market. You can’t afford to NOT be in the stock market.

Reality: The stock market is only for people with money to gamble. People with debts and small savings should not be in the stock market. The former should pay the debts, including their mortgages first. The latter should wait until they have substantial savings before they decide to risk a small amount of their assets in the stock market.

The stock market game is rigged against the average small investor. With the way accounting rules and etc are these days, there are lots of ways that corporations can hide important information. Just ask some of the Lehman’s stockholders about that.

Lie the Fourth: Buy and hold is the smart strategy. Over time, the stock market always goes up.

Reality: That’s not the way the rich make their money in the stock market. They buy stocks when they are cheap and sell them when they are expensive. The “always goes up” comment is usually coupled with a comparison of two dates and the stock market index values on those dates. Compared to the history of economics, there is no way that we can say with total truth that the market over time will always go up. Where are the investments in the stock exchanges of the Roman Empire these days? And a rise in a stock market index may have nothing to do with the performance of individual stocks or mutual funds. Ask the stockholders of Enron about that. Or the stockholders of corporations that made horse-drawn carriages.”

I don’t blame people who were constantly told that they’d need X million dollars to keep living into their old age, and if they didn’t have it, would find themselves freezing and starving for believing this, but it is how the Ponzi economy works.  It relies on the idea that you are doing something good by feeding your dollars into corporate coffers, and that your money is still really yours.  Those are both false truths.  And they are built on ponzi model they pay out to the earliest investors (why, for example, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of older folks) while offering nothing to those unlucky enough to get in late.

I had one of those “duh” moments yesterday as I was doing a radio show - I made a point I’ve made many times before - that growth capitalism in general and the real estate bubble in particular depended heavily on the idea that we can’t live together, that everyone has to own their own separate household.  So the rise in average material living space from 250 square feet per person in 1950 to 850 square feet for each warm body in 2000 was in part a product of the constant message that living together with one’s family or friends was a measure of failure. 

This point I’ve written about a number of times - but somehow I’d never quite fully grasped the corollary point, which I found myself articulating on the fly - that the Ponzi economy depends on an endless supply of laborers, laborers who wouldn’t quit because they can’t.  And that means that the cost of living - of basic needs like housing, food and transportation have to be kept high - because otherwise people might notice that serving corporate masters isn’t the best or only way to live their lives.  Those 850 square feet, and the costs associated with them, and the problems of housing the ordinary stuff we “require” for daily life in 250 square feet means that the cost of housing for ordinary people is dramatically  high - so high that we must devote most our time to the corporate economy, so high we then have no time to do work in the informal economy, so high that we can never, ever think about whether there are any better choices out there.

We’re going to try and rescue the economy with another Ponzi scheme - with borrowing against our children’s future wealth to protect financial institutions and invest in some good things and some bad ones.  This, of course, is the oldest ponzi scheme of all, and you can make the argument that some human societies have been playing this game for a very long time.  We’ve been doing it with natural resources and are continuing to do so, and we’re also expanding the share of our children’s wealth we’re willing to borrow against.  After all, what have future generations ever done for us?  They might as well serve some purpose - to pay off our debt.

And of course we’ve got the best possible reason for this - we’re in a crisis.  There’s always a good reason for taking just a little more of what belongs to the future - to bring people out of poverty, to resolve this or that crisis.  Of course, the crisis was caused by borrowing against our children’s inheritence of natural resources, but more of the same is now necessary.  A good Ponzi scheme always needs new investors - and if none are going to volunteer, well, let’s volunteer them.  We’ll use the to prop up the stock market and today’s version of the Roman chariot business.

Our ecology and our economy all fundamentally are built on a Ponzi scheme in which we can never make enough to keep up - we are always losing ground, always having to steal from further down the line of our posterity.  At the same time, we justify their forcible participation in this speculation by saying that we are protecting them - we have to protect them from a Depression, so it is worth risking their future.  But, of course, if you actually care about your children and grandchildren, you don’t ask them to make sacrifices you aren’t prepared to make.  Fundamentally, we’re covering our own asses, and asking our kids to do it for us.

