Greetings from the start of fall in the northern hemisphere. Here in northeastern Virginia temperatures are oscillating, giving us alternating glimpses of summer and autumn. The cats are not entirely pleased, suspecting that humans have, once again, failed to arrange things to their perfect satisfaction.
It’s also been an overwhelming month for me. Professionally, I finished my new book’s first draft (about 70,000 words) and am now revising it, seeing what first readers make of it.
My two fall seminars are under way, taking up more time since each is a hybrid/Hyflex class. Clients are also engaging me – all for virtual events for the rest of 2021. Personally, my family ran into three bad health scares, two of which turned out to be real, one treatable, and the other not. Which is to say: my apologies for being quiet of late.
I’d like to return to the bloghouse with a note about climate change. A note and a question, really.
It’s about that recent UN report. It has some good news about a group of nations promising to cut emissions over the next decade. Yet even with that, there’s a very scary finding:
The available NDCs of all 191 Parties taken together imply a sizable increase in global GHG emissions in 2030 compared to 2010, of about 16%.
To translate from the diplomatic bureaucratic: GHG = greenhouse gas.
Parties = all nations which signed on to the 2015 Paris Accord.
NDC = how much GHG countries plan on emitting.
Did you catch that?
After all these years of science, of activism, of big declarations, of innovation, of proclaiming climate change to be an existential crisis for the human – after all of that, civilization is planning on making the climate crisis worse.
For some context, here’s what we’re supposed to be doing, according to the same report:
[T]o be consistent with global emission pathways with no or limited overshoot of the 1.5 °C goal, global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions need to decline by about 45 per cent from the 2010 level by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050.
We’re not doing that. Instead, “such an increase [that 16% rise], unless actions are taken immediately, may lead to a temperature rise of about 2.7C by the end of the century.” (That’s nearly 5 degrees F, for Americans.) So we’re blowing right past 1.5C.
It’s worse than it sounds. All of this is in the open. The UN report is based on public declarations, the figures governments decided to publish. This is the optimistic projection, the positive spin version. How much worse will the reality be, if we don’t change?
We’re not hiding this idea. We know what we’re doing right now. Instead of cutting back our GHG, humanity is going to make even more greenhouse gasses and loft them into the atmosphere. We are doing this with our eyes wide open. Yes, even as the weather rages around us, with fires and storms on multiple continents.
This increase in emissions, this deliberate and public drive to worsen the climate crisis, this is what civilization in 2021 proclaims to the future.
Think about how this report and the series of decisions it describes will look to the future. Imagine that world after a 2.7C temperature rise. When they consider us from their drowned cities, ruined agriculture sectors, acidic oceans, spreading deserts, and staggering human catastrophe, how will they view the human race of 2021? I do not think their judgement will be kind.
The UN report came out last week and the global response looks like… a big shrug. COP21 is coming up. China just vowed to not build any more coal plants.
The United States is struggling to try passing a watered-down, massively cut bill which could have some climate mitigation measures. Britain is vaunting a green agenda while firing up a new coal plant. The overall effect is one of resignation laced with a short-sighted drive to get the last goods out of fossil fuels while the getting is still good.
In higher education the report seems to have passed with summer temperatures and the start of fall term.
Overall, the report has not prompted us to revolt in the streets, even though its findings were widely discussed. There has been no calling out of governments for proclaiming their willingness to hasten an existential crisis. There is certainly nothing like mass civil disobedience, much less violence.
The very kindest verdict anyone can pass on us at this moment is that we are profoundly unserious about the climate crisis. Perhaps we are too exhausted from the global pandemic. Maybe climate positions have just hardened so much that shocking news like this only confirms each party in their pre-established view. It could be that there still is little traction for ordinary people outraged by this, beyond altering selected shopping preferences.
What might a harsher verdict resemble? That, I leave to your imagination.
Personally, it’s making my book darker.
It’s harder for me to treat my best case scenario as plausible in any way, and easier to see staggering disaster as scheduled to hit us over the next two generations.
The question I have is: what are we going to do now?
Saw it this morning. Skimmed lightly, groaning, not surprised, hoping — apparently in vain –that closer would improve on initial impression. I have been seeing a lot of climate indifference all over, right when it most needs to be folded into every issue.
I do see more organizations (climate and groups where issues are most affected by climate) connecting more and encourage them but still find myself thinking about the Children of Kali.
I share your pessimism. Social movements need visible successes in order to maintain momentum and solidarity. Either that, or they need to find ways to leverage negatives to maintain emotional energy (ex., martyrs).
Right now, King Covid rules the attention space — and notice how fragmented the response to Covid is. But the larger problem is there are too many people.
I wonder what the carrying capacity for the planet is with current climate trends through 2100, 2200, etc. ?
Glen, yes human overpopulation is a problem, especially in the US, where so may people overconsume–with little regard about the consequences. Ignorance, greed, and indifference are also involved. It’s not like there aren’t answers, but there are so many social, cultural, economic, and political hurdles to clear. As you have noted Human Capital Theory (HCT) is one of those overriding ideologies.
