by DGR News Service | Jul 23, 2024 | ACTION, The Problem: Civilization, The Solution: Resistance
By Julia Conley Jun 26, 2024, for Common Dreams.
“The geoengineering approach puts Earth’s systems at risk in a faulty and false bid toward solving the climate crisis. It is what we call a false solution,” said one campaigner.
Biodiversity advocates on Wednesday called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reject a new geoengineering project spearheaded by researchers in Massachusetts that one critic said would do “nothing to solve the root causes of the climate crisis and instead puts at risk the oceans’ natural capacity to absorb carbon and their role in sustaining life on Earth.”
Friends of the Earth (FOE) and other groups warned that an experiment called LOC-NESS by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) carries “potentially catastrophic risks” for the Atlantic Ocean, where researchers have proposed dumping more than 60,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide near Cape Cod to test a “carbon dioxide removal approach” called Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE).
WHOI’s website states that the experiment would involve the release of “nontoxic, fluorescent Rhodamine WT dye into the ocean from a research ship,” with researchers tracking the dye’s movement over 72 hours in order to determine whether the ocean’s alkalinity could be enhanced.
If so, the scientists say, they could ultimately help to regulate atmospheric carbon.
The EPA’s notice about the proposed study from last month, however, says that the project “would involve a controlled release of a sodium hydroxide solution”—which is “essentially lye, a substance known to cause chemical burns and one that must be handled with great care,” according to Tom Goldtooth, co-founder and member of the board of directors of the national Climate Justice Alliance.
“It’s astonishing that the EPA is even considering allowing dangerous, caustic chemicals to be dumped in ocean waters that are frequented by at least eight endangered species, including right whales and leatherback turtles.”
“Altering the chemical composition of the ocean under the guise of increasing its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide is misleading and dangerous,” said Goldtooth. “An experiment centered on introducing this caustic substance into the sea should not be permitted… The geoengineering approach puts Earth’s systems at risk in a faulty and false bid toward solving the climate crisis. It is what we call a false solution.”
Friends of the Earth pointed out that WHOI’s permit application to the EPA acknowledges that after changing the ocean’s alkalinity, the researchers “have no direct way of measuring how much carbon dioxide will be removed by the experiment.”
“The production of alkaline materials is extremely energy-intensive, releasing similar or even higher levels of greenhouse gasses than they remove upon being dumped into the ocean,” said the group. “The researchers have declined to analyze how much carbon dioxide was released in the production, transportation, and dumping of the sodium hydroxide, making it impossible to know whether the technology even reduces greenhouse gas emissions.”
Despite these lingering questions, said FOE, the EPA has issued tentative approval for a permit for the experiment, with a public comment period open until July 1.
The caustic sodium hydroxide solution the researchers plan to use, warns FOE, “causes chemical burns upon contact with skin or marine animals, setting the stage for potentially extreme damage to local ecosystems.”
Benjamin Day, FOE’s senior campaigner for its Climate and Energy Justice Program, said the group “unequivocally” opposes the LOC-NESS geoengineering experiment in the fragile ecosystem off the coast of Cape Cod.
“It’s astonishing that the EPA is even considering allowing dangerous, caustic chemicals to be dumped in ocean waters that are frequented by at least eight endangered species, including right whales and leatherback turtles,” said Day.
Mary Church, geoengineering campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, said “speculative technologies” like OAE are “a dangerous distraction from the real solutions to the climate crisis,” which scientists around the world agree requires a rapid reduction in planet-heating fossil fuel emissions through a large-scale shift to renewable energy sources.
“Marine geoengineering does nothing to solve the root causes of the climate crisis and instead puts at risk the oceans’ natural capacity to absorb carbon and their role in sustaining life on Earth,” said Church. “Outdoor experiments could not only cause immediate harm to marine life but are also a slippery slope to potentially catastrophic impacts of large-scale deployment.”
United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has placed a moratorium on geoengineering techniques like OAE until there is “adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic, and cultural impacts.”
