It’s been a year since I last did a couple of posts (here and here) on climate change – but a combination of book downloads on the subject and Europe’s present heatwave is the prompt for another post. The books are first “Power – limits and prospects for human survival” by Richard Heinberg which came out in 2021 and then Five Insights for avoiding global collapse by Gaya Herrington which was published in 2022 (and can be read in full by tapping the title)
Heinberg has been writing about our overreliance on fossil fuels for a couple of decades but I find his book a bit too glib. Herrington is a much younger writer and starts with an
explanation of the systems approach - with due tributes to Dona Meadows and her Thinking in Systems book.
Admittedly, thinking in systems can be quite overwhelming sometimes. If everything is connected, where does one start to make any change at all? And how, if it is not as simple as pressing a button? There is a way to still make a difference, but not with force. Influence, rather than strength, is the key to making a lasting impact when working in a system (p11)
We are living in the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, and partially because of our encroachment into wildlife habitats, 2020 brought us a seemingly sudden pandemic that completely disrupted our already feeble sense of normalcy. What many of us initially thought would be over in a few months, lasted years. And at the time of writing, Russia’s war in Ukraine has us heading into winter with renewed anxieties around geopolitical and energy security. Our world is full of tipping points, counterintuitive conjunctions, and inertia.
Harrington's 5 insights are a bit underwhelming -
Acting as if we are not connected has brought the world to the edge of collapse
growth is the cause of society’s problems
We need to fundamentally change society’s priorities if we want to avoid significant declines in our current levels of well-being
this is urgent
the end of the growth objective doesn’t mean the end of progress
But these podcasts will tell you more -
https://open.spotify.com/show/3sNUjJdtw4dsNb5jtkukHq
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/57-gaya-herrington
My fellow blogger Dave Pollard put it nicely in a recent post
Thanks for the inspiration to a number of collapsnik writers who have been musing helpfully on this subject, particularly about personal and collective human agency, about our human propensity to obfuscate and put out of mind truths we don’t want to deal with, and about our inclination for disingenuous wishful thinking — particularly Erik Michaels, Indrajit Samarajiva, Jem Bendell and Tim Morgan.
It’s great to be reading the work of others who appreciate that there are no answers to such predicaments, nothing to feel ashamed about, and no one to blame, and that it’s enough to just try to understand and explain what is happening. I think we owe that much to ourselves, all of us doing our weary best, and I think we owe it, too, to the future inhabitants of this planet, human and/or more-than-human, that will live with the mostly unintended consequences of our efforts and our presence here.
The editorial of the current issue of the New Statesman has responded by reminding us that
Twenty two of the hottest years since records began in 1850 have occurred in the last 23.
Since 1950, the number of floods has increased by a factor of 15 and wildfires by a factor of seven.
In 2003 an estimated 70,000 people died as a result of a European heatwave. Across the world,
five million deaths a year are now linked to abnormally hot and cold temperatures. Climate change
is not only a catastrophe for the generations to come – it is one for us today
For 50 years, scientists have been warning us that we were outstripping planetary boundaries - “Limits to Growth” came out in 1972 and sketched various scenarios. Vested interests fought back and rubbished the scientists – encouraging cynicism and fatalism. We can – and do – rationalise our reluctance to change our habits but it’s only in the past decade that books started to appear to explore this reluctance. Last August I recommended some books -
Living in Denial – climate change, emotions and everyday life” Kari Norgaard (2011) A researcher returns to her Norwegian roots to spend a year exploring what one town felt about climate change
“Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy”; Joanne Macey and Chris Johnstone (2012) A philosopher and social psychologist team up to develop an important idea about hope (about which St Augustine did not say - "Hope has 2 beautiful daughters – anger about how things are – and courage to ensure they do not remain so)
How to have impossible conversations; Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019) a rather formulaistic book
“Still Hopeful – lessons from a lifetime of activism”; Maude Barlow (2021) an admirable activist in issues such as water and globalisation offers some lessons from her work
“Saving Us – a climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world”; Katharine Hayhoe (2021)
There is undoubtedly climate change - but then there always has been - as the current BBC 2 series "Earth" shows - and the planets that don't have change all are dead planets. The current climate change is almost certainly a function of CO2 emissions from industrialised societies. The question is is that necessarily bad, and what is the best way of responding?
ReplyDeleteDenying it, certainly isn't a policy, but clambering about the Malthusian, anti-development, small is beautiful bandwagon has never been a solution either. The Malthusians have repeatedly been proved wrong, back to Malthus himself, who had his own personal vested interests, as paid representative of the landed aristocracy he was, to promote.
Rather than resources running out, which would imply rising marginal costs of production, the opposite is true. Being of a similar age, we both remember the warning that oil was about to run out within 30 years, in the early 1970's. Didn't happen, and fifty years later, here we are with more than enough oil, and its cheaper than ever in real terms. Global food production has risen so much, and become so much more efficient that as a proportion of household budgets its sunk massively, and to an extent the average household throws away a third of the food it buys!
All for the same reasons that Malthus was wrong himself as shown by Marx, and the Scottish agronomist James Anderson, i.e. productivity rising faster than demand. In addition, development of new materials etc. So, the question is, is the cost of simply adapting to changed climate conditions - as life on Earth has always done, and prospered - the rational and more cost-effective thing to do rather than putting on a hair shirt, and curtailing industrial development that will be the basis of producing the wealth required to provide those solutions, as it has done for the developed economies over the last 200 years.
After all, not only is the idea that the world has to remain static reactionary and utopian, but the attempts to make it so are not only likely to fail, but also to have their own reactionary consequences.
Are wildfires caused by climate change, or simply by dry conditions, and the dry material being lit? I remember lots of local such fires in my youth, most lit by people. The fire in the UK last year that was in the news, as evidence of climate change, its been announced, was actually started in someone's garden, probably from a bar-b-q. So unless the causation is climate change, more bar-b-q's, more garden fires, its a bit of a stretch.
ReplyDeleteMore flooding may be due to more rain, or may simply be a consequence of more areas having been concreted over, with new housing developments no providing adequate gardens, or parking so that what garden there is gets concreted for parking. Also, anti-flooding measures tend to cause more flooding elsewhere, as they channel larger volumes of water downstream.
22 of the hottest 23 years etc. Too small a time period to be decisive given the huge timescales involved. To give, an example from another sphere, where the timescales are only a fraction of that, if you looked at interest rates, you could say that they have been the lowest on record for the majority of years since 1982 until 2022. On that basis you might conclude that some qualitative change has arisen causing that, and project it to the future. Many did, and are now squealing as interest rates and their mortgage payments have doubled and so on.
Those that produce the news and so on, tend to be young, and only have a very short time frame to make judgements upon. Whereas the economic long wave takes place over 60 years. Long periods of generally falling interest rates are not new, and are always followed by long periods of generally rising rates.
In any case, no sign of a heatwave here in Brexit Britain, as I sit well wrapped up in the house, to avoid putting on the heating. And, that's also the point about people dying from heat or cold too. I've been in Spain with temperatures nearly 50 degrees. So you don't go out in the midday sun, you drink lots of fluids, dip in the pool, or a cold shower. Its common sense isn't it. Failure to apply it might result in death, just as it will from smoking and so on. You can't protect everyone from idiocy.
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