And that’s, well, evil, to put it bluntly.  It is precisely the opposite of what parents are supposed to do for their children, and what present generations are supposed to do for the future.  As David Orr observes in his superb essay “Loving Children: A Design Problem” living in a world in which we do not act as though we love our children (despite our endless assertions that we do) does them deep, moral harm.  It lessens us, but more importantly, it doesn’t just physically impoverish our children, it morally impoverishes them too.

“The Skymall catalogue, conveniently available to bored airplane passengers, recently offered an item that spoke volumes about our approach to raising children. For a price of several hundred dollars, parents could order a device that could be attached to a television set that would control access to the television. Each child would be given a kind of credit card, programmed to limit the hours he or she could watch TV. The child so disciplined, would presumably benefit by imbibing fewer hours of mind numbing junk. They might also benefit from the perverse challenge to discover the many exciting and ingenious ways to subvert the technology and the intention behind it, including a flank attack on parental rules and public decency via the internet.

My parents had a rather different approach to the problem. It was the judicious and authoritative use of the word “no.” It cost nothing. My brother, sister, and I knew what it meant and the consequences for ignoring it. Still, I sometimes acted otherwise. It was a way to test the boundaries of freedom and parental love and the relation between the two. 

The Skymall device and the word “no” both represent concern for the welfare of the child, but they are fundamentally different design approaches to the problem of raising children and they have very different effects on the child. The device approach to discipline is driven by three factors that are new to parenting in the postmodern world. It is a product of a commercial culture in which we’ve come to believe that high-tech gadgetry can fix human problems, including that of teaching discipline and self-control to children. Moreover, the device is intended mostly for parents who are absent from the home for much of the day because they must (or think they must) work to make an expanding number of ends meet. And, all of our verbal assurances of love notwithstanding, it is a product of a society that does not love its children competently enough to teach them self-discipline. The device approach to parenting is merely emblematic of a larger problem that has to do with the situation of childhood within an increasingly dysfunctional society absorbed with things, economic growth, and self. 

We claim to love our children, and I believe that most of us do. But we have, sheep like, acquiesced in the design of a society that dilutes the expression of genuine love. The result is a growing mistrust of our children that easily turns to fear and dislike. In a recent survey, for example, only one-third of adults believed that today’s young people “will eventually make this country a better place” (Applebome, 1997). Instead, we find them “rude” and “irresponsible.” And often they are. We find them overly materialistic and unconcerned about politics, values, and improving society. And many are too materialistic and detached from large issues (Bronner, 1998). Not infrequently they are verbally and physically violent, fully adapted to a society that is saturated with drugs and violence. A few kill and rape other children. Why are the very children that we profess to cherish becoming less than likable and sometimes less than human? 

Some will argue that nothing of the sort is happening and that every generation believes that its children are going to Hell. Eventually, however, things work out. Such views are, I think, fatuous because they ignore the sharp divide imposed between the hyper-consumerism of the post-modern world and the needs of children for extended nurturing, mentoring, and imagining. It’s the economy that we love, not our children. The symptoms are all around us. We spend 40% less time with our children than we did in 1965. We spend, on average, 6 hours per week shopping, but only 40 minutes playing with our children (Suzuki, 23). It can no longer be taken for granted that this civilization can pass on its highest values to enough of its children to survive. Without intending to do so, we have created a society that cannot love its children, indeed one in which the expression of real love is increasingly difficult.”

Our love for our economy leads us to seek any path out of the crisis we are now facing - whether it will work or not, whether it does harm or good.  We say we are doing it for our children - but much of what we have done mean that their own Depressions will be deeper and they will be poorer.  The Ponzi scheme is coming to an end - we have drawn in generations at a huge remove from us.  500 years from now, when no one remembers our names, our descendents will still be living with the consequences of climate change, will still be paying the debt from our overdrawn ecology.

It may well be the case that we will have to borrow against both resources and wealth to adapt our infrastructure - but we shouldn’t put a penny of borrowed money into anything that won’t serve the next generation, as well as us or better.  That means not a cent for Detroit to keep building gas guzzlers and personal cars.  Not a penny for highways that they won’t be driving on anyway.  We cannot afford to waste what’s left of their inheritance - we need to leave our children buildings worth occupying, that will last long enough to house them, and energy resources that will serve them, and some accessible oil in the ground for the things they may not be able to produce without it. 