Photo by Taylor Rooney on Unsplash
by DGR News Service | Dec 19, 2021 | Education, Human Supremacy, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization
Non-neutrality of technology & limits to conspiracy theory
By Nicolas Casaux
“For, prior to all such, we have the things themselves for our masters. Now they are many; and it is through these that the men who control the things inevitably become our masters too.”
Epictetus, Discourses, Book IV, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Ed.
In an essay published in the fall of 1872, entitled “On Authority,” Friedrich Engels, Marx’s alter ego, railed against the “anti-authoritarians” (the anarchists) who imagined they could organize the production of “modern industry” without recourse to any authority:
“Let us take by way of example a cotton spinning mill. The cotton must pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in different rooms. Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed, must be observed by all, without any exception. Thereafter particular questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled in an authoritarian way.”
He mentioned another example,
“the railway. Here too the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?”
What needs to be understood is that:
“The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]
If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.”
To put it another way, Engels points out that technical complexity is tied to organizational imperatives. Separate to any individual’s intention, each technology, each technical device, has its own ecological and social implications.
In a similar vein to Engels, George Orwell noted that:
“…one is driven to the conclusion that Anarchism implies a low standard of living. It need not imply a hungry or uncomfortable world, but it rules out the kind of air-conditioned, chromium-plated, gadget-ridden existence which is now considered desirable and enlightened. The processes involved in making, say, an aeroplane are so complex as to be only possible in a planned, centralized society, with all the repressive apparatus that that implies. Unless there is some unpredictable change in human nature, liberty and efficiency must pull in opposite directionsi.”
Consider another example. The fabrication of a wicker basket, like that of a nuclear power plant (or a solar photovoltaic power plant, or a smartphone, or a television set), has material (and therefore ecological) as well as social implications. In case of the former, these material implications are related to the collection of wicker. While in case of the second, they relate, among other things, to the procuring (mining, etc.) of the innumerable raw materials needed to build a nuclear power plant, and before that, to the construction of the tools needed to extract those raw materials, and so on – modern technologies are always embedded in a gigantic technological system made up of many different technologies with immense social and material implications.
In his essay entitled “The Archaeology of the Development Idea,” Wolfgang Sachs takes the example of:
“an electric mixer. Whirring and slightly vibrating, it mixes ingredients in next to no time. A wonderful tool! So it seems. But a quick look at cord and wall-socket reveals that what we have before us is rather the domestic terminal of a national, indeed worldwide, system: the electricity arrives via a network of cables and overhead utility lines fed by power stations that depend on water pressures, pipelines or tanker consignments, which in turn require dams, offshore platforms or derricks in distant deserts. The whole chain guarantees an adequate and prompt delivery only if every one of its parts is overseen by armies of engineers, planners and financial experts, who themselves can fall back on administrations, universities, indeed entire industries (and sometimes even the military).”
Back to the wicker basket and the nuclear power plant. The social implications of the wicker basket are minimal. It relies on the transmission of a very simple skill that can be understood and applied by any person. The social implications of the nuclear power plant are immeasurable and far reaching. The construction of a nuclear power plant is based on a social organization capable of generating a massive division and specialization of work, highly qualified engineers, workers, managers of all kinds (i.e. on an organization with a system of schooling, a way of producing an obedient workforce, scientific elites, etc.), of transporting materials between distant points of the globe, etc. (and this was the case in the USSR as well as it is in the USA today).
Therefore, those who claim — often without having seriously thought about the matter — that technologies are “neutral” because one can use a knife to cut butter or slit one’s neighbor’s throat are seriously mistaken. Yes, you can use a knife to cut butter or slit your neighbor’s throat. But no, this certainly does not mean that this technology is “neutral”, it only testifies the existence of a certain versatility in the use of technological tools. They are seriously mistaken because they ignore the conditions under which the knife is obtained, made and produced. They overlook or ignore the way in which the technology they take as an example is manufactured. They assume that the technology already exists — as if technologies fell from the sky or grew naturally in trees, or as if they were simply tools floating in space-time, implying nothing, coming from nothing, just waiting to be used well or badly.
