The Difficulty of Knowing

The main character from Camus' The Plague, a medical doctor spending his days and nights helping the sick, said,

"A man can't cure and know at the same time. So let's cure as quickly as we can. That's the more urgent job."

This hit me as particularly poignant as we're still coping with wafting smoke from so many fires which is making us face the reality of the situation, which might render us immobile. We can't figure out an exit strategy from climate change - it's all too big and complex and overwhelming; we can only try to keep helping one another as best we can while we're here.

Dr. Rieux recognizes that the vastness of pain and suffering is horrific, and we can't think about it without being paralyzed by the thought. His tactic is to focus on whomever needs his help right in front of him, trying to help one patient after another for 20 hours each day, doing his utmost to maintain his personal integrity at the peak of the plague, Camus' allegory for fascism creeping up on the unsuspecting. We have very little control over the big picture, so mainly focus on being a good person, helping in any way you can. 

Climate change is devastating. The knowledge of it is paralyzing. We can't solve it, but we can still try to slow it down or at least try not to make it too much worse. While we do that, we have to focus on the here and now, on helping in whatever way we can - to heal, teach, console, befriend...  We can't get stuck in fretting. In others words, we have to stay in the present, with what's right in front of us, instead of the future of unknowns.

It's all the Scientists' Fault!

We're at the stage in climate change news that it's time to blame scientists for not telling anyone about it before now. Headline from The Hill: "Catch-22: Scientific communication failures linked to faster-rising seas"

"Scientists failed for decades to communicate the coming risks of rapid sea-level rise to policymakers and the public, a new study has found. . . . Scientists have soft-pedaled the kinds of catastrophic risks most easily headed off by cutting emissions. While scientific communication has improved in the 2020s, this trajectory led policymakers to make decisions based on risks that are better understood, easier to quantify--and also easier to write off as an acceptable long-term risk."

This is so totally bananas!! 

I'm a nobody with a flippin' philosophy degree. I've blogged about the environment since May 2009, when I start a blog for the explicit purpose of trying to get other environmentally-minded high school teachers and students involved in an amazing collaboration of ideas to help green our schools. I tried valiantly, writing at least once/week for two years, with few commenters and no joiners, then slowly gave it up. I get few commenters here, too, but I'm just barfing out my outrage now, not hoping to actually work with people on a solution. It's too painful when it's so fruitless.

Anyway...

Even I knew all about the causes and solutions around climate change. Heck, I remember learning all this from my grade six teacher, worried about global CO2 rising ONE degree back in 1976! Aw, so cute. 

The information was always out there for the taking, so if policymakers chose poorly, they have NOBODY to blame but their own idiocy.  

The study they cite, big surprise, doesn't slam scientists for failing to communicate coming risks. It's very specific to communication of "sea-level projection uncertainty." Analyzing how best to explain types of uncertainties is very different than claiming a failure to communicate! A better news article here. 

The article does get to the meat of the study, but later in the article, and it's definitely not indicated by the headline. And all too often, people don't read much past the headline.

Hey, mainstream media! Maybe it's time to look in the mirror, and consider how well you communicate. 

Climate Conspiracy

Journalist and activist George Monbiot wrote on why we can't actually explain the problems with certain arguments anymore:

Conspiracy fictions have succeeded, as Steve Bannon hoped, in "flooding the zone with shit". It is almost impossible now to have a rational conversation about the real sources of oppression, destruction and injustice, as so many have been so badly misled. Climate science denial has come roaring back, though the evidence of climate breakdown is now all around us. 

It's a tragedy: we need to unite around the greatest predicament humanity has ever faced, but millions have been persuaded that it isn't happening. 

Bannon was one of Trump's advisors. There was a conversation between them (that I'll never find now), from early on in Trump's first run, with Bannon decidedly convincing Trump of the benefits to his campaign if he's openly racist. I'm almost positive it happened, but it was possibly a nightmare.

I wrote about Bannon's propaganda efforts over six years ago. Now we can see it all come to fruition as nothing makes sense.

We're Reaping What We've Sown

There's tons of news about all the smoke - so much about the smoke. But I'm finding very little information about the actual fires. We know that firefighters are coming to help from the states and from South Africa, which is fantastic, but where are the videos of planes water bombing the shit out of this mess? Why aren't the fires front page news every day? It's annoying not to be able to sit outdoors for breakfast, sure, but so many people have lost their homes. And the wildlife. It's baby season in Canada, so even if some animals were able to flee and then hope to return (?) to the charred remains of their habitat, they're leaving all their littles behind (see what happened in Australia in 2020). And can we possibly prevent this in future?