I was born in 1972.  By the time I was six or seven, it was well known that we desperately needed to take action to address future needs for energy, economic and climate stability.  In 1979, Jimmy Carter’s Year 2000 report identified Global Warming as a major threat, and the need for growth in renewable energy as a primary national project.  Some nations, including Sweden, took their posterity as a priority and began seriously investing in alternative energies.  And in the US, we had morning in America, and the decision to offer some temporary prosperity at the price that my generation, coming of age, with children on our knee, would face the coalescing problems passed down to us.

I don’t blame the baby boomers as a unit - many I know did their damnedest to make it happen, but they were not the majority.  I admire and respect all of those who fought the good fight to keep priorities straight.  But that said,  our parents and grandparents failed us, they passed the problem down to my peers, and those younger than us.  And those same people (because most of the powerful are baby boomers still) are planning on passing the problem down to the children we hold at breast or watch play at our knees.  They will impoverish their grandchildren to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

The question is whether we, and the baby boomers and older folk who had it right from the beginning, actually love our children and grandchildren enough to stop the buck here?  I don’t minimize how difficult that is - and I don’t doubt that trying to live on a fair share, and get through the necessary economic crisis so we can start better next time will be difficult for children as well as adults.  And yet, passing the buck again ensures them a darker, warmer, more bitter world with fewer natural resources, and a crushing economic debt.  Sometimes when there are no easy answers, one has to move to “what is right.”

The burden of addressing our world-wide Ponzi scheme falls, I fear upon all of us who are adult enough to demand it stop, to refuse to participate to the extent we can, to work to end it, and most of all, to shield with our bodies the children and grandchildren we do love, and in whom we must reposit our hopes, our endurance and our courage.

Sharon

• economy , future , peak oil
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Sharon December 15th, 2008

I’m writing this a little early this year - _Independence Days_ is due in a couple of weeks, and I anticipate a great deal of distraction as the end-of-the-year predictions really start pouring out, so I thought I’d jump the gun and make mine now.

But first, how did I do last year? (And note, just ’cause I got some right last year doesn’t mean that you should take my word as gospel - I don’t think that everything that comes out of my ass is the high truth, and neither should you ;-)) 

I called this year “Here be Dragons” arguing that this was when the maps we use to make sense of the world begin to fail us.  I think that was pretty accurate - I think most people still don’t really understand how badly our maps have failed us, how the operation of our economy, our ecosystem, our culture is simply different than what we’ve been taught.  I think we can all see that most experts are pretty lost too - not because they are simply stupid, but because they aren’t prepared to work off the map.  The stories we tell ourselves shape what we can see in the world - and the conventional narratives have undermined our understanding of the realities.

Here are my predictions for 2008 and my comments on how they came out:

1. This year, the words “peak oil” will go mainstream, but this mainstreaming will not be matched by a subtle or nuanced understanding of what the words mean. That is, peak oil will be used for political purposes, and not necessarily ones anyone will approve of.

- I called this one.  As oil prices rose, CNN and the rest of the MSM couldn’t get enough of PO poster boys Simmons and Kunstler.  But, of course it wasn’t really possible to create, in that media, a complex enough understanding for people to realize that peak oil hasn’t gone away just because prices have collapsed, that, in fact, for the long term, the collapse of prices probably ensures that we’re past peak oil. 

2. By the end of the year, there will begin to be runs on preparedness equipment and food storage, a la Y2K.

- It wasn’t quite as dramatic in the equipment department as Y2K, although woodstoves and electric bikes were backordered like crazy.  But the big story was people fighting over bags of rice at Costco and other stores back in the spring. And unfortunately, for other reasons, I think we may see this one again.  Called it.

3. The NeoCons will not go gently into that good night - there will be at least one serious surprise for us. G-d willing, it won’t involve the word “nukuler” or any of its cognates.

- I’d give myself 50% on this one - I think the build up with Russia was indeed a final Neo-con attempt to make themselves seem like the best answer to a scary world (and Alaska as our DMZ), but it wasn’t as dire as I feared.

4. Hillary will not win the 2008 election. Neither, despite all the people who keep sending me emails saying he will, will Ron Paul.