This is, obviously, not the case. No technology is “neutral”. Every technology has social and material requirements. The case of objects like the knife is special in that there exists very simple versions of them, corresponding to low technologies, soft technologies, whose social and material implications are minimal, as well as complex versions of them, which belong to the high-tech realm, whose social and material implications are innumerable. A knife does not have the same social and material implications depending on whether it is a (prehistoric) knife made of flint or obsidian or a knife bought at Ikea made of stainless steel (including chromium, molybdenum and vanadium) with a handle made of polypropylene. The manufacturing processes, the materials needed, the specialized knowledge involved are completely different.
In an essay called “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”, dated 1964, American sociologist Lewis Mumford distinguished two main categories of technologies (techniques, in his vocabulary). Democratic technologies and authoritarian technologies. Democratic technologies are those that rely on a “small-scale method of production”, that promote “communal self-government, free communication as between equals, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of individual moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community”. They favor “personal autonomy” and give “authority to the whole rather than the part”. Democratic technology has “modest demands” and “great powers of adaptation and recuperation”.
Authoritarian technologies, on the other hand, confer “authority only to those at the apex of the social hierarchy,” rely on the “new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization”, on “ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery”, on “complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable and interdependent parts — the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy”.
What does this have to do with conspiracy theory? One of the characteristics of a conspiracy theory is the blaming of nefarious individuals for most of the ills that plague the human condition in contemporary industrial civilization. As if all our problems were the result of malevolent intentions of wicked people. Most conspiracists — and this trait is not exclusive to them, it also characterizes most people on the left — imagine that without these bad people and their bad intentions, we could live in a just and good, egalitarian and sustainable technological civilization. It would simply be a matter of electing good rulers or reforming society in multifarious ways (as if systems and objects of themselves had no requirements, no implications).
However, as we have made clear, we should recognize that all things — including technologies — have requirements and implications independent of the will of any specific human being.
As Langdon Winner noticed in his book The Whale and The Reactor, each and every technology requires its environment
“to be structured in a particular way in much the same sense that an automobile requires wheels in order to move. The thing could not exist as an effective operating entity unless certain social as well as material conditions were met.”
This is why some technologies (certain types of technologies) are, by necessity, linked to authoritarianism. This is most notably the case, to state the obvious, of all “high technologies”, of all modern technologies in general. We should note that, historically, the more civilization became global (the more the economic system became global), the more powerful its technologies became, the more rigid and authoritarian. This process is still ongoing. And the more powerful and dangerous technologies become, like nuclear power or artificial intelligence, the more authoritarianism — a thorough control of people and processes and everyday life — becomes necessary in order to prevent any catastrophe, in other words, the more technocratic society becomes.
Let us take another thing as an example: the size of human societies. In his “Project of Constitution for Corsica”, written in 1765, Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted:
“A purely democratic government is more suitable for a small town than for a nation. One cannot assemble the whole people of a country like that of a city, and when the supreme authority is entrusted to deputies the government changes and becomes aristocratic.”
In his book The Myth of The Machine (1967), Lewis Mumford similarly noted:
“Democracy, in the sense I here use the term, is necessarily most active in small communities and groups, whose members meet face to face, interact freely as equals, and are known to each other as persons: it is in every respect the precise opposite of the anonymous, de-personalized, mainly invisible forms of mass association, mass communication, mass organization. But as soon as large numbers are involved, democracy must either succumb to external control and centralized direction, or embark on the difficult task of delegating authority to a cooperative organization.”
The size of a human society has, quite logically, implications, meaning that it determines — at least in part — how its members are able to organize themselves politically, independent of human preferences. One can wish with all one’s heart to establish a real democracy (i.e. a direct democracy) with 300 million people, but in practice it is (very) complicated.
All things have their requirements.
We could take another example, related to the previous one: Human density. Since its advent, civilization has been synonymous with the emergence of infectious diseases, epidemics and pandemics (the Athens plague, the Antonine plague, etc.), because one of its intrinsic characteristics is a high concentration of domesticated animals, where pathogens can mutate and reproduce, near a high concentration of — also domesticated — human beings (assembled in cities), who can thus be contaminated by the pathogens of their domesticated animals, and then infect each other all the more quickly and extensively as the available means of transportation are rapid and global. In addition to all this, because of its needs, every civilization has a systemic imperative to degrade existing ecosystems, to disturb nature’s dynamic equilibriums, which increases the risk of new epidemics or pandemics.