The smoke is horrible, but the fires are horrific. So far almost 4 million hectares is on fire this year, about twenty times more than the average, and it's only June!

The Need to Grow

When I taught civics and we discussed Canada's immigration policy, that we typically take in about 250,000 newcomers each year, but over 600,000 apply, many students would suggest we need to take them all. They'd prefer an open door policy that maybe only stops the criminally-minded from entry. My follow up question: To what point? What happens if much of the rest of the world becomes uninhabitable and we get millions wanting to live here? At what point do you close the door, if ever? 

We're about to find out in just a few decades. According to an article in Nature about the specific kind of habitat we need to survive,

"Climate change has already put ~9% of people (> 600 million) outside this niche. By the end-of-century (2080-2100 [about 55 years from now]), current policies leading to around 2.7°C global warming could leave 1/3 (22-39%) of people outside the niche."

When a third of the civilized world becomes inhabitable, we'll all be either migrants or hosts or something far worse. Canada's in a pretty good location to weather this except for all the fires. 

But, I just watched a film that's free for the next couple days: The Need to Grow. It focuses on food production, but it's all interrelated. It's well put together with three entwined storylines, and it's got a hopefulness to it that can really help these days! It's just $7 to buy a permanent copy of the film along with lots of extras, and that will help them continue their work. 

Michael Smith is a genius inventor who found a way to create nutrient rich soil after learning that we've lost 1/3 of the world's topsoil in the last forty years, taking a matter of days to regenerate what would normally take a few hundred years. Erik Cutter created a vertical agriculture technique that enables far more food growth in a much smaller area and reduces GHGs as well. And Alicia Serratos and her mom, Monica, aimed to take on Girl Guide cookies. 

The bad guys are the fertilizer and pesticide corporations, an $170 billion industry, which could lose substantial profits if these ideas take off. The industries started with the leftover materials from the military without a market, like nerve agents.  

*** SPOILERS ***

The soil creating building burns down (possibly arson); the vertical farm is replaced by a huge skating rink, and the little girl doesn't get an audience with the head of Girl Guides. 

"People don't have the foresight to know what to care about. They don't WANT to know - ignorance is bliss."

BUT, they persisted! Two years later Smith rebuilt and Cutter found new places to start over, and Serratos kept working on food education. 

"You don't get points for doing the right thing. You just have to do it. . . . We can solve these problems. It's not too late. We can do much better."

It helps to know people are still trying to do the right thing even though things look bleak. 

My only criticism of the film is that the music is a bit heavy-handed at times, drowning out the audio, and was reminiscent of being on hold. But I'm old, and it might just not be to my taste!

1.5° in the Next Five Years

I've been to many marches and protests for the environment. Most recently, the call to action was around changing policies enough to cut GHGs in half by 2030 in order to keep us under 1.5°C by 2100. Now we're predicted to hit that marker in the next five years!! The World Meteorological Organization thinks it will just be temporary, but it's the first time in recorded history that we've been here. Oceans are warmer and less oxygenated than ever before.  

We failed to value trees over buildings, cycling/bussing over cars, reduce/reuse over consumption, longterm survival over short term fun, and people over profits. 

We need more commercial real estate despite the discovery that people can be more productive working from home, instead pretending our homes are causing all this illness, because people make scads of money off commercial rents. We're paving over the greenbelt in order to provide luxury entertainment for a small group of people. We keep pushing electric cars instead of offering free bus/rail and making cycling safer. We glorify travel as the ultimate way to enjoy life despite it destroying our habitat in the process. 

And we're still pushing to finish that pipeline.

Kolbert's Under a White Sky

It's World Environment Day (who knew?!), and the Independent published a collection of hopeful messages despite the world not being on track to keep temperatures below two degrees this century. Some are pinning cautious optimism on youth climate movements. Others are hopeful that this time, at COP26, things might be different since tackling climate can transform society. If we fix this one big problem, then everything will be better. Others point to stats: 70% of GDP in the UK is covered by net-zero targets, up from 30%, and the G7 is taking steps towards decarbonizing the power system. And others focus on a court case won against Shell as a reason to look forward to the future. Generally, they acknowledged that "the geopolitical landscape around climate change has shifted seismically." I've seen that shift too, in my classroom, where climate change is finally (finally?) a concern for students, but I'm not quite as hopeful. 