- Got it.
5. The economy will tank. Yup, I’m really going out on a limb here.

- Got it.

6. Many of us will find we are being taken more seriously than we ever expected. We will still be taken less seriously than any celebrity divorce, however.

- This was certainly true for me - I don’t really know how John Michael Greer, Kunstler and Orlov, for example, felt about it, but I was surprised at how seriously my predictions were taken, and how few people thought I was over-reacting, even when doing, say ABC affiliate radio interviews.  But, of course, there are limits to seriousness - fairly few people really critiqued the worldview, but comparatively few people paid attention, either.  
 

7. We’ll see food riots in more nations and hunger will increase. The idea of Victory Gardens won’t seem so crazy anymore.

 - Yup.  31 nations and counting had some form of food riot this year.  And Michael Pollan wrote “Farmer in Chief” and the “White House Farm” idea hit the blogosphere.
 

8. The biofuels craze will begin to be thought the better of - not in time to prevent the above.

- Called it.  The collapse of oil prices of course is doing its own work, but even before that, we were finally seeing serious questioning of the premise of biofuels hit national discourse, at least in Europe.
 

9. We will see at least one more image of desperate people, walking out of their city becuase there’s no other alternative. And a lot of images of foreclosures.

Part one of this is the only one I got wrong, and that only partly.  People were walking out of Houston, and a whole lot of people were walking around looking for Gas in Memphis and Atlanta, but it didn’t quite have the resonance of Katrina or 9/11 - the media wasn’t paying attention, so it wasn’t the kind of iconic image that I was expecting.  The second part I called.

10. TEOTWAKI, if it ever happens, will be delayed long enough for my book to be released this fall and to make back at least the advance, so my publisher won’t have any reason to try and sue me ;-). 

- I’m not sure, but I think I might have actually made back my advance by now (all 4K of it), and my publisher is still in business.  Who knows, I might actually make a pittance!

Ok, what about the coming year?  While I think 2008 was when most people first realized something was wrong, I’m going to go out on a limb here (ok, not a huge limb, but a limb) and say that 2009 will be the year we say that things “collapsed.”  I don’t think we’re going to make it through the year without radical structural changes in the nature of life in most of the world.   I’m calling it, a la Yeats’s “Second Coming” the “The Year ‘Its Hour Come Round at Last’” 

 What do I mean by collapse?  We throw that word around, but it is easy to misunderstand.  I mean that the US is likely to undergo a financial collapse a la the Great Depression - widespread unemployment, lots of people facing hunger, cold and the inability to get health care, a disruption of what we tend to assume are birthright services, and a sense that the system doesn’t work anymore.  I don’t claim that we are headed by Thursday to cannibalism, however - what I think will be true is that we will often do surprisingly well in the state of collapse, as hard as it is.

 In previous years, I was fairly lighthearted about my predictions - this year, I don’t find it possible to be.  I really hope I’m wrong about this.  And I  hope you will make decisions based on your own judgement, not mine.  These are predictions, the results of my analysis and my intuitions, and sometimes I’m good at that.  But I do not claim that every word that comes out of my mouth or off my keyboard is the truth, and you should not take it as such.  You are getting this free on the internet - consider what you paid for it, and value it accordingly.

1. Some measure of normalcy will hold out until late spring or early summer, mostly based on hopes for the Obama Presidency.  But by late summer 2009, the aggregate loss of jobs, credit and wealth will cause an economic crisis that makes our current situation look pretty mild.  With predictions of up to a million jobs lost each month, there will simply come a point at which the economy as we understand it now cannot function - we will see the modern equivalents of breadlines and stockbrokers selling apples on the streets.

2. Many plans for infrastructure investments currently being proposed will never be completed, and many may never be started, because the US may be unable to borrow the money to fund them.  The price of globalization will be high in terms of reduced availability of funds and resources - despite all the people who think that we’ll keep building things during a collapse, we won’t.  We will have some variation on a Green New Deal in the US and some nations will continue to work on renewable infrastructure, but a lot of us are going to be getting along with the fraying infrastructure, designed for a people able to afford a lot of cheap energy, that we have now.  The most successful projects will be small, localized programs that distribute resources as widely as possible. 

