Kim Stanley Robinson's THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE: A Review

 ...by me, but not here; it's at The Ancillary Review of Books, and you can read it here:

https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2021/01/20/even-this-is-too-good-to-be-true-review-of-the-ministry-for-the-future-by-kim-stanley-robinson/

A Longer-Term Problem

 

I know we're all (rightly) paralyzed with fear and anxiety about the next few months, but allow me a moment for a longer-term worry.

I heard some of Biden's speech on climate change this morning. And I had two thoughts. First, it was (as far as a Democratic candidate goes) superb: a level of alarm and seriousness which is very welcome (and, yes, long over due). I doubt that Bernie could have done better.

But I fear he fell into a trap not specific to him, but broadly arising out of liberal politics. He said that if we reelect a "climate arsonist" (great term), more of America will burn, more will flood. But he seemed to imply that if we elect him instead, this won't happen. The horrible truth, of course, is that at this point 20-30 years of ever-increasing climate misery are already baked in. We're going to spend the next three decades paying for the last three decades of emissions (you know, the 50% of all emissions throughout history which were produced after we were thoroughly warned & had supposed begun to react).

This doesn't mean that reducing our emissions rapidly is not a priority; it has to be. But that's because if we don't act now things will be unimaginable—perhaps literally unendurable—in the second half of the century. We need to ensure a future for later generations. But the near-term present will be increasingly worse regardless. — Of course, there are things we can and should do to help the next few decades, adaptation and social strengthening of all sorts. But those are to live through the climate misery, not avert it.

Again: nothing Biden said was wrong, precisely. Certainly a vote for the climate arsonist is as immoral as it is possible to imagine—solely on these grounds, even aside from everything else. But he hasn't done anything to prepare people for the longer-term struggles ahead. I don't think that's a failure of Biden's; I think it's a problem with liberal democracy, which must sell people the idea that they will have a better life if they vote for us. Whereas now we have reduced ourselves to choosing between bad and worse for the rest of our natural lives.

Not now, not in the next two months, but soon, we're going to have to learn, as a political movement, as a society, to talk about these things. We don't want Joshua Hawley or Tucker Carson or Don Jr to get up and say in 2024, "you said you'd fix this!". We need to communicate to people the urgency, but also the length of the storm. This won't be fixed in four years, nor even in forty, although in forty we will make some serious strides (or else have dug our own graves). We need to learn to speak of care; of struggling together to survive the damage already done; of preparing for the long term. Because that's what we need to do, now.

 

Housekeeping: this is reposted from FB. Preparing it for blog publication, it occurs to me I've been nattering about this long enough that the tag is "global warming" and not the more up-to-date "climate change" — or the currently trending "climate emergency". What will we call it in a decade?  Just ordinary life, I suppose.  Or perhaps our long twilight struggle.

"But What Can I Do?"

A friend on facebook (who will be anonymous unless they say they'd like to be named) asked. re climate change: "But what can we do? I have yet to come up with anything we can do as individuals that could possibly help. Have anything?"

My reply:

"As individuals"? No. Nothing we can do as individuals is remotely equal to the scale of the problem. I mean, sure, drive less, fly never, get solar panels — all good things. But if everyone who cared did this it won't help. Only a radical restructuring of society and the economy can save us.

So what can we do? What we need to do is to elect politicians committed to a restructuring of the economy and society to a degree consonant with the problem. Not just Democrats; AOC Democrats, not Biden Democrats. (Along those lines: go to marches. Sign petitions. Give money. Make sure Jay Inslee is in the debates, at least.)

How do we do this? The only thing I know of, broadly, is to change the way people think. The best thing to do, I suppose, would be to find conservatives you know and convert them. That's tough, though. Second best? Try to convince liberals you know to treat the problem with the seriousness that is its due.

That's why I post on it all the time. If enough of us get that this is an emergency, one that will need to be solved by greater-than-WW2 style mobilization starting yesterday, then maybe, *maybe*, we can overcome this.

So talk about it, as often as you can stand or more. Be that annoying person who always points out that the house is on fire. And get everyone you know to talk about it.

If enough of us talk, if enough of us listen, then we won't be individuals any more, but a collective. And then maybe we can do something that can help.

Today in Apocalinks

• Mayor of Boston urges preparation for 2-foot sea level rise
• Permafrost Melting Rate Could Be Faster And Worse Than We Thought, New Study Finds (link via)
• Global temperatures are projected rise 3.5 degrees C. over the next 25 years. More here.  Link via.
• What is to be done?

Recursive Conspiracy Theories

From Justin Gills at the New York Times (via):

Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey results suggested that people who rejected climate science were more likely than other respondents to reject other scientific or official findings and buy into assorted fringe theories: that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Central Intelligence Agency killed Martin Luther King Jr., that the AIDS virus was unleashed by the government, and so forth.

This piece of research appeared in a specialized journal in psychological science, but it did not take long to find its way onto climate skeptics’ blogs, setting off howls of derision.

A theory quickly emerged: that believers in climate science had been the main people taking Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey, but instead of answering honestly, had decided en masse to impersonate climate contrarians, giving the craziest possible answers so as to make the contrarians look like whack jobs.

So, a paper about a tendency among this group to believe in conspiracy theories was met by … a conspiracy theory.

Words fail me.

But one further wrinkle occurs to me.  This is all a secondary finding of the initial study.  The primary finding was "that ideological belief in an unregulated free market tended to be a predictor of someone’s willingness to reject the findings of mainstream climate research." As Gills says, "no surprises there"; after all, that's a straightforward ideological pairing in a country where beliefs are more and more partisan (and the right has an echo-chamber devoted to spreading falsehoods).