In order to alleviate these problems, industrial civilization has developed various remedies, including vaccination.
Just as industrially raised pigs would probably not survive in their environment without medication (antibiotics and others), urban existence and civilized life (the life of industrially raised human beings) would be difficult without vaccines [or some other form of palliative], with even more numerous and devastating epidemics and pandemics.
Here we see again that things have their requirements. The list of possible examples goes on and on. This means, among other things, that life in cities, with running water, electricity and high technology in general has many social and material implications, among which, in all probability, a hierarchical, authoritarian and unequal social system. (It is certainly the case that the requirements of things are not always extremely precise, offering relative latitude: the sanitary pass in France was probably not an absolute necessity, since many countries didn’t implement it, at least not yet; on the other hand, all of the nation-states worldwide are constituted in a similar way since one finds police forces, a president etc. everywhere).
Yes, some individuals already own and seek to monopolize more and more power and wealth. But if we live in authoritarian societies today, it is certainly not — not onlyii — because of greedy individuals, lusting for control, power and wealth. The authoritarian and unequal character of industrial civilization is not — not only — the result of the intentions and deeds of a few ultra-rich people like Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates. It is, in great part, the result of the requirements of the things that constitute it — technical systems, specific technologies, economic systems, etc.
If we want to get rid of authoritarianism, inequality, and found true democracies, we have to give up all those things whose requirements prevent us from doing so — in particular, we have to give up modern technologies.
ii This is in its review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, in the Collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell, Volume IV, In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950.
ii “Not only” because initially, if we came to live in authoritarian societies, in industrial civilization, it is largely because of the intentions of a few groups of individuals, who gradually (and by means of force, violence) imposed this new socio-technical organization on the populations. And because the rich and powerful, the elite, sometimes conspire (history is full of examples of conspiracies that are now officially acknowledged) to make people accept new technical systems, which come with certain requirements. Once these systems have been accepted and adopted by people, they have no other choice, if they wish to keep them, than to comply with their requirements.
by DGR News Service | May 20, 2019 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Elizabeth Robson / Art for Culture Change
In the preface to Columbus and Other Cannibals, Derrick Jensen asks: “why is the dominant culture so excruciatingly, relentlessly, insanely, genocidally, ecocidally, suicidally destructive?” [1]
The author of Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack D. Forbes, goes on to answer Derrick’s question in the chapters of his remarkable book, pinning the main cause of our suicidal destruction on a virus of the mind, wétiko. Wétiko was first identified by Native Americans and other indigenous people, when they saw how white colonizers so disrespected the natural world, women, and all people who were not yet colonized, they needed a name for the sickness in the colonizers’ minds that allowed them to commit such acts of aggression, hate, and conquest.
Colonizers are still colonizing today, now more than ever. Colonizers take whatever they think they need from the natural world to feed the global machine of capitalism and consumerism, without a care for the living beings who need what is now destroyed, and so the living beings themselves are now destroyed, too. These colonizers know the destruction they are causing–the loss of life, the loss of biodiversity, the loss of habitat, the loss of a stable climate–and yet they continue taking and destroying anyway. This is pure arrogance.
We in the early 21st century are the most arrogant humans to ever have walked the face of the Earth. Mr. Forbes identified this arrogance as one of the major traits of wétikoism:
“There are many psychological traits that help form the wétiko personality. Greed, lust, inordinate ambition, materialism, the lack of a true ‘face,’ a schizoid (split) personality, and so on are all terms which can be used to describe most wétikos. But one of the major traits characterizing the truly evil and extreme form of wétikoism is arrogance.”
This is not new, and it’s not news. Mr. Forbes argues wétikoism first originated in Egypt, and over time infected all peoples who reigned via colonialism and imperialism, including of course the Romans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Europeans, and the Anglo-Americans in the United States.