I pray that we will have the brains to ignore most other things and set up some kind of health care system, one that softens the blows here.  If not, we’re really fucked - the one thing most of us can’t afford is medical care as it works now in a non-functioning economy.  Unfortunately, my bet is that we don’t do something about this, but I hope to God I’m wrong.

3. 2009 will be the year that most of the most passionate climate activists (and I don’t exclude myself) have to admit that there is simply not a snowball’s chance in hell (and hell is getting toastier quickly) that we are going to prevent a 2C+ warming of the planet.  We are simply too little, too late.  That does not mean we will give up on everything - the difference between unchecked emissions and checked ones is still the difference between life and death for millions -  but hideously, regretfully and painfully, the combination of our growing understanding of where the climate is and the economic situation will force us to begin working from the reality that the world we leave our children is simply going to be more damaged, and our legacy smaller and less worthy of us than we’d ever hoped. 

4. 2008 will probably be the world’s global oil peak, but we won’t know this for a while.  When we do realize it, it will be anticlimactic, because we’ll be mired in the consequences of our economic, energy and climate crisis.  Lack of investment in the coming years will mean that in the end, more oil stays in the ground, which is good for the climate, but tough for our ambitions for a renewable energy economy.  Over the long term, however, peak oil is very much going to come back and bite us all in the collective ass.

5. Decreased access to goods, services and food will be a reality this year.  Some of this will be due to stores going out of business - we may all have to travel further to meet needs.  Some will be due to suppliers going under, following the wave of merchant bankruptcies.  Some may be due to disruptions in shipping and transport of supplies.  Some will be due to increased demand for some items that have, up until now, been niche items, produced in small numbers for the small number of sustainability freaks, but that now seem to have widespread application.  And some may be due to deflation - farmers may not be able to harvest crops because they can’t get enough for them to pay for the harvest, and the connections between those who have goods and those who need goods may be thoroughly disrupted.  Meanwhile, millions more Americans will be choosing between new shoes and seeing the doctor.

6. Most Americans will see radical cut backs in local services and safety nets.  Funding will simply dry up for many state and local programs. Unemployment will be overwhelmed, and the federal government will have to withdraw some of its commitments simply to keep people from starving in the streets.  Meanwhile, expect to see the plows stop plowing, the garbage cease to be collected, and classrooms to have 40+ kindergarteners to a class - and potentially a three or four day school week.

7. Nations will overwhelmingly fail to pony up promised commitments to the world’s poor, and worldwide, the people who did the least harm to the environment will die increasingly rapidly of starvation.  This will not be inevitable, but people in the rich world will claim it is.

8. We will finally attempt to deal with foreclosures, but the falling value of housing will make it a losing proposition.  Every time we bring the housing values down to meet the reality, the reality will shift under our feet. Many of those who are helped will end up foreclosed upon anyway (as is already the case) and others will simply see no point in paying their mortgage when, by defaulting, they could qualify for lowered payments (as is already the case).  Ultimately, the issue will probably self resolve in either some kind of redistribution plan that puts people in foreclosed houses with minimal mortgaging, with foreclosures dragging down enough banks that people find it feasible to simply stop paying mortgages that are now unenforceable, or with civil unrest that leads people simply to take back housing for the populace.  I don’t have a bet on which one, and I don’t think it will be resolved in 2009. 

9. By the end of the year, whether or not we will collapse or have collapsed will continue to be hotly debated by everyone who can still afford their internet service.  No one will agree on what the definition of collapse actually is, plenty of people will simply be living their old lives, only with a bit less, while others will be having truly apocalyptic and deeply tragic losses.  Some will see the victims as lazy, stupid, alien and worthless, no matter how many there are.  Others will look around them and ask “how did I not see that this was inevitable?”  Many people will be forced to see that the poor are not a monolith of laziness and selfishness when they become poor.  We will know that we are in our situation only in retrospect, only in hindsight - our children will have a better name for the experience than we will, caught up in our varied personal senses of what is happening  Meanwhile, each time things get harder most of us will believe they are at the bottom, that things are now “normal” and adapt, until it becomes hard to remember what our old expectations were.