But how do other conspiracy theories fit in?  Are they part of the right-wing nonsense machine somehow?  Does getting one's news from that machine simply predispose one to believing other conspiracy theories?  Are they somehow in sync with right wing beliefs?  Or are these two different groups -- a big group that deny climate science because of right wing beliefs, and another group that denies them because they believe other conspiracy theories?

Damn. Now maybe I'll need to read the #$%^& papers.  (Oh, and by the way: here's a link to the first paper, which spawned the conspiracy theories, and here's a link to (a preliminary draft of) a second paper, written about the response to the first one.)

What if the World Ends Tomorrow and No One Notices?

LINDSEY: It's been here all along. Underneath. You're just too damn stupid to see it.
ANGEL: See what?
LINDSEY: The apocalypse, man. You're soaking in it.
SPIKE: I've seen an apocalypse or two in my time. I'd know I one was under my nose.
LINDSEY: Not an apocalypse. The apocalypse. What'd you think, a gong was gonna sound? Time to jump on your horses and fight the big fight? Starting pistol went off a long time ago, boys.

-- Angel, Season 5.17 "Underneath", by Sarah Fain & Elizabeth Craft

What if those predicting that, because the remaining ancient Mayans need to order their next world-cycle wall calendar now,* the world is ending, are right?  And no one ever notices?

I mean, is there some reason to think that the world has to end all at once?  Must it be over in seconds?  Can the actual sounding of the trumpets take a few minutes?  A few weeks?

Centuries?

Does it matter, as long as the ending really begins -- say, becomes irreversible, so that there is no longer anything to be done about it -- on the starting date?  Can't we say world, in some sense, ended on that day?**

I refer, of course, not to the penny-ante mystical apocalypsi that various adherents of internet conspiracy theories, but to the apocalypse, the one that we're sitting in, that we're perpetuating, day in and day out.

Climate change.

Because, yeah, if we don't change course, the world -- by which I mean the human race, since our "world" is the one with our feelings and thoughts and interpretations in it: mere rock and tree don't, in my view, make a world -- will end.  It'll take a while -- two centuries?  Three? -- but it'll happen.  The warming process will eventually become self-sustaining, and will go on, even as the industrial processes which began it crumbles, and our lives along with it.  And it will get hotter and hotter, until no grain can grow in it, no one can stand outside in it.  Until it's all over.

Unless we change course in time.

But what's "in time"?  We don't really know.  It's too complex, too big.  There are too many factors.  There's good reason to think it's soon -- terrifyingly soon -- but we don't know precisely when.

In fact, we'll never know.

If we stop it in time -- if we control our emissions enough that world civilization survives well enough to mitigate and adapt -- we won't know how close we came.  All we'll know is that we came very close, but swerved at the almost-last instant.  Even if we could -- and we almost certainly won't be able to, technically, it's just too hard -- who goes out with a ruler to measure precisely the distance from the tire to the cliff?  At most you gaze, with a shiver, at the depth of the skid marks.

And if we don't stop in time, we'll even less be able to know. As things crumble -- as the waters rise, as crops fail, as refugees in search of a nonexistent safe haven -- who will have time to look back, measure, calculate, ruminate, and figure that, yes, up until this date, there was still a chance to change, up until just this moment it wasn't too late, but after such-and-such a date the inertia was too great, and no effort could have stopped it.

"Such-and-such a date."  Such as, perhaps, December 21, 2012.

Oh, there's no reason to believe it will be then -- the Ancient Mayans didn't even believe the world would end on that day, let alone have any actual grounds for that belief.  But it seems far more important to note that it might be that day.  That things are happening, right now, that will ensure that, sometime, sometime soon, it will be too late.

Surely the blithe reassurances that the world will not suddenly end today are almost beside the point when we know for a fact that the world is on its way to ending?  Perhaps instead of telling people not to worry, we should instead tell them that, yes, they should worry -- but that it's not yet set, and that perhaps action now can still turn the tide?

Because -- since we can't know for sure, since we'll never know, either way -- the only sensible thing to do -- the secular Pascalian wager, that looks not at the odds but the stakes, at what there is to be lost and won -- is to fight on as if it isn't too late.  Since acting as if it is would, after all, be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But to believe there is still time -- warranted or not -- is not the same as to say there's no danger.  The calendar is turning, and we'll be long past the end of the world by the time we are certain that there will, in fact, be one.

So run, fight, work, as if we can still escape.  Because maybe we can.  But one thing we do know is that we won't be able to always, nor even for very long.

____________________________
* Although, in fairness, it was a really good calendar -- IMS, better than the Gregorian (which is to say it diverges from the sun's cycle by a tiny fraction of a second less than the Gregorian does, and thus drifts off season slightly more slowly).

** Actually, this was (very, very roughly) the response to the Great Disappointment of 1844 -- when hundreds of thousands thought the world was ending -- which eventually led to the Seventh Day Adventists.

Verbatim Title of a Recent Presentation at a Major Scientific Conference: "Is the Earth F**ked?"

LINDSEY: It's been here all along. Underneath. You're just too damn stupid to see it.
ANGEL: See what?
LINDSEY: The apocalypse, man. You're soaking in it.
SPIKE: I've seen an apocalypse or two in my time. I'd know I one was under my nose.
LINDSEY: Not an apocalypse. The apocalypse. What'd you think, a gong was gonna sound? Time to jump on your horses and fight the big fight? Starting pistol went off a long time ago, boys.

