Saturday, December 15, 2018

Towards the Last-Ditch Transformation

As the global climate summit ended its official sessions, the Washington Post reported: "Negotiators from nearly 200 nations drew close to a deal Friday that would nudge the world toward stronger targets for reducing carbon emissions and enshrine a clearer set of rules for how to get there."

According to the Post, negotiations will continue until an agreement can be announced, probably this weekend.  No one expects a groundbreaking agreement, but some progress from the heady Paris Agreement would be an achievement, given the political mischief wrought by the US, which prompted both anger and scornful laughter during the conference.  Update: The deal was announced Saturday.

But there is only so much these conferences can achieve, since they require the agreement of 200 countries.  The Post quotes an unnamed scientist at the summit:“There is no documented historic precedent” for the sweeping changes to energy, transportation and other sectors that would be necessary to hold warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the scientists said, citing the need for a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of human civilization."  That transformation must come from political energies within nations, as well as more practical alternatives for achieving these transformations.

At least according to some, practical alternatives are probably needed to reliance on the carbon tax, a so far unpopular and regressive way of limiting carbon emissions.  But the energies to jumpstart a transformation politically in the US as well as around the world, beginning with young people, may well be poised to enter the halls of power in 2019.

Young demonstrators are rallying around the cry "12 Years," which is what the latest UN report says is all civilization has to pull back from the point where climate catastrophe becomes civilization-threatening climate cataclysm.  Entering Congress in just a few weeks are newly elected, younger, more diverse Democrats who are rallying around the Green New Deal that one of their leaders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making a core issue.

These wide-ranging proposals that link efforts to address both the causes and effects of the climate crisis with employment opportunities are already attracting the backing of more experienced legislators.

Moreover, a Post analyst sees signs that climate will be a key issue in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, and Democratic candidates are already working on it.

Given the information and forecasts that keep getting worse, and the short amount of time to change just about everything, this is a last ditch effort, and it easily could be too little and too late.  But what else is there to do but try?  The measure of this generation is how hard it tries in this effort, the most important in the history of civilization.

In any case, it is inevitable that climate will be just about everyone's job sooner or later.  Best to get started while there's still a chance that the future can still be saved.

Monday, December 10, 2018

Shrinking Planet, New Work for the Future


The UN climate summit took the day off on Sunday, after Saturday produced a predictable if dispiriting dissension.  The Guardian led:

The US and Russia have thrown climate talks into disarray by allying with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to water down approval of a landmark report on the need to keep global warming below 1.5C.

After a heated two-and-a-half-hour debate on Saturday night, the backwards step by the four major oil producers shocked delegates at the UN climate conference in Katowice as ministers flew in for the final week of high-level discussions."

Besides further evidence of US-Russia collusion, it was basically another effort to bury heads in the sand until the last profits can be rung out of our current carbon-based global suicide.

But the report, which was issued in October in draft form, warns of a catastrophic future for the planet, beginning of course with the poor and the poor countries, but sure to cause turmoil and suffering in the rich countries.  If this future isn't soon faced, as it appears it won't be, an even worse one is in the cards.  So thinking about the future is a moral imperative.  One aspect of the climate cataclysm future is the subject of the rest of this post.

Call it capitalism or imperialism or colonialism or call it endless greed backed up by ideology and armies, or just the way the human animal mindlessly spreads, but the result has been civilization's insistence on infinite growth in an unfortunately finite world, which sooner or later becomes tragically impossible. Thoughtless growth bashes away at a sturdy but not indestructible support system, sometimes also known as resources and otherwise known as what makes life possible.

Unlimited human expansion (in several senses) seemed to work for awhile, but the fast-growing number of humans plus the power of human technologies and the heedlessness with which we use it is rapidly using up the world.  Infinite growth is meeting the finite limit.