10. Despite how awful this is, the reality is that not everything will fall apart.  In the US, we will find life hard and stressful, but we will also go forward.  People will suck a lot up and retrench.  It will turn out that ordinary people were always better than commentators at figuring out what to do - that’s why they stopped shopping even while people were begging them to keep buying.  So they’ll move in with their siblings and grow gardens and walk away from their overpriced houses, or fight to keep them.  Some of them will suffer badly for it, but a surprising number of people will simply be ok in situations that until now, they would have imagined were impossible to survive.  We will endure, sometimes even find ways of loving our new lives.  There will be acts of remarkable courage and heroism, and acts of the most profound evil and selfishness.  There will be enormous losses - but we will also discover that most of us are more than we think we are - can tolerate more and have more courage and compassion than we believe of ourselves.   

An early Happy New Year, everyone.  May you know better than you deserve and see others at their best in these hard times.

 Sharon

• Uncategorized , future
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Sharon December 13th, 2008

Are you sleeping too well?  Do you find yourself suffering from symptoms of happiness, a sense of security and contentment that the future will be good?  Well, I’ve got the medicine for that condition: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/552439

“There was a line in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s fourth report that didn’t get the attention it deserved:

‘Dynamic processes related to ice flow not included in present models but suggested by recent observations could increase the vulnerability of the ice sheets to warming, increasing future sea-level rise.’

The media picked up on the projected rise in sea levels of 18 to 59 centimetres by the end of the century, but they didn’t question the models’ limitations.

Many climatologists fear the gradual melting of ice will be replaced by ice break-up, causing a sudden huge rise in sea level. Such a scenario increases the necessity of rescuing our climate.”

Besides giving us all another reason to spend our time clutching our teddy bears and sucking our thumbs, to me this is the final straw.  Right now, one of the great difficulties we face when addressing climate change is simply this - we’re not scared enough.  Climate change commentators regularly observe this - generally speaking, the public gets terrified about something (avian flu, terrorism, etc…) and the experts are generally more moderate, particulary scientific experts.  They’ve been taught to moderate their statements, been taught to include plenty of caveats.  This is not the case in the subject of climate research - those who know most about it are far more frightened than the average American.  They are worried about a world in which our ability to grow food, to live where we have been living, to sustain our population is radically undercut by climate change.

Even before the IPCC report came out, we knew that it suffered from a combination of scientific reticence, excessive consensus building  and political manipulation by governments who didn’t want to be pushed too hard.  And within months or weeks of its release, we knew that the IPCC report had not just understated what *might* happen sometime in the future - it had wildly understated what had happened already.  For example, its emission projections were based on older data - emissions concentration in the early 21st century were dramatically higher than anticipated.  Within months, we saw that the end of Arctic ice might come in 5-10 years, rather than the 100 years projected in the report.  This alone should have been enough to shift the public discussion of climate change - to say that the IPCC report cannot operate as the primary public account of what is needed to address climate change.  Unfortunately, and despite the heroic efforts of people like James Hansen, Joseph Romm, George Monbiot, and the people at Climate Equity, the IPCC report has continued to dominate and misshape discussion of climate efforts.

I do not mean to criticize the IPCC scientists as a group or personally.  I agree that their own efforts have been remarkable. Many of them are also fighting the battle to help people understand exactly what the real situation of our climate is.  But it is not enough - the IPCC report operates a text with Biblical weight - all the rest, as they say, is commentary.  And as long as they IPCC report retains its power, those who do not wish to act, or those whose primary concern is not preserving a really inhabitable planet for the future, will be able to point to the IPCC narrative and say “but your own account of things says that things are not that urgent.”  Right now, this is a strategy being used by conservatives in the US who have been forced to believe in climate change, but who still want to put business first - and it is a strategy that will probably gain more, not less traction as the realities of our economic situation hit us harder.

The next IPCC report will not be released until 2013 - around the time we anticipate all the Arctic ice will be gone, and very close to the end of the narrow window of time that we have to perhaps - and at this point it is only perhaps - address climate change.   Right now, the talks in Poland are struggling - again, we are locked in a global game of chicken, with poor nations refusing to consider making cuts until rich ones do, and every nation terrified of the economic consequences of making moves that address even the IPCC account.