-- Angel, Season 5.17 "Underneath", by Sarah Fain & Elizabeth Craft

Today in apocalylinks:

• The question we all want to know the answer to: Is the Earth F**ked?

As for the big question—is Earth f**ked? ...there’s a choose-your-own-adventure element to the story that has yet to play out. Resistance, Werner argued, is the wild card that can force dominant systems such as our current resource-chewing juggernaut onto a more sustainable path. Werner hasn’t completed that part of his model, so we’ll have to wait to find out what happens. But during the Q-and-A session, he conceded that “even though individual resistance movements might not be fast enough reacting to some of these problems, if a global environmental movement develops that is strong enough, that has the potential to have a bigger impact in a timely manner.”

In other words, according to at least one expert, maybe the Earth is not quite f**ked yet after all. But the ultimate outcome may depend on how much, and how many, scientists choose to wade into the fray.

Read the rest here.

• Michael Klare sums up the recent World Bank report:

Even if governments take vigorous steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the report concluded, the continuing increase in fossil fuel consumption will result in “a long-term average global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees C.”

This should stop everyone in their tracks.  Most scientists believe that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius is about all the planet can accommodate without unimaginably catastrophic consequences: sea-level increases that will wipe out many coastal cities, persistent droughts that will destroy farmland on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their survival, the collapse of vital ecosystems, and far more.  An increase of 3.6 degrees C essentially suggests the end of human civilization as we know it.

To put this in context, human activity has already warmed the planet by about 0.8 degrees C -- enough to produce severe droughts around the world, trigger or intensify intense storms like Hurricane Sandy, and drastically reduce the Arctic ice cap.  “Given those impacts,” writes noted environmental author and activist Bill McKibben, “many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target.”  Among those cited by McKibben is Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes. “Any number much above one degree involves a gamble,” Emanuel writes, “and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up.” Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it this way: “If we’re seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much.”

As Tom Englehardt puts it in his introduction to the piece: "climate change is getting scarier by the week".

• Disasters making their way through production, should soon be in a theater near you!  Possible climate Pearl Harbors; -- or, as Gerry Canavan, from whom I got the link, suggested, climate fiscal cliffs.

• We Can Cut Carbon Pollution One Third By Closing ‘Carbon Loophole’ Through The Clean Air Act... which Obama could do without Congressional approval.  If Obama doesn't get serious about climate change soon, then his only hope for avoiding history's remembering him solely for his inaction is the possibility that the world will be so f**ked that no one will have any time to think about history at all.

• The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert says it's time for a carbon tax. Ibid's Hendrik Hertzberg says that said carbon tax should replace the payroll tax.

• One climatologist predicts the 2012 drought will last through 2013.

• At least large groups of Belgians are singing cheerful songs about the apocalypse. 

Kim Stanley Robinson on Geoengineering

Kim Stanley Robinson, "Earth: Under Repair, Forever":

We lack the political mechanisms, or maybe even the political will, to decarbonize. So people are right to be worried, and some of them have therefore put forth various geoengineering plans as possible emergency measures: problematic, but better than nothing.

Objections to geoengineering appeared immediately. Many people have expressed doubt that the proposals would work, or believe that a string of negative unintended consequences could follow. Merely discussing these ideas, it has been said, risks giving us the false hope of a "silver bullet" solution to climate change in the near future -- thus reducing the pressure to stem carbon emissions here and now.

These are valid concerns, but the fact remains: our current technologies are already geoengineering the planet -- albeit accidentally and negatively....

For the rest of history, we will be required to work at repairing the damage we've already done to the biosphere. Geoengineering, then, has become our ongoing responsibility to life on this planet, including all human generations to come....

...just as technology has aided us in the task of deforesting and draining our wetlands, so too does it now provide us with the capability to do things like reforest and rehydrate. Thinking about such potential reversals makes me believe the definition of geoengineering should be broadened. Our actions have a global impact; it's good to be reminded of this by giving that impact a name. Were we to take up hybrids and electric cars in great numbers, for example, could that be considered geoengineering? Under an expanded definition, absolutely. Whatever we do as a civilization of seven billion is inevitably going to have a geoengineering effect.

What about that number, seven billion? Could stabilizing our population count? Again, yes. And we know of one good way to achieve this goal: promoting women's legal and social rights. Wherever they expand, population growth shifts toward the replacement rate. This particular geoengineering technology nicely illustrates how the word technology can't be defined simply as machinery; it includes things like software, organizational systems, laws, writing, and even public policy.

Read the rest. (via)

Today in Apocalypse Links

• New Scientist Special Report: 7 Reasons Climate Change Is ‘Even Worse Than We Thought’.  From Think Progress's post summarizing the seven reasons:

1. The thick sea ice in the Arctic Ocean was not expected to melt until the end of the century. If current trends continue, summer ice could be gone in a decade or two. Read more (or see “Death Spiral Watch: Experts Warn ‘Near Ice-Free Arctic In Summer’ In A Decade If Volume Trends Continue“).
2. We knew global warming was going to make the weather more extreme. But it’s becoming even more extreme than anyone predicted. Read more (or see “NOAA Bombshell: Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather“).
3. Global warming was expected to boost food production. Instead, food prices are soaring as the effects of extreme weather kick in. Read more (or see “Oxfam Warns Climate Change And Extreme Weather Will Cause Food Prices To Soar” and links therein).
4. Greenland’s rapid loss of ice mean we’re in for a rise of at least 1 metre by 2100, and possibly much more. Read more (or see “Greenland Ice Sheet Melt Nearing Critical ‘Tipping Point’” and links therein).
5. The planet currently absorbs half our CO₂emissions. All the signs are it won’t for much longer. Read more (or see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100” and “Drying Peatlands and Intensifying Wildfires Boost Carbon Release Ninefold“).
6. If we stopped emitting CO₂ tomorrow, we might be able to avoid climate disaster. In fact we are still increasing emissions. Read more (or see “The IEA And Others Warn Of Some 11°F Warming by 2100 on current emissions path”)
7. If the worst climate predictions are realised, vast swathes of the globe could become too hot for humans to survive. Read more (or see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“)