Here’s a short list of ideas for ways that various university departments could engage with the underlying civilizational design defects that currently make our grand project self-extinguishing:
Economics / Business:
– Design new types of money, looking at natural currencies, gift economics, negative interest rates, non-debt-based money supply, and even carbon coins.
– Ecological economics – plenty of room for new economic models/theories that de-externalize pollution, environmental degradation, carbon emissions, etc.
– More work on the practical application and implementation of de-growth, doughnut, and steady-state economic models is needed.
Arts:
– Film: Cli-fi is a growing literary segment, but we need more large-scale public stories (aka movies) about what’s coming. The majority of people aren’t moved by data (or even facts), but they are moved by stories. We need a “The Day After” for the climate crisis (and not a “The Day After Tomorrow”; recall The Day After was a widely-viewed televised miniseries movie in the 1980s that portrayed in stark and human terms what a nuclear attack on America would look like). We need similar human-scale stories about the accelerating unraveling of the coming decades, to help us fell at a visceral level what it will be like to live in a world without beaches; to walk into a favorite forest trail and find all the trees dead; to never see ice and snow.
– We also need public stories that envision better ways of living, stories that imagine what a functional eco-civilization might look like. We get the world that we envision in our collective imagination, and so far our collective imagination is mostly infected with visions of superhero/disaster/zombie/space-fantasy diversions. There are many indie groups that produce these (Sustainable Human, Happen Films) but we need more mass audience works.
– There are opportunities for the fine arts as well: it’s interesting the XR civil disobedience actions are essentially large-scale performance artworks. For example, a few days ago someone floated a model of a half-submerged townhouse in the Tidal Basin, which was kind of like a sculpture. The fine arts have always challenged the status quo, and nows the time for more of it.
– Design schools have major opportunities; movements like permaculture are founded on design principles and processes. Designers need to shift attention away from developing marketable products and media toward designing new/better communities, institutions, modes of production, ecological systems (see John Todd Ecological Design), etc. The designer’s mindset is needed now more than ever.
Philosophy:
– We desperately need new philosophical underpinnings for a new way to engage with the rest of life on Earth. We’re still operating on a Descartes model which clearly doesn’t produce very good outcomes long term. Reductionism, materialism, objectivism.. these are useful tools for certain contexts, but not the only ways of seeing or engaging with the world.
Theology:
– There’s work to be done here to re-orient our mainstream religions away from a human-centric worldview toward the protection, care, rehabilitation of all of creation. Pope Francis’ Laudato Si starts to get at this.
Agriculture:
– This needs a wholesale reboot and should move beyond the purview of state schools and extension units, many of which are reinforcing business-as-usual models of food production. Agriculture and food may not sound academically glamorous, but a great swathe of our environmental problems (and emissions) stems from our relationship (or lack thereof) with the land, particularly on the food-production front. From urban agriculture to permaculture to regenerative carbon-farming to food security to agroforestry, there is a ton of good stuff ready to scale up with the right level of support. Universities could play a significant role in this scaling-up.
Law:
– Work to make ecocide an international crime akin to genocide is gaining momentum. There’s more to be done around establishing the fundamental rights of nature and the rights of future beings, and for developing legal theories to establish support for both groups under our legal systems.
At the institutional level, universities might start looking beyond achieving sustainability toward achieving resilience in the face of permanent crisis, and perhaps even going so far as to become “deeply adaptive” loci of stability in a context of collapse.
And then more broadly we might re-examine the design and purpose of our university system as a whole. Is it to further the goals of a growth-oriented, materialist society? Or is it to optimize the civilization to ensure its continuance, and if so, is it functioning properly?
Only some of this is about reducing carbon emissions. We need to do that too, and the science and engineering departments are all doing great work, but that alone won’t alter the downward trajectory of our civilization. Solar-powered tractors bulldozing rainforests for cornfields to feed hamburger stock aren’t going to save us!
All of these are great ideas and need to be done. Thank you Jeremy.
I want to reiterate the penultimate point you make about the need for universities to start thinking about resilience in a local context. How will the university adapt when it becomes prohibitively expensive for students to travel across the country or the globe in order to attend school? If air travel were to double or quadruple in cost what would happen to enrollments at top-tier schools that have built non-local student bodies?
Travel is the big cost and contributor to GHG that universities could take immediate action on. Conferences may contribute a third of the carbon footprint for some universities – https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/04/18/12-scholars-share-ideas-reducing-carbon-emissions-academic-travel-opinion
We could do conferences almost completely online. We’ve been doing that for the past 18 months during the pandemic. Many people don’t like it, but if we truly believed that climate change was an existential crisis then I can’t think of any reason not to ban conference travel immediately. But that’s just another point of evidence that we, even the elites in universities, don’t take climate change seriously.
Gosh! I almost forgot to congratulate you on completing your manuscript!
I am reminded of George Orwell’s quote, “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”