I do not think we will break this impasse while the IPCC report offers a comforting, even if recognizably false narrative in which to leave one’s faith.  As long as the largest portion of the population believes we have until 2050, that sea level rises will not be a problem in our grandkids’ lifetimes and a host of other misconceptions, and can find a document of authority to back them up, they will not be afraid enough. 

Ideally, the IPCC participants themselves would speak out - and some of them, to their enormous credit have done so.  But we need a concerted narrative pointing towards the real information - the idea, for example, that an appropriate target must be 350 ppm, rather than the 450 or 550 ppm numbers that are more politically expedient, but less real.  And we need to say over and over again - the IPCC was wrong.  It understated things.  Our metrics must be based on cutting edge knowledge, and cannot be undercut by scientific reticence.

Who knows, maybe the IPCC should hire me - I’m no scientist, but those they have - what they need is the Stephen King of climate change narration ;-).  There is no way that an IPCC report written by me would describe the danger of sudden sea ice break-off causing rapid sea level rise in terms that no would notice, right ;-)?

Sharon

• climate , future , global warming
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Sharon October 23rd, 2008

Just for one moment, I’m going to pretend that instead of a silly article diagnosing a pretend disease in the New York Times, I was given a chance to speak on the Op Ed Pages of the Times, that this is my one shot at the huge audience that the Sunday Times has.  Ignoring, for a moment, how unlikely that is, here’s what I would have said.

Last weekend my family and I appeared in the New York Times as victims (or perhaps purveyors) of a new mental illness, “carborexia.”  Apparently this is the pathological inability to produce sufficicient carbon, an environmental mania so extreme that it transforms ordinary lives into obsessive madness.  

The article began with the fact that my son Simon is deprived of the great American pasttime because it is a half-hour drive to a league that doesn’t have games on the Jewish Sabbath (poor kid, he has to play catch with his parents and pick up games with his friends and brothers - in fact, he and one of his friends actually broke one of our front windows yesterday with a particularly nice hit).  The language of the article included the term “huddle together for warmth” to describe the fact that my young kids sleep together in both warm and cold weather.  All of this operated to implicitly imply that I’m abusing my kids in my pursuit of a lower energy life.  And since even implied accusations of child abuse and mental illness are a potent weapon in this society, I wouldn’t be shocked if you did think I was crazy and a bad Mom.

My first inclination was to fire back with the accusation that instead, most Americans may be suffering from a pathology called “carbulimia” in which they gorge themselves on energy - twice as much as Europeans, who often have a similar or higher standard of living and level of happiness - and then effectively vomit up the excess, deriving no benefit and often actual harm to their health and hope for the future.  But this doesn’t quite get at the issue either - it just continues the Times’s trivializing of real eating disorders and their sufferers, and adds another dumb and uneuphonious faux-disease to the cultural lexicon.  Definitely not what is most needed.  Moreover, most of us don’t take in huge quantities of energy for its own sake, we use it because that’s how our society is structured, and how we’ve been taught to meet our needs.  We use most of our energy because we’re not sure how to do anything else.

Debating which extreme is pathological doesn’t help us find a functional way of life.  And that is what is desperately needed.  And quickly.  NASA’s chief climate scientist James Hansen has argued that we need to reach 350ppm very rapidly - within a decade.  We’re already past at nearly 390ppm - the arctic ice is already in the danger zone, Greenland is showing increasing melting signs and most disturbing, methane is being released from upper levels of arctic permafrost.  Meanwhile, there are signs that we may have passed the world peak in crude oil production, and the volatile price of energy has helped drive us into a recession.

Meanwhile, the governments of China, India and Russia have all announced that they have no intention of taking major steps to reduce their climate impact while wealthy Americans, Canadians and Australians consume all they want.  They argue that they are trying to bring their populace out of poverty, and that we who produce the largest per capita emissions need to make our reductions first.  We argue with them that we won’t reduce our standard of living, that “the American way of life is non-negotiable,” in part because we are frightened by the idea of changing our way of life into something unfamiliar.  And thus we enter a global game of chicken - they won’t change until we do, and we won’t change because we don’t want to be like poorer people.  Never mind that we are condemning our own children - and theirs - to greater poverty as larger and larger parts of their income will be required to mitigate unfettered climate change.  This is known as “cutting off your nose to spite your face” and it is pretty much our climate policy.