• 5 Charts About Climate Change That Should Have You Very, Very Worried:

Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our current course and fail to take more aggressive measures. A World Bank report [pdf link] imagines a world 4 degrees warmer, the temperature predicted by century's end barring changes, and says it aims to shock people into action by sharing devastating scenarios of flood, famine, drought and cyclones. Meanwhile, a report from the US National Research Council, commissioned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies, says the consequences of climate change--rising sea levels, severe flooding, droughts, fires, and insect infestations--pose threats greater than those from terrorism ranging from massive food shortages to a rise in armed conflicts.

Click through for five charts taken from the reports.

• Climate Change Largely Irreversible for 1000 Years

• The shells of ocean animals are already dissolving in acidic sea

• Climate Change Threatens to Create a Second Dust Bowl

• Canadian conservatives are embracing denialism because they're just interested in the money gained from burning the world.

• Obama is on the wrong side on this one.  Not "not doing enough": he's working on the side of those who are destroying the world.

As I've said before: however worried you are, you're not worried enough.

(Most links via Dave Roberts's twitter feed.)

Update: New day, new apocalyptic link:

•  Global Sea Level Rising 60 Percent Faster Than Predicted

Update 2: Pandora's box contains hope.  Now we just need to replicate that woman's experience millions of times over.  And maybe we can start to reverse the course we're on.  (The movie web site is here.)

Impending Apocalypse Low Priority Compared to Future Budget Deficits

This is the way the world ends...

• Shorter Barack Obama: Climate change is real, and serious, but it's a tough challenge, so fuck it, let's fiddle while the world burns.

• Here's something that Obama could do unilaterally if he wished.  And it sounds like this idea is one Obama could do unilaterally too.  So Congress me no Congress: he could help, if he cared.  He just doesn't care enough.

• Geoengineering: it's in your future!

• From Nature:

I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago. The seriousness of this change is not appreciated by politicians and the public. The scientific world carefully measures the speed with which we approach the cliff and will, no doubt, carefully measure our rate of fall. But it is not doing enough to stop it...

Recognition of the facts is delayed by the frankly brilliant propaganda and obfuscation delivered by energy interests that virtually own the US Congress....

Scientists are understandably protective of the dignity of science and are horrified by publicity and overstatement. These fears, unfortunately, are not shared by their opponents, which makes for a rather painful one-sided battle. Overstatement may generally be dangerous in science (it certainly is for careers) but for climate change, uniquely, understatement is even riskier and therefore, arguably, unethical.

It is crucial that scientists take more career risks and sound a more realistic, more desperate, note on the global-warming problem. Younger scientists are obsessed by thoughts of tenure, so it is probably up to older, senior and retired scientists to do the heavy lifting. Be arrested if necessary. This is not only the crisis of your lives — it is also the crisis of our species’ existence. I implore you to be brave.

-- Jeremy Grantham, Be Persuasive. Be Brave. Be Arrested (If Necessary).

• From the Harvard Business Review:

...the math is not pretty, but it is what it is.... Let's not let politics or fear of the size of the task ahead get in the way of today's climate math... Climate math is simply a constraint on the imaginary formula that is business as usual. But constraints drive innovation. We in the business community respect numbers and the best companies love challenges. Let's prove it.

• "But what can I do?"

I think the moment for mass civil disobedience is upon us.  Someone needs to stand athwart the end of history, yelling Stop.

Preach it!

Accelerating Towards Hell

I've posted a version of this video once before, but I'm going to post it again, because Ryan Cooper has taken Dave Robert's TED talk, "Climate Change is Simple", and jazzed it up with cool music & visuals to make his bleak news even more exciting to see.  So here it is:



Roberts has a post giving all the slides along with links to studies, etc, here, if you want more detail.

But the basic point is summed up in his sentence "our present course leads to certain catastrophe".  We are headed -- we are accelerating -- towards a situation where, in a few generations, half the Earth's surface will be so hot that you will die simply by going outside (170º Fahrenheit).  We are heading -- we are accelerating -- towards a situation where feedback loops means that climate change will become self-sustaining and will continue indefinitely even if humans stop emitting carbon tomorrow (which we won't).

WE ARE RACING TOWARDS DEATH, AND WE NEED TO STOP.

And I respectfully suggest that if you think this is too horrible to contemplate, or if you think other political issues are more important or more urgent, or, really, if you are more concerned about ANYTHING ELSE, then you haven't really grasped the magnitude and urgency of this.

(Oh, the election?  Well, climate change is being ignored by both parties (h/t).  I think it's quite, quite clear that Obama will be better than Romney -- but "better" here means not anywhere near good enough to save us, but more susceptible to being influenced by the massive direct action campaign that we need.  Obama won't save us: but he might -- might -- give us enough room to save ourselves.  If we accomplish a level of political mobilization that seems, at this point, miraculous to contemplate.)

We need to do something drastic, and to do something now.  To borrow a phrase from another writer speaking of another crisis, "if this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, [human beings] may have no future on this earth."

