Climate Death Throes

An indispensable new This American Life episode, "Hot in My Backyard" contains riveting stories from a genuine political balance of perspectives, suggesting together something that is all-too-rare in today's media hellscape:  a proper and informed 'pathos of indignation.'   

Personally I think it is long past time to risk offending so-sensitive conservatives.

Did you know that if ExxonMobile *alone* simply extracts what is already in their reserves (as indeed the market, including your 401K, currently counts on them to do), the planet tanks (and not in an "engineering problem" sort of way, but irreversibly and horribly)?  We have no stable models (and likely never will) to predict just how climate change will effect weather patterns, other than the obvious consensus that destructive extremes will get much, much worse, and in this fundamentally unpredictable fashion climate change is by any reasonable measure the true "Terror" of our time.

The terrifying reality is that todays climate catastrophes will *very* soon come to be seen as mild, indeed less than average in only 14 years when we reach the universally, world-dreaded two degrees.  And we're currently on track for five degrees. 

In short, unless the market can be made to believe that those reserves will never be tapped, and adapt accordingly, we're screwed.  Global warming will be so unimaginably horrible in just a few short decades; by the time Exxon executives rouse themselves on their delusional perches to the floodwaters at their ankles, most of the planet will be underwater.

Thank God, the divestment campaign is growing faster than anti-Apartheid did at first, but thanks to fossil fuel industry-purchased Republicans (many of whom are politically afraid to speak what they objectively know to be true) nearly half of all Americans *still* don't grasp what 98.4% of scientists (and even ExxonMobile itself) unambiguously do: that climate change is manmade, very real, and sooner-than-each-previous-study-anticipated irreversible, if not irreversible already. 

Contrary to what ExxonMobile would have you believe, an alternative future is not only imaginable but reasonably possible (and it does not involve the quack science nightmare of geoengineering).  Just as one example, there's enough wind power on government-owned land in the mid-western US alone to supply 1/3 of all US energy needs.  Imagine what the world's most profitable company ever to exist, ExxonMobile, could do with its annual $46M, were it forced to pursue energy technology that did not lead straight to Biblical-scale, inevitable mass misery and suffering.  Is their bottom line that precious? 

There really is no other news story of our time than this one.

Update:  Ok, maybe also this one.

SAGP

A placeholder (light posting for a spell)

• More and more and more on global warming. One thing consistently bothering me about the whole Gore book/movie exposé/presentation is that he never seems to emphasize the implications of a delayed response – that it takes roughly 40 years (though this may be decreasing as things accelerate) to register the effects of current emmission levels, etc. You might think, then, that the fact things are melting exponentially faster practically by the year would be cause for even greater concern, that is, when realizing that whatever we do, nothing will begin to improve for at least forty years! What we are seeing now, in Gore's footage, is the direct consequence of our actions forty years ago. We have no idea how much worse it's going to get, only that it will be exponentially so, and inevitably (at least for n + 40 years). And so on. Oedipus, indeed.

Naturally the very possibility, that no matter what we do a new Ice Age may be coming (at least for Europe) is, how shall we say, a prospective truth a tad too inconvenient for any politician to dare emphasize. Better to just go home, buy that hybrid car, praise the adaptability of capitalism, and pray.

• A translation.

• An interview.

• Jodi Dean on Theory Blogging.

• A disturbing article (via). And, meanwhile...speaking of whom.

• A typically excellent post by Michael Bérubé (how very common and tired, the "dissenting" straw man so habitually beloved of conservative opportunists does become). Bérubé's still riding Chomsky, too, for those of you wishing to have that debate (go there).

• So much for Civil Rights, say the reactionary ruling class, bunker-headed politicians (for those of you interested in tomorrow's news).

• A discussion ongoing, with interesting...tangents.

Happy Father's Day (to the tune of Dylan's #7 installment)

calling Kyoto

N+1:

"Our President has declared a perpetual borderless war as a consequence of a single unforeseen attack; even a much saner administration may become unhinged when nothing, least of all the weather from year to the next, can be relied on. Skirmishes or worse will flare as resources dwindle. Our isolation will grow as millions of fellow species become extinct. The suppressed nightmare of nuclear war will recur during daylight hours.

These are not worst-case scenarios. The worst-case scenarios are much worse.

...Like Oedipus, we've been warned...The Nation devotes as much space to the dangers of global warming as anyone, but it also publishes "A 'Top Ten' List of Bold Ideas," which aims at "positive, aggresive post-Bush (and post-New Democrat) near- and long-term change"...the words global warming are nowhere to be found, and the weakly worded "investing in conservation and renewable energy" rates only an honorable mention.  This is as perverse as it is typical.  Imagine a historian in the year 2080, reading such lists as she researches the vexing question of how even educated, "progressive" people could have refused to face what was happening....in the case of global warming, our collective imagination has failed us utterly."

A prediction:  this is all about to change.  (For mighty TV, she hath caught the meme.)

"There seems to be a persistent if unstated resistance on the part of the left to the precepts of ecology...The most powerful and cogent critique that can currently be leveled against our mode of capitalism is that markets fail to account for ecological costs."

A conjecture:  given an optimistic projected income for a newly minted PhD'd white male, living in the United States (discounting any student debts), it will be safe to assume that, were one to decide to start a family, one's theoretical grandchildren would not be likely to face premature extinction within the next 80 or so years.  That is, they might live into their 50's, provided one starts having children now (and assuming said children progenerate in turn, efficiently, around age 30).

Of course, with neither a PhD (yet, or just for example) nor an income, nor any real desire to have children for another decade or so, at the least, one is unlikely at this moment to have grandchildren who survive past age 30.  Hence, great-grandchildren of any sort, for the current author's generation and general demographic are – as of now – highly unlikely.  And spoiled Europeans – should the Gulf Stream shut down, as the Pentagon openly speculates – are simply screwed.  Or rather, "deeply chilled:"

"...The authors go on to conclude that, while superior wealth and resources would allow the US to adapt moderately well to such a scenario, we would find ourselves in a world "where Europe will be struggling internally, large numbers of refugees are washing up on [US] shores, and Asia is in serious crisis over food and water.  Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life." Such conclusions force us to consider the most cynical of all possible interpretations of our [i.e. the US's] indifference to global warming: on some level, we believe not only that we'll be fine, but that our relative advantage over other countries will actually increase.  Instead of yielding aspects of our dominance to bigger nations like China and India, we'll maintain our hold over a troubled world – an idea as unethical as it is dubious.

[...]

Maybe, as the Pentagon report suggests, the same privileged caste of people who engineered the coming disasters will live in fifty years much as they do now, buffered from harm by money and medicine and force of arms.  The weather will be an erratic and dangerous spectacle, economies and ecosystems will collapse, millions will die elsewhere in the world, but we'll seal our borders, abandon our ideas of nature, buy Canada ("the Saudi Arabia of freshwater"), and adapt.

Fifty years after that?  We won't be around.  Those who will be can fend for themselves, and call us what they like."

–Chad Harbach

Such is The Bush Legacy.

nb.  Following on from here.