The size of planet Earth obviously remains the same, but the resources--that is, the life as well as the basic supports of a particular mix of gases in the atmosphere, the abundance of water and soil, and in particular, the quantity and quality of land necessary for the diversity of life that is also a vital part of the matrix that supports humanity--all of that is shrinking.  Throw in a climate that becomes increasingly inhospitable to human life and lots and lots of other existing lifeforms, and there's less room--not even to grow but to exist.

A couple of years ago Edmund O. Wilson proposed that we devote half of the actual planet to saving the many forms of life that otherwise are going to become extinct.  In the words of the Guardian reviewer: "So what should be done? For Wilson, there is only one solution. We must increase the land we have set aside for reserves for protecting wild plants and animals until this terrain covers half the globe. Such a project would then give us a reasonable chance of saving around 80% of species still alive today, he argues."

Unfortunately, the reviewer (Robin McKie) said, Wilson is vague on how this could be done, and offers no plan.

More recently, Kim Stanley Robinson endorsed the idea and gave it more substance: empty half the Earth of humans, concentrate them in cities and leave the rest to the rest of life.

Again, the reason for doing something like this is inescapable: Our situation, KSR writes,"can’t endure for long – years, perhaps, but not decades. The future is radically unknowable: it could hold anything from an age of peaceful prosperity to a horrific mass-extinction event. The sheer breadth of possibility is disorienting and even stunning. But one thing can be said for sure: what can’t happen won’t happen. Since the current situation is unsustainable, things are certain to change."

But clustering people into cities is not as big a change as it might seem, he says: people are already doing that on their own, emptying out territories where small towns and farm communities used to be. "So emptying half the Earth of its humans wouldn’t have to be imposed: it’s happening anyway. It would be more a matter of managing how we made the move, and what kind of arrangement we left behind." 

"One important factor here would be to avoid extremes and absolutes of definition and practice, and any sense of idealistic purity. We are mongrel creatures on a mongrel planet, and we have to be flexible to survive."  So some of the remaining land (and sea) would be wilderness, while some would be cultivated, used for recreation, etc.

This is less vague that Wilson, but huge problems remain. For instance, it's true cities are expanding, and fast, but many in the world are growing so fast, primarily because starving people flood into them, that they are chaotic places: unhealthy and dangerous, with intensely overcrowded slums.  They already constitute overwhelming management problems.

But the Half-Earth idea reminded me of a similar plan proposed 45 years ago by Paul Shepard in his book The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game.  Shepard saw these problems coming (resource depletion, extinctions, runaway human growth over the planet threatening all other life--though not so much the climate crisis yet), but he thought that by the 21st century, human civilization might be capable of designing a sustainable world, and ready to do so.

In particular he believed it would be possible to have low density human spaces and large natural spaces--with easy access for humans to non-human life.  He noted the work of an architect-planner who figured the optimum human city would have fifty thousand inhabitants.  Shepard figured the human population would be about 8 billion in 2020 (pretty much what demographers predict today), and so 160,000 such cities would suffice.

It would be possible to configure them in a simple way--by placing cities "in a broken line on the perimeter of continents" and therefore leave the interiors to nature.  He goes into more detail about how these cities might be organized internally and in relation to natural areas, all in a few pages.

At the time this proposal seemed so outlandish that even Shepard devotees (a small but enthusiastic and sometimes influential self-selected group) tended to ignore these pages as an overreach, if not an actual embarrassment.

Soleri's demonstration Arcosanti, built in 1970s in Arizona
On the other hand, it was the 1970s--the era of planned communities and big ideas, Buckminster Fuller and his floating cities and cities under geodesic domes, Paolo Soleri's arcologies, when Daniel Burnham's exhortation was widely quoted: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work."

The world has much bigger cities now, and more of them, but they grew virtually unplanned, and many observers would simply call them monstrous.  Meanwhile the world's population has more than doubled, from 3 billion to nearly 8 billion.  All of the ecological disasters identified in the 70s are getting closer or well underway, with the addition of the mother of all crises, the climate crisis.  (And the "perimeters" of continents in Shepard's suggestion can longer be coastal cities, thanks to flooding by the rising oceans.)