The wétiko virus is now more virulent than ever; we become more arrogant by the day, as we use science and technology to discover and invent whole new ways to pollute and destroy our one and only home. Mr. Forbes writes:
“Scientists in many fields recognize no societal obligations restraining their experimentation, least of all any restraints imposed by ‘the lower classes’ or less powerful nationalities. … Many modern scientists are the precise counterparts of Christopher Columbus, and not merely by way of analogy. They will pave the way for new imperialism and new systems of coercion and will themselves economically, participate in the fruits of the new ‘discoveries.’”
I cannot think of a more perfect example of wétikoism than the emerging research field of geo-engineering. Scientists working in this field are hoping to invent and understand ways to reduce the impacts of climate change via chemical and technological means. One of these research areas, solar radiation management, also known as albedo modification, is proceeding to the experimental phase at Harvard University, where scientist David Keith heads up an experiment named SCoPEx, a powered balloon that will release chemical particles into the stratosphere, and measure how those particles affect the reflection of sunlight away from the planet. Solar radiation management is widely regarded as the cheapest and easiest way to cool the planet in case we do so much damage to the climate, we find ourselves in need of such extreme and drastic measures. Inspired by volcanoes–which release reflective particles when they erupt–solar radiation management would, in theory, cool the planet with just a few applications a year, costing in the millions or low billions of dollars. Of course, we have no idea what this would do to the temperature or the weather on a planetary scale, but, scientists argue, it’s better to have a fallback idea that’s already been researched and tested, than not have one at all.
Do you or I or anyone but the scientists at Harvard have a say in whether the SCoPEx experiment goes forward? Does it matter?
Scientists tend to use the argument that it’s better to know, than not to know. Maybe. But research can lead us down a path that, in hindsight, we might wish we’d never taken. Some of the scientists who developed the hydrogen bomb, which has led us into a nuclear arms race that threatens all life on earth, regretted their participation in creating that weapon of mass destruction. Without the benefit of hindsight, how might we feel about inventing new ways to change the atmosphere of the Earth?
Of course, we already are changing the atmosphere of the Earth, so perhaps one might argue that more experiments are necessary to counteract the planetary-wide experiment we are currently running with CO2 in our atmosphere.
The thing is, these scientists at Harvard aren’t asking you, or me, or anyone else if they should go forward with their research and their experiments. They aren’t asking the millions of other species on this planet if they want more experiments on the only planet we know of that sustains life. In other words, as Jack Forbes put it, these scientists “recognize no societal obligations restraining their experimentation.”
What do the scientists get out of this research, other than satisfying their need to know? Are the scientists paving the way for “new imperialism and new systems of coercion” as Mr. Forbes writes? Are these scientists participating in the fruits of their discoveries? Are these scientists wétikos?
David Keith, the main researcher on the SCoPEx experiment at Harvard founded a company in 2009 named Carbon Engineering, of which he is executive chairman. Carbon Engineering creates technology that captures CO2 from the air. The company announced partnerships with the fossil fuel companies Chevron and Occidental in January 2019.
Why are Chevron and Occidental partnering with Carbon Engineering? Because, as Occidental stated, “the deal would complement the company’s enhanced oil recovery business, where CO2 is pumped in fields to release more fuel.”[2]
In other words, the oil companies use the captured CO2 to get more oil out of the ground.
So think about it: David Keith is the founder of and receives direct monetary benefit from a company that sucks CO2 from the air. And he is the primary researcher behind the Harvard solar radiation management experiment that would reflect more sun in our atmosphere, cooling the planet and thus allowing us to burn more fossil fuels and continue creating CO2 emissions, that his company can then capture and sell to oil companies to “enhance” oil recovery.
Yes, these geo-engineers are wétikos.
One can easily imagine the day that humanity realizes it has so utterly failed to stop the relentless and insane extraction and burning of fossil fuels, that in order to survive, in order to keep this ecocidal, genocidal culture going so that the rich and powerful can maintain their positions of power for just a little while longer, someone somewhere decides to spray reflective chemicals into the stratosphere. Will you or I or anyone who is not rich and powerful have a say in that decision? It is highly unlikely.