However Worried You Are About Climate Change You're Not Worried Enough

Dave Robberts points to a new paper showing that avoiding catastrophe will "require a level of immediate, global, coordinated action never before seen in human history." (Somewhat related follow-up post here.)

If I could think of anything to do about this -- save pass this on -- I'd do it. Anyone have any ideas that might work? 'Cause I can't think of anything, myself.

Update: Oh, and this, too. (via)

Quote of the Day: Of Despair and Climate Change

Taken from a pair of comments in this comment thread from Making Light. The comment thread really springs to life with the first of these comments, so my advice (if you're interested) is to read the post, and then skip to this comment and proceed from there.

The general topic is a bad move by Greenpeace (see the post for details). But it's PNH's broader point I want to highlight here. Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

I do think that what [Greenpeace's bad move] springs from isn't arrogance but despair. If there was ever an issue in human history that could conceivably justify people deciding that the time for conventional tidy morality is past, the oncoming juggernaut of global climate change is probably it. It's going to kill hundreds of millions of us and leave the rest with significantly degraded lives, and it's clear that our wonderful political systems and our "meritocratic" elites are powerless to do a thing about it.

Bruce Sterling observed years ago that there will be purges, show trials, and public executions once the next level of climate calamity kicks in. I see no reason to think he was wrong. One can only hope that the set of victims will have some overlap with the guilty, but that's probably unwarranted optimism. (And yes, it does occur to me that I and everyone I know could defensibly be classed with "the guilty.")

I'm not saying any of this in order to argue with Abi's post or with anyone in this thread. And certainly not to justify Greenpeace. But I have a lot of sympathy with them. They're right. The threats they've been trying to point out are real. Nothing they try, nothing anyone tries, seems to work. This is the kind of situation in which people go crazy, lose their moorings, turn on one another, and start disregarding the copybook virtues. It's called "desperation" and the rest of our lives will see much more extreme versions of it.

Then, a few comments down, PNH continues:

What I should have said is that it's clear that our wonderful political systems (you know, our Freedoms, the ones the Terrorists Hate Us For) and our "meritocratic" elites have no intention of doing anything about it. I don't actually think they're powerless. I think they just don't care. They'll ride it out. Their lives will be okay. (Not for nothing is Cory Doctorow's "Chicken Little" one of my favorite SF stories of the last decade, because it's all about this: we live in the era during which the 1% are pulling up the ladders. They'll be fine. Many of the rest of us will be fucked.)

I'm not "despairing". I think something resembling human civilization will survive. It's just that a lot of actual, you know, people won't survive to enjoy it. For them, it is the end of the world. We've decided that's an acceptable cost. Those decisions are made now.

Arguments about "despair" are bullshit. Thousands of us turned out in the streets to say no to invading Iraq. The US and its tributary states invaded anyway. Lots of people said "don't despair." Who are we talking to when we say that? The tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians we butchered? Do they get a pass on the "don't despair" stuff? Oh, wait, it doesn't matter, they're dead.

I've never advocated giving up. But for God's sake can't we look our losses in the face and recognize that this much loss leaves some of us broken. That's really all I was trying to say. Greenpeace did a stupid thing here, and I've (actually) felt for a long time that Greenpeace is kind of stupid in its messaging and methods. But holy crap I can sympathize with the kind of despair that can lead to mistakes on this order. So go ahead and repeat to me how despair is a sin. I refuse to believe that imagination is one.

As I said in a comment I myself (just now) added to the thread (wherein I linked to and quoted from this post by Dave Roberts; see also here), I don't know if despair is a sin, although it certainly seems self-defeating. At the same time, I don't see how to avoid it. At this point, turning a political corner on this looks less likely than, say, benevolent Vulcans arriving to pull our fat out of the fire.

On this issue, despair hits me and I squirm to try to avoid it, but usually can't. Any suggestion for any positive action that has a less than vanishingly small chance of actually doing anything commensurate with the scope of the problem would be greatly appreciated.

Lines in Larry Kramer's Seminal Essay "1,112 and Counting..." Which Could Be Written Today About Global Warming

I'm teaching Larry Kramer's astonishing article, "1,112 and Counting...", on Monday for part of a unit on AIDS we're doing in a class on the social history of medicine. About this article, Randy Shilts wrote in his astonishing history of the early years of the AIDS pandemic, And the Band Played On:

Kramer threw a hand grenade into the foxhole of denial where most gay men in the United States had been sitting out the epidemic. The cover story of the New York Native, headlined "1,112 and Counting," was Kramer's end run around all the gay leaders and GMHC organizers worried about not panicking the homosexuals and not inciting homophobia. As far as Kramer was concerned, gay men needed a little panic and a lot of anger.... Kramer's piece irrevocably altered the context in which AIDS was discussed in the gay community and, hence, in the nation. Inarguably one of the most influential works of advocacy journalism of the decade, "1,112 and Counting..." swiftly crystallized the epidemic into a political movement for the gay community at the same time it set off a maelstrom of controversy that polarized gay leaders....

-- Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On, pp. 244, 245

Rereading it, it occurred to me how appropriate the tone of the article is -- not the specifics, obviously, but the tone in general -- to global warming.

I herein presented the edited version: sentences we could say about global warming, right now. Of course "killing us" in Kramer's work was in the present; now it is still -- mostly (global warming-induced wildfires and hurricanes aside) -- in the future. But the scale of the possible devastation is, of course, greater than even that great calamity.

We -- the people of the earth -- need someone to rouse us to action. Where is the Larry Kramer of global warming?

***

If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, [human beings] may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get....

I repeat: Our continued existence as [human beings] upon the face of this earth is at stake. Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die. ...we have never before been so close to death and extinction....