And then I finished Elizabeth Kolbert's book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. 

Kolbert wrote the provocative Sixth Extinction, and her writing here is just as clear and concise but far more poetic and often humorous. This new book has a few black and white photos but should really be re-released with colour pictures of all the incredible things she describes in her journey through beautiful landscapes to talk with fascinating people in order to find solutions to the problems plaguing our planet. Although they discuss many of the same things, this is the antithesis of Mann's most recent book both in style and in substance. Kolbert's book focuses on specific examples to explore each new technology, which makes it more accessible for the non-scientist, while also looking more profoundly at the conundrum we're in.

Kolbert's guiding question is the Jurassic Park nugget: now that we know we can change the world, should we? If we fix one mistake, it often creates another, but "What do you call natural selection after The End of Nature?" (97). Do we even have a natural environment to make unnatural with our technology? This is "a book about people trying to solve problems create by people trying to solve problems" (200).

Michael Mann's New Climate War

It's not all that new. There are tons of books on this topic now, so it would be hard to find a completely new angle. But the public still needs to learn the basics, and Mann does a good enough job of explaining it all in a very conversational writing style that's approachable for casual readers of science. His big argument, however, is with most of those other books and anyone who errs on the side of worst case predictions of the future because the doomers might provoke us to give up the fight, and this war has just barely started. 

I still know some people who think e-cars are evil because they use cobalt, and fast fashion is the main cause of climate change and are against any carbon tax because it will harm poor people (despite my explanation of the rebate system). They're convinced that vegetarianism is more important than decreasing fossil fuels use, but also that persuading others towards vegetarianism is elitist and privileged because it's cheaper to eat beef, despite my attempts to show them, with grocery store prices, that it's cheaper to buy bulk beans and lentils and cook from scratch; it's only more expensive if you buy 'near-meat' products. Although it takes more time than going through a drive-through, it doesn't have to if you cook a pot full of rice and lentils once/week. I used to live well below the poverty line, and dried beans kept me and my kids afloat. But somehow beef is the road to equity?? 

When I ask for sources, it's all Tiktok videos, so that's where climate scientists and activists have to head next! It's clearly still necessary to explain all this over and over in short soundbites with intense visuals that people will take away with them and share endlessly. These types of books need to be promoted by influencers. 

Mann has written a different type of climate change book in that it feels sort of personal, and he names lots of names of individuals, corporations, and countries. He seems a little snarky at times, which can be fun, but it's definitely different that the usual dry facts and data. He comes down hard on some of the people and ideas I've supported in the past, which has given me pause, but I don't fully support his take-downs. He wants to mend the rift between various factions of environmental movements, but he's doing so by arguing that they're all wrong. That might not be the best way to build bridges.

The gist: denial isn't the biggest problem anymore; now it's "other breeds of deceivers and dissemblers, namely downpayers, deflectors, dividers, delayers, and doomers" (45). We have to do both individual actions and corporate /political actions, and ignore any fight about which is better or faster. We have to do ALL THE THINGS! (I argued the same last year.) "At the center of the acrimonious debate over individual action versus systemic change is a false dilemma. Both are important and necessary" (68). 

"The solution is already here. We just need to deploy it rapidly and at a massive scale. It all comes down to political will and economic incentives. . . . A renewable energy transition would create millions of new jobs, stabilize energy prices in the absence of fuel costs, reduce power disruption, and increase access to energy by decentralizing power generation" (143-4). 

Planet of the Humans Review

So I just noticed I'm getting a lot of traffic for a post I wrote 8 months ago that advertised the release. Back then I wrote about some concerns with the film based just on the trailer and the backstory.

I actually watched the film on Tuesday, Earth Day's eve. It's free for the next month. It's a weird production overall. The music is a mix of 70s rock and iMovie background choices. There's some Emerson Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, and Black Sabbath in there at odd random times. I mean, if you're going to make a movie, why not shove all your favourite songs into it? There are interviews with many random protesters and people in forests who aren't named, but not anybody that can answer the right questions that they should be asking. A lot of interviews with protesters. Curious.