Will any of the other millions of species on this one planet we all call home have a say in that decision? Of course not. Wétikos forgot how to listen to the Earth a long, long time ago.
And so what is geo-engineering if not a wétiko system of planetary imperialism and coercion?
[1] Columbus and Other Cannibals, by Jack D. Forbes, 1979, 1992, 2008
[2] https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060111481
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 29, 2012 | Climate Change, Strategy & Analysis
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
Climate scientists are clear that modern human societies are changing the atmosphere of the planet, mainly by clearing forests, grasslands, wetlands, and other natural ecosystems for the purposes of development and logging and by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. These activities are releasing greenhouse gases and destroying natural greenhouse gas reservoirs. The result of all this activity is that the Earth is growing steadily warmer, year after year, and this is causing problems all over the world.
That additional heat is powering up weather systems and altering global flows of energy. Storms are more powerful and frequent than in the past. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, and other weather patterns are becoming increasingly unpredictable and dangerous. “Freak” events like the disastrous heat wave in Russia in 2011 are becoming more common. Annual deaths ascribed to climate change were estimated in a 2002 study to be 150,000 per year at that time, using what the authors called an “extremely conservative” methodology.
Every year representatives from governments around the world gather to discuss the problem of global warming as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1994 treaty which has been signed by 194 nations. In 2012, the 17th annual meeting was held in Durban, South Africa. The stated goal of these meetings has been to limit global warming to 2° Celsius – about 3.5° Fahrenheit over average pre-industrial temperature. This is the maximum level of warming that has been labeled as safe by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the United Nations scientific advising body on the matter.
Warming beyond this level is not safe because it threatens to accelerate due to “tipping points” in the global climate. These tipping points refer to a specific time at which a natural system, after being stressed by global warming, “flips” into a different state and begins to release greenhouse gases in a self-sustaining reaction instead of being a carbon dioxide ‘sink’. James Hansen and other climate scientists have issued dire warnings about this possibility. In fact, Hansen and other scientists have recently revised their assertions that limiting warming to 2°C will prevent climate tipping points. They, and many other climate scientists, believe now that warming must be limited to 1°C to avoid these catastrophic feedbacks, which are already beginning to take effect.
“With the current global warming of ~0.8°C evidence of slow feedbacks is beginning to appear,” Hansen wrote in 2011.
These “slow feedbacks” include processes like ice sheet melt and the release of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost and warming shallow oceans, and threaten to rapidly increase the effects of global warming if climate tipping points are exceeded. Their effects are rarely included in climate models and policy, and are a major reason why some scientists are concerned that estimates and forecasts have been underestimating the speed and severity of climate change.
“There’s evidence that climate sensitivity [to greenhouse gases] may be quite a bit higher than what the models are suggesting,” said Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford University.
That is why many scientists and policy analysts are calling for greater emissions cuts than what has been proposed in international negotiations. So what is necessary to avoid runaway global warming?
According to the climate-modeling group of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, we need 100% cuts by 2050 to avert 2°C warming. Their calculations show that even this rate of reduction would leave a 1 in 3 chance of rise over 2°C. James Hansen, in the same 2011 paper referenced above, notes that if emissions cuts don’t begin until 2020, the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, currently around 395ppm, will not decline to 350ppm (considered the highest safe level for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) for almost 300 years.
George Monbiot, the noted climate journalist and researcher, has called for a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute calls for at least 80% cuts by 2020. Hansen notes that 6% cuts per year beginning in 2012 would prevent substantial warming beyond 1°C – this is equivalent to a 100% emissions cut by 2030. To be successful, Hansen also notes that these cuts would have to be combined with a massive campaign to restore forests and other natural carbon sinks.
As we can see, the consensus among the most informed individuals is that emissions need to be near zero by 2030 and more likely by 2020. To achieve this by systemic means, emissions need to peak between 2012 and 2015 and begin to decline rapidly, but the trend has been moving in the opposite direction. Between 2000 and 2010, emissions rose about 3% per year, and projections from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development assert that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will be 50% higher than current levels by 2050.