And thanks to the climate crisis, the Half Earth is likely to be realized, though not in a pretty way.  In fact the online version of  Bill McKibben's recent New Yorker  piece is entitled: How Extreme Weather is Shrinking the Planet. 

The changes may come in waves (literally on the coasts when the sea washes in) with gaps between them, but the changes--whatever they will be--will be as close to permanent as humans can conceive. McKibben:

"Human beings have always experienced wars and truces, crashes and recoveries, famines and terrorism. We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted perverse ideologies. Climate change is different. As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature Climate Change, the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will “extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”

If global heating reaches predicted levels, let alone levels allowed by doing little or nothing to limit them, areas of the world where human now live will be too hot for humans to remain.  Islands are already disappearing under rising seas, cites will next be pushed back or erased.  The entire state of Florida is endangered even in relatively modest scenarios.

The areas where humans can live (or work or visit or farm or even see) in a century or two (and possibly sooner)  may well constitute a much smaller part of the Earth than now. The planet is effectively shrinking now, as McKibben illustrates, as pollution, garbage and effects of global heating spread, along with concrete, razed forests, dying rivers, dead zones spreading in the oceans, and dead soil.  It will do so faster and for more people in the coming years and decades.

So new ways of living in new places won't be only a ecologist's proposals.  They will be the work of the future.  New ideas now, new designs, new strategies to make life worth living, and quite possibly better, are also the work of the present.

Sunday, December 09, 2018

Masters of Deceit

In the late 1950s, notorious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover published a book that sold in the millions called Masters of Deceit.  It purported to describe the nefarious activities of the Soviet Union in the US by way of the American Communist Party.

Most of what Hoover described was specious, a holdover from McCarthyism and the discredited HUAC.  But he did mention Soviet espionage and its favorite techniques, including blackmail and threats of exposure.  He emphasized the insidious and especially the deceptive methods that the Soviets employed.  The Russians would do anything to undermine democracy in America.

The most virulent Red-baiting anticommunists of that and succeeding decades were Republicans.  They went after any Democrat who appeared too liberal, who was too insistent on racial equality (which Hoover linked to communist subversion), and anyone pointing out the insanity of the nuclear balance of terror as "soft on Communism."

Today it appears the Russians are Republicans' best friends.  There is a picture emerging of Russian money being laundered through the National Rifle Association and ending up in the Republican campaign for President or even the RNC bank account of the president-elect.  This past week, further evidence emerged of multiple pathways for Russian influence exerted on behalf of a candidate in Republican primaries who successfully became the Republican candidate for President in 2016.

This past week we saw more damning evidence of direct financial motivation for allowing the Russian government to interfere with the US election of 2016, influence or dictate policy proposals in the campaign, and possibly influence or dictate actual policy out of the White House.  This is a piece with the corruption in plain sight that this administration has so far gotten away with.  But its initial effect was to defraud voters and the election process, the basis for constitutional government.

Greed may furnish the dots, but they are connected with lies. The evidence emerges out of systematic lies that continue today.  Today's Masters of Deceit run the White House and, in perhaps different ways, the U.S. Senate.

Meanwhile the Republican party begins to mirror the Russian autocracy.  The first blatant example was the Republican Senate ignoring their constitutional responsibilities to advise and consent on the President's appointment to the Supreme Court in 2011.  They got away with that, so Republicans engage in even bolder efforts to undermine democracy in several states--notably Wisconsin and Michigan--to contravene the results of democratic elections.

Not content with completely blatant efforts to limit voting and cynically deny voting rights to entire segments of the public they can't persuade to vote for them, it's now pretty clear that Republicans in at least one congressional district in North Carolina actually destroyed or changed ballots, or both.  It wasn't the first time--at least the third time in that district.  I'm not convinced it didn't happen in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election.

All in all the Republican party is moving quickly towards becoming as close to an American Fascist political party as this country has ever seen.