Why isn’t every [person on this planet] so scared shitless that he is screaming for action? Does every [person on this planet] want to die? ...

Priorities in this area appear to be peculiarly out of kilter at this moment of life or death....

To continue to allow [status-quo politicians] to represent us in [any government] will, in my view, only bring us closer to death....

With his silence on [global warming], the [President of the United States] is helping to kill us....

I am sick of our electing officials who in no way represent us. I am sick of our stupidity in believing candidates who promise us everything for our support and promptly forget us and insult us after we have given them our votes....

I am sick of the [mainstream media], which has yet to quite acknowledge that there’s anything going on....

With the exception of... a few, very few, other [small] publications, the [mainstream] press has been useless. If we can’t get our own papers and magazines to tell us what’s really happening to us... how are we going to get the word around that we’re dying?

Unless we can generate, visibly, numbers, masses, we are going to die....

I am sick of everyone in this community who tells me to stop creating a panic. How many of us have to die before you get scared off your ass and into action?... Over and over again I hear from [people], “Why aren’t you guys doing anything?” Every politician I have spoken to has said to me confidentially, “You guys aren’t making enough noise. Bureaucracy only responds to pressure.”...

Get your stupid heads out of the sand, you turkeys!...

How can they value life so little and [gas-guzzlers and profits] so much?...

I don’t want to die. I can only assume you don’t want to die. Can we fight together?

I hope we don’t have to conduct sit-ins or tie up traffic or get arrested. I hope our city and our country will start to do something to help start saving us. But it is time for us to be perceived for what we truly are: an angry community and a strong community, and therefore a threat. Such are the realities of politics....

I hope I have not been guilty of saying ineffectively in five thousand words what I could have said in five: we must fight to live.

I am angry and frustrated almost beyond the bound my skin and bones and body and brain can encompass. My sleep is tormented by nightmares...

I know that unless I fight with every ounce of my energy I will hate myself. I hope, I pray, I implore you to feel the same....

If we don’t act immediately, then we face our approaching doom.

* * *

Volunteers Needed for Civil Disobedience

It is necessary that we have a pool of at least three thousand people who are prepared to participate in demonstrations of civil disobedience. Such demonstrations might include sit-ins or traffic tie-ups. All participants must be prepared to be arrested. I am asking every [...] person and every [...] organization to canvass all friends and members and make a count of the total number of people you can provide toward this pool of three thousand.

Let me know how many people you can be counted on providing. Just include the number of people; you don’t have to send actual names – you keep that list yourself. And include your own phone numbers. Start these lists now.

"Our present course leads to certain catastrophe"

The basics of climate change in 17 minutes:



If you're not panicked, then you're not paying attention (or are in denial, or have swallowed some very malignant lies.)

Dave Roberts comments on his own video, giving still images of the slides & links, here.

(The issue is, what can possibly be done about it? If anyone has any answers to that one that aren't based in denialism, don't depend on fantastical deus ex machina workarounds of either technological or political problems, and aren't a counsel of utter despair, I, for one, am desperate to hear them. (Myself, I know of only one... a very, very bad answer, but an answer, that fits all three of those. I'll try to blog it soon.)

We Are All Senator Inhofe Now

There was a certain amount of justifiable mockery when Senator James Inhofe, one of the leading deniers of climate change in American politics, said in a recent dialogue with Rachel Maddow:

I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this. I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost.

The reason for the mockery is obvious: the costs of dealing with a problem have absolutely no bearing on whether the problem is true or not. It's an open admission of truly idiotic denial.

Worse, it is a gaffe in the "accidental truth" sense: that really is the logic behind the conservative denial of climate change. Oh, not at the grassroots perhaps: they're just lied to by Fox News. But among those who devise the lies -- the oil shills, the oil men who pay them, the reporters who treat them seriously -- that's the basic logic. They don't like the effect that the truth of climate change would have. So they simply deny it.

It's risible -- and, given the stakes, despicable.

And more or less all of us do it.

What, after all, is the difference between liberals who recognize that climate change exists and yet are not acting in a way commensurate to the magnitude of the problem -- which is almost everyone (including, I hasten, to add, me) -- and conservatives who deny it completely? It is simply the location of the denial. Rather than deny the fact of climate change we deny the implications of climate change. Rather than deny it outright -- baldly asserting its falsity -- we say we can't think about it, that it overwhelms us, that we don't know what to do. We pay attention to other things.

And the world continues to burn.

(There's a very good discussion of the mechanisms of this mainstream denial, with a particular focus on the mass media, in this post by Dave Roberts, which more or less directly inspired this one (via.))

I'm sure that Paul Glastris, Ryan Cooper, and Siyu Hu, who wrote this list of Obama's 50 greatest accomplishments, would say they believe in climate change. But they don't really recognize its scope and urgency or implications, or they wouldn't write a list like this, which in the context of climate change sounds like the top fifty accomplishments of the captain of the Titanic, who I'm sure did a very good job of making all passengers feel welcome.

I'm sure that Glenn Greenwald, who spends his time doing extraordinarily righteous and important work pointing out many moral and legal flaws in America's current bipartisan regime, would say he believes in climate change. But he does not write as if the world were burning. He talks about the long-term consequences of our foreign policy. our wretched media, our corrupt and law-breaking elites, as if all these things were not taking place in a context of supreme, world-wide emergency.

And so on. I think it's fair to say that anyone who is focusing on anything else is not, really, understanding the scope or urgency or threat of climate change.

I've found this in my personal interactions too: I mention, to friends or colleagues, the true severity of the problem, and they nod, and say yes, it's terrible; or, I can't bring myself to think about it.