Business As Usual Is A Dead End…
Obviously, the rate of emissions cuts being promoted by governments around the world are not sufficient to avoid 1°C of warming (or even 2°C warming), regardless of new technologies brought into play. And what is the foundation of the cuts that are proposed? What are the technologies being relied on to reduce emissions?
Most of the proposed solutions to global warming focus on a revolution in transportation that leaves fossil fuels behind and transitions to electric transportation, and a conversion from fossil fuel electricity generation to “renewable” energy generation. Among policymakers, governments, and environmentalists, “green energy” is often considered the Holy Grail of the new green economy. Excitement and investment has focused on solar energy, wind power, and biofuels as the technologies that will herald the new ecotopian future.
But do these new technologies actually represent real solutions? Serious concerns have been raised about the true sustainability of these and other “green” technologies. Author and activist Lierre Keith writes:
“Windmills, PV panels, the grid itself are all manufactured using that cheap energy [from fossil fuels]. When fossil fuel costs begin to rise such highly manufactured items will simply cease to be feasible: sic transit gloria renewables… The basic ingredients for renewables are the same materials that are ubiquitous in industrial products, like cement and aluminum. No one is going to make cement in any quantity without using the energy of fossil fuels… And aluminum? The mining itself is a destructive and toxic nightmare from which riparian communities will not awaken in anything but geologic time.”
Biofuels are similarly plagued by criticism. Many biofuels simply take more energy to produce than can be extracted from them. Those that do produce energy produce an exceedingly small amount. These fuels are often created by clearing natural ecosystems such as tropical rain forests or prairies for agricultural production, a process which releases even more greenhouse gases, reduces biodiversity, and reduces local food availability. Biofuel production is considered a major factor in rising food prices around the world in recent years. These rising food prices have led to widespread starvation, unrest, and violence.
Digging Out of a Very Deep Hole
Some governments, corporations, and advocacy groups are calling for emergency efforts to stop global warming using techniques collectively referred to as geo-engineering. Proposals include injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect incoming solar radiation, dumping huge loads of iron into the ocean to stimulate phytoplankton growth, or even putting massive reflectors in space to redirect solar rays before they hit the earth. But many worry that these solutions could cause more problems than they solve.
“Einstein warned us and told us that you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them,” says physicist and sustainable agriculture activist Vandana Shiva. “The sun is not the problem. The problem is the mass of pollution we are creating.”
Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere would certainly reduce global warming, but only as long as these injections are continued. This would mean that if, in the future, society was unable to maintain atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide, these levels would rapidly fall and warming would commence once again. It is a false solution based on offloading the effects of global warming onto future generations.
Ocean fertilization would also be effective at reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels by stimulating the growth of phytoplankton who absorb greenhouse gases. However, the side effects of modifying oceanic food chains and energy flows on the scale that would be required for this to be effective are unknown, and could be catastrophic for oceans already reeling from decades of overfishing and industrial pollution.
Reflectors in space are a logistical nightmare. The massive amount of energy that would be required to manufacture and deploy such technology would greatly exacerbate warming. These reflectors would also have unknown effects on plant growth, vitamin D synthesis in humans, weather patterns written by solar energy, and other global systems. It is possible that this “solution” could devastate the planet.
Beyond these issues, none of the geo-engineering proposals address some of the fundamental issues of climate change that go beyond global warming. For example, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are dissolving into the oceans where they become carboxylic acid. This acid is lowering the pH of the entire ocean and interfering with fish and shellfish reproduction, coral reef growth, and numerous other living systems that, aside from their intrinsic value, provide a good deal of human nutrition around the world.
Geo-engineering also fails to deal with the issue of rising seas – we are already committed to several feet of sea level rise, which is likely to displace tens of millions of people around the world and inundate ecosystems. While reducing warming through these techniques would slow the melt of mountain glaciers and ice sheets, it would do nothing to address the natural systems already in dire straits because of warming up to this point.
What about simple living?
Faced with these problems, many people are addressing some of the fundamental issues at hand, such as the culture of consumerism that is fueling the industrial machine. Millions of people are embracing the need for voluntary simplicity and taking steps to reduce their waste, use less energy, support local economies over corporate globalization, and become self-sufficient wherever possible.