The only hope we have to make rapid changes, on the scale necessary to achieve the 350 goal, is to put every tool we have on the table.  We need to invest as much as we can in things like massive reinsulation, renewable energy and public resources.  We need to use sustainable agriculture, reforestation and the preservation of existing rainforests forests to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.  But these will not be enough - we cannot make this sort of shift in 8-10 years on renewable energy development alone.  It would be nice if we could - or if we had 50 years to do this, but we don’t have the time and resources, and there is no point in mourning the time we wasted.  We have better things to do.

What is going to be needed is a rapid shift in the American dream and the American way of life.  Without that shift, there is no hope that China, India and Russia will forswear coal or make other changes.  Unless we can look poorer nations in the eye and say we’ve met our targets, we’ll all pay the price together.  Without a model for a good, sustainable and happy American life that produces 50-90% less carbon, not from costly technologies that simply can’t be put in place in time, but from ordinary practices of daily life that can - we’re doomed.  If we believe that living a sustainable life makes us crazy, or forces us to live in misery and poverty, we face misery and poverty for future generations all over the world.

The good thing is that the good American life isn’t so very far away.  In 1945 we used 80% less energy per household than we do now.  Your parents and grandparents lived that way - they heated the rooms they used most often and closed off the other ones, wore sweaters and walked more than they drove.  They took the bus.  They ate less meat.  They grew Victory gardens and ate food grown near them.  They shared with their neighbors more and they worked together on what was then the greatest challenge facing the world - the rise of fascism.  What is most needed isn’t a move to the third world - it is a return to a familiar past.

There are plenty of Americans living right now who grew up like my kids do - instead of being driven to ball practice, they played baseball with other kids in their yard, and helped their parents weed the Victory garden.  They wore warm clothes in the winter and slept outside in the yard in a tent when it got too hot inside instead of clicking on the a/c.  Many grew up like my kids on farms, or spent their afternoons playing outside on the sidewalk or among the trees, rather than inside watching tv or playing video games.  They walked or biked places.  They mostly ate food from their family gardens or from local truck farms near their homes rather than processed foods and take out.  Maybe a few of you even remember that kind of childhood.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a perfect Mom, and my kids don’t live in fairy land.  We too struggle to find balance between the good in our energy use and the things we can afford to discard without doing harm.  We don’t always get everything right.  But we’re trying.  The reason I agreed to allow a photographer to come to our farm was that I believe that the very first step to going forward to a sustainable life is being able to imagine ways of getting there without the fear that this means unimaginable hardship.  I hoped that they might even show that we’re having fun - and we are.

We’ve come so far away from our lower energy life that we now think that the past is uninhabitable, that we can’t go home again.  And it certainly isn’t as simple as flipping on the way-back machine.  It requires thought and practice and time, small steps and failures, experiments and discussions with friends who care about the same things.  It requires an investment of time and energy.  But the past isn’t so very far way, either.  It would be a mistake to think that a life with less energy is so distant, so unimaginable that we cannot conceive of inhabiting that space.  Instead, it is something we can get to with a bit of commitment ane energy, with allies and imagination and creativity. 

Maybe my way isn’t right, I don’t know.  I know doing it exactly my way isn’t for everyone- we need city models of the sustainable life, and suburban ons as much as we need me and my garden and our goats.  We need versions that adapted to different ethnicities, faiths and cultures.  But we need all of these, and we need them badly.  Because as much of our future depends on our creating renewable energies or reinsulating homes, it depends at least as much on ordinary people transforming their lives into something that the whole world can live with.  It is a pity that we’ve heard so much about one half of the equation (the electric cars and renewable grid) and so little about this very basic question - how will we live?  How will we go on in a way that sustains us and creates a sustainable future for our posterity?  How will we find a way home to our past and our future simultaneously?  How will we (and here I mean all of us, across the world) find an equitable way out of our terrible dilemma?

 I don’t claim to have all the answers - heck maybe I am crazy, because I truly think that this could be accomplished, and I’m enjoying the process of making it happen. I do think that there are some available here for those (and I think there are many out there) who care enough to try: www.riot4austerity.org and www.350.org.

Shalom,

Sharon

• future , global warming
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