And they turn to something else.

And, again, yes, this very much includes me. (How much time do I spend working on writing my writing, reading other people's, worrying about causes that are not this one? Glance at this blog and you'll see well enough.) This is not my saying I'm better than thou. I'm saying we're all doing this, and we need to figure out how to stop. (And I don't know the answer to that one.)

Why are we doing this? Why aren't we recognizing the sheer enormity and urgency of the problem?

Because it costs too much.

Oh, not in money -- those of us who aren't conservatives probably aren't focused on that aspect. But it costs in other ways. To our peace of mind. To our ability to function in our daily lives. To the other causes that we (legitimately, morally, urgently) care about. To our sense of ourselves as balanced people, as not alarmists or doomsayers or crazy.

Rather than appear crazy by saying the truck is driving towards a cliff, or worry ourselves too much about what's coming, we decide to chat with those on the truck. We may die, but at least we won't seem alarmist.

If the only sane response is to be crazy with panic, we'll choose seeming sane over being sane.

All of which is just what Senator Inhofe is doing. We may pride ourselves that we accept science, and he is a crazy fool: but we, too, won't confront climate change because of what it costs. It's a different way not to confront it -- ignore, downplay, not focus, rather than outright deny its existence; and it's a different type of costs -- to our sanity, our reputations, our other priorities, not to the profits of oil companies and the maintenance of a "free-market" ideology. But in truth, we are no better than he.

We are all James Inhofe now.

__________________
Note: all the links on phrases like "magnitude of the problem" and "severity of the problem" and so forth go to a single blog post -- Dave Roberts's "The Brutal Logic of Climate Change". Partly because it captures the matter briefly and well, and seems like a good 'read one' post; partly because, following my own Senator Inhofe, I don't know much about the problem because I can't stand to look. If you read that -- and you should -- you'll want to read his follow-up posts, "The Brutal Logic of Climate Change Mitigation" and "'Brutal Logic' and Climate Communications".

Quote of the Day on the Most Important Political Issue of Our Time: a New Year's Eve Post

Climate change is the most important issue of our time -- both due to its urgency (the time frame for getting a solution into place is distressingly narrow) and the direness that will result if nothing is done. If you're not convinced of this, read these two posts by David Roberts (follow-up here) -- and worry. Even if you only posit a, say, 5% change that he's right (ludicrously low), panic seems a very appropriate response. Every other issue before us will affect only a few generations, or only Americans, or some other subset of humanity -- this issue will affect the fate of humanity, full stop. It's urgent and it's dire and it's terrifying.

Let's just pause on the consequences for a moment longer. To quote "Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain":

For humanity it’s a matter of life or death ... we will not make all human beings extinct, as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 degrees.

‘‘If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving."

Read that again. We're talking about the death of 94% of the human race. (The above-linked articles talk about the fact that we are, in fact, heading rapidly for a 4 or more degree (celsius) temperature rise.)

So how is Obama, our "liberal" president, doing on this most pressing of matters? Well, they're working as hard as they can... to sabotage a small European-led effort to work on the problem. From Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (via):

It’s bad enough—more than bad enough, really—that the U.S. has failed to lead the fight against climate change. This is very nearly as true under President Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. As former Senator Tim Wirth, now the president of the U.N. Foundation, put it recently, “I don’t know who and where the climate leadership in the Administration is. It doesn’t exist.”

Now, by trying to block others’ attempts to tackle the problem, the U.S. is behaving in a manner that seems best described as unforgivable. Last week, in a letter to Secretaries Clinton and LaHood, the heads of several of the nation’s leading environmental groups noted that the Administration is “actively thwarting other countries’ efforts to effectively and efficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” a position that is incompatible with the Administration’s own stated commitment to avoiding “a dangerous rise in global average temperatures.” The groups urged the Administration to abide by the European court’s decision, “just as the Administration would wish other nations to respect the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

It’s pretty much impossible to imagine how the world can reduce the risks of climate change without imposing some sort of emissions limits, and airline emissions seems like as good a place to start as any. If the Administration disagrees with the European plan, then it would seem to be under a heavy obligation to propose its own. All it's doing now is shilling for the airlines. Is this any way to run a planet?

For those of you who like to blame the Republicans in Congress for all of the Obama administration's mistakes, please note that they are not involved here: this is Mr. Hope & Change, and his trusty deputies, all on their own.

To say that Obama is working hard to be the James Buchanan of climate change is far, far too optimistic. First, however horrific a crime slavery was, it did not threaten the extension of 94% of the human race. And, of course, Buchanan was followed by Abraham Lincoln -- whereas Obama-as-Buchanan is likely to be followed (whether in 2013 or 2017) by the climate-change equivalent of John C. Breckinridge.

Most people would probably think that I was being histrionic in saying Obama could and should be impeached for this. But the truth of the matter is that it would be ludicrously slight. Obama will be -- to quote a President whose name Obama is not fit to utter -- "damned in time and eternity" for his inaction -- or, rather, for his positive actions on the side of mass death and destruction.

Obama has been a utter disappointment in so many important areas -- civil liberties, executive secrecy, American military adventuring, coddling of 1% lawbreakers, a failure to aggressively address unemployment, a failure to confront inequality, a pathetic tendency to pre-capitulate to the forces of reaction, and an utter failure to use his famously powerful voice to articulate an alternate language to the Ayn Randian culture we have created (something which was begun -- just begun, but begun -- this year by Occupy Wall Street). But I think I could forgive all of that if he had genuinely confronted the environmental crisis. After all, if politics is about utilitarian compromise, then you could certainly argue that the climate crisis outweighs all of the rest put together.