This is an excellent first step. However, it is important to recognize that the vast majority of energy consumption and waste production comes from the commercial and industrial sectors – that is to say, business. So even if all of the 350 million people in the United States reduce their energy consumption and personal waste production drastically, it would have marginal effects on the global situation. It bears repeating often and loudly that the US military is the largest consumer of fossil fuel on the planet. So while simple living is certainly a moral necessity, it does not fundamentally challenge the globalized industrial economy that is based on colonization and extraction of resources.
So what could work?
But plants can be grown for food in ways that are in accord with the needs and desires of a particular landscape, as has been demonstrated by thousands of cultures throughout history. These cultures practiced gardening, tending wild plants, and horticulture – practices which revolve around closed loop systems of perennial polycultures, communities of plants that supplement and support each other. The modern idea of permaculture evolved from these roots. Permaculture uses thousands of techniques, precisely adapted to the region, climate, soils, and microclimate to create edible ecosystems which provide food as well as quality wildlife habitat.
Annual grain monocrop agriculture is certainly no solution: it is based on drawdown of finite soil reserves and enables the population growth that is currently stretching the carrying capacity of the planet to its limits. In fact, the history of agricultural civilizations is precisely the history of environmental devastation, from the deforestation of Babylon-era Mesopotamia, to the felling of great forests of North Africa to construct the Roman fleets, to the great dust bowl of the 1930s and onwards.
Permaculture, as well as other traditional subsistence methods such as hunting, animal husbandry, fishing, and gathering, must be the foundations of any future sustainable culture; otherwise any claims to being “green” will be falsehoods. Perennial polycultures, both cultivated and wild, can also supply the other basics necessities of life: clean water, clean air, material for clothing and shelter, and inspiration spiritual nourishment.
Addressing the population bubble…
The skyrocketing world population will need to be addressed if climate change is to be averted. This is technically possible, but socially and politically very difficult. About half of all children born are unplanned, which means that by simply reducing or limiting unwanted pregnancies, we would solve the population problem. The most effective means of reducing unwanted pregnancies is by empowering women, making birth control easily available and culturally appropriate, and by combating the effects of patriarchal, male-focused culture.
It is also critical that we note that population is a secondary issue; consumption has a more direct effect on climate change and population. What I mean by this is that a single person in the United States is likely to have a massive climate impact compared to a dozen or more people living in poor nations. So while population must be addressed, we must also address the issue of overconsumption and industrialization.
A human-rights issue
Global warming is a human rights issue, so perhaps it will be useful for us to look at past struggles for human rights. It is important for us to recognize that global warming is also a value-laden issue. It is inherently political and partisan. There is a clear dividing line between those who are making fortunes off industries and lifestyles of flagrant consumption, and those who are bearing the brunt of the effects of global warming.
What does this mean for our strategy? For one, it may mean that legislative change will be too slow to stop catastrophic global warming: powerful interests are so entrenched within our political system that booting them out is a long-term process. For another, it means that in addition to allies, we must concern ourselves with enemies. There are specific corporations, governments, and individuals who will consistently side with profit and with business rather than with human health, dignity, and good relationship with this land underneath our feet and this air flowing in and out of our lungs.
We should learn from past struggles, like the civil rights movement, where people used a variety of strategies and techniques to make social change. We should learn from independence movements like the Indian resistance to British colonization, and from the successes and failures of the environmental movement in the past.
Above all, we should be prepared to escalate. Powerful entrenched forces seldom concede their position willingly, and the history of social movements is a short history in escalation of tactics. We must never forget that there are lives on the line, both human and non-human, lives numbered in the billions. There is a continuum of tactics that we must consider, beginning with raising awareness, lobbying for legislative change, and mainstream political engagement, moving through legal challenges and court battles to mass protest and civil disobedience, and, at the last, ending with direct action against polluting industries.
Regardless of the strategies and tactics that are used (which are likely to be a broad combination of these and many more), averting catastrophic global warming is a daunting task. It will require courage, commitment, creativity, and groups of people working together in concert to achieve their goals. This work is already being done, and the only question is this: will you join us?