But far from addressing it, Obama is fighting on the wrong side (just as he is in at least the first four of the items in the first paragraph, and arguably the first six (the last two he is clearly just failing miserably, or giving up without trying, rather than actively aiding the forces of Malevolence.)) What, in fact, does he have to show for all his meekness and compromise? A Republican health-care plan, and a number of small symbolic victories -- boy scout medals which he can hang on the wall moments before it is washed away by the flood which will drown the world.

So this is where we are: a crisis of unprecedented proportions, dire urgency, and the mainstream of political life caught between a conservative, business-agenda hack, and whichever loon the Republicans put up to run against him.

I don't, as a principled matter, believe in despair in the realm of the political. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light": yes. But at the moment I don't even see how to forward the hopeless struggle. If we are to fight the long defeat, we at least need to know how to do that. But now, where do we line up to fight in the hopeless battle? If that is the only question left, then I'd at least like an answer to that.

And that's where I see us located, now, on the last day of 2011. Happy new year to you all.

I Have Not Been Writing About Current Events This Year

-- because my head has been elsewhere. I have a lot of posts in the pipeline for the next week: none on current events. (All on poetry, actually: it's Accidental Poetry Month™ here at Attempts!) Which is perhaps all the excuse I need to link to this beautiful, anguished meditation of Chris Floyd's on living in a world that invites political despair, yet which has so much beauty in other areas. That's not precisely why I've not been writing about politics -- but it's not entirely disconnected, either.

But somehow the internal dybbuk of keeping-current is whispering in my ear loudly enough that I'm just going to say one or two things -- in part about why I'm not saying anything. There will be no links for a lot of this stuff because you've already seen it -- or can do so just as easily as I can link.

1) The revolution in Egypt was one of the most thrilling and positive events in recent history, and one that will likely be remembered for years; the devastation in Japan was one of the most horrific and negative likewise. I have been riveted by both, with opposite but equally strong emotions. But I've posted on neither because I having nothing to say on either except that, in the case of Egypt, I am delighted, and Japan, horrified -- that is, the obvious felt by everyone of good will.

2) I wish we weren't going to war in a third Middle Eastern country -- although it seems we are.

2a) It's particularly depressing because the person initiating the war was the one I voted for in no small part because he'd opposed the last war. More fool I.

[Update: 2b) I should say I do see a significant moral difference between our attacking Libya now and our attacking Iraq in 2003, which is that in Libya the fighting is already ongoing. We're not starting the shooting. I think this is very important. So I don't feel that it's clear that an intervention would be immoral. (It might become so (or be revealed to have been so to those of us who know diddly about Libya) as things go on; but it's not obviously so now.) What I don't see is that it is any wiser than intervening in Iraq was, nor a sensible means for humanitarian ends any more than Iraq was.]

3) Of course Congress needs to declare war if we're going to attack Libya. This is utterly obvious. (Candidate Obama said so, just to name one relevant person.) If Obama attacks Libya without Congressional approval, it will be an impeachable offense so far as I can see.

4) Of course, Obama already belongs next to Bush at the Hague, on trial for the war crime of torture; in Obama's case, he's doing it against an American citizen who has not been convicted of any crime -- and who's crime, whistleblowing, was praised by candidate Obama back when he was trying to win my vote. The normalization of torture in this country is one of the truly horrifying things of the past few years -- and Obama, who I had hoped would push back against it, has instead ratified it as part of the normal political consensus.

4a) Steve Randy Waldman had a particularly a propos comment on Manning's detention: "Oddly, Manning's treatment helps to justify his actions ex post. Is a govt that would do this a govt we should trust to act in secret?" Consider this a retweet. (Via)

5) Oh, and by the way we're still burning down the house of our planet.

...back to poetry tomorrow morning.

Actually, no, fuck it: I think that a poem sums all this up pretty well:

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-- Robert Frost

See how whatever I do this March it comes back to poetry? Accidental Poetry Month™ continues!

Back to politics free poetry tomorrow.

The Onion Continues to Live Up To Its Tag Line, "America's Finest News Source"

The newspaper that brought you the single story that told you everything you really needed to know about the Bush administration before it happened now brings you the essential political story of the current moment. The headline and the first paragraph:

Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth

In a strong rebuke of President Obama and his domestic agenda, all 242 House Republicans voted Wednesday to repeal the Asteroid Destruction and American Preservation Act, which was signed into law last year to destroy the immense asteroid currently hurtling toward Earth.

I found the story via Ezra Klein (in turn via Gerry), but Ezra leaves out some of the best bits of humor, which are in some of the details. It has the miserable cowardice and smallness of the Democrats pegged, for instance:

In support of their position, Democrats have pointed to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that show repealing the law could result in a loss of up to $14 trillion in the nation's GDP.

[...]

"...While I recognize that intelligent minds may disagree on this issue, I believe we have an obligation to prevent our citizens from having their flesh seared off in a global firestorm that transforms our planet into a broiling molten wasteland," Obama added.

They've also got the news media pegged too:

"If efforts to destroy the asteroid are successfully overturned, then there will be major ramifications for both Obama and his Republican opposition, as well as the American populace at large," political scientist Alan Abramowitz said on Face The Nation Sunday. "This could have a huge impact come 2012."

Oh, and in case anyone thinks this is satire: I guess technically it is, but only slightly. Really it's just euphemism. To decode it, just read "environmental destruction due to global warming" for "immense asteroid". Then it stops being funny -- but doesn't, alas, stop being true.