The first 45 minutes were a frustrating exploration of the energy that goes into producing solar panels and wind turbines. Yup, it takes energy and resources to make them. That seemed to be a shock to the producers. The frustrating part is that they discuss all the materials that go into making renewables completely divorced from any lifecycle comparisons between, for instance, solar, winds, nuclear, gas, and oil. They spend half the film shocking us with the reality that materials used to make renewable energy sources take energy. Is it the case that the energy used to create solar is equal to the energy produced over the lifetime?? They don't say, but they lead us down that path and then fade away to behold the next tragedy. Also, solar panels don't last forever. They have a lifespan of only a couple decades and then they have to be built again. Just like nuclear power plants. I'm not sure if that was news to the producers, but nothing lasts forever. Everything wears out in time. Do they think that we think renewables are like mythical perpetual motion machines?

The question that would have changed everything is, does the lifecycle of solar take more energy than it makes? AND does the production of solar panels create more GHGs than drilling for oil?? But the choices are never laid out like that. There's a very disingenuous feel to the first half of the film.

They also suggested that it takes a field of solar to run a toaster, and that if it rains, then it all falls apart because nobody's heard of batteries. Yes, batteries also take energy and resources to be produced. No energy source is entirely devoid of resource extraction, and they all take a toll on the planet, so we have to make some very wise and careful decisions about how create and store energy in future. And biofuel was always a disaster.

But then, in the second half, they get to their real concern: population. In the past 200 years, there's been a 10-fold increase in population AND a 10-fold increase in consumption each. It's taking a toll.

It's funny that this was the number one concern for a long time in many environmentalists' minds, but then it because absolutely offensive to suggest we restrain ourselves from having so many kids. I wrote about that a couple months ago. And I understand that in the more developed areas, each kid produces way more GHGs than in less developed areas, absolutely, but no matter how you slice it, it becomes a numbers game. The more people on the planet, the more resources we're going to use.

And, no matter what, we have to change the way we live. I get where they're going with it all. It's a problem whenever environmentalists suggest that renewables will save us. They won't be able to do it alone. They've got that part right.

And then it ends by calling out any environmentalist who's in bed with a corporation, and there are a lot of them (ETA see McKibben's article proving he was slandered in the link at the bottom)! Yup, even hippies can get corrupted. That's a problem, for sure. BUT that doesn't mean solar and wind and tidal energy can't help dramatically reduce our need for fossil fuels. We definitely have to change our lifestyles, stop eating meat (not even mentioned), stop travelling everywhere by car or plane, stop using electricity for anything unnecessary, and super-insulate our buildings. AND we can use renewable energy to also reduce fossil fuel use. It's still very much a viable part of the solution. Don't let them convince you otherwise!

ETA: Also check out this scathing review and this thorough fact checking. And then this overview of reviews from Bill McKibben, with this great line: "Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day's 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine." Neil Young calls it "a very damaging film to the human struggle for a better way of living." And here's some more specific fact checking on solar, wind and fossil fuels.)

And George Monbiot finally added his two cents, clarifying all the errors. Nobody has suggested why Moore is supporting this crap so vehemently, though. Could he be in bed with the Kochs??

Age of Oblivion: Another End of Decade Rant

Of course  calendars are a construct and don't mean anything, but the end of the year and, even more so, the end of the decade are useful times to take stock.

In pop culture, we have the Ecco Homo moment as a cultural foreboding - the chutzpah to insist on a fix that pretends to be completely oblivious to the destruction of former beauty. We've done that with our whole planet. But more than that is the fame it brought to the amateur restoration worker, driving up tourism dramatically. We are positioned to celebrate destruction of beauty more than creation. This could be bookended with the acknowledgment and then immediate justification of "billionaires in wine caves" having more power than the rest of the populous; that a politician will be attacked for refusing to be bribed is a sign of our times.

The New York Times got a random smattering of people to answer: What Will the World Look Like in 2030?, twelve years after we were told we have twelve years to fix everything. It's a terrifying read. I've smushed some pertinent bits together here:

Being a Gadfly or Just a Bitch

Or perhaps we should be casual observers watching the end without comment. Hmmm....

A few years ago, a friend with a similar house as mine in a similar neighbourhood complimented my laundry line, but bemoaned the fact that it wouldn't be possible for her to have one. As I provided ample rebuttal to each point of opposition that started with "I'd would, but", she eventually stopped me with, "I'd would, but I just don't care enough about it. I wish I wanted to more, but reducing electrical demand is not a priority for me."

We need to get to a point where people make it a priority, where people are shocked into action.  Hailstorms in Mexico might be a start. But some of my travel-loving friends, and one of my own kids, still have no intention of slowing down despite further evidence that air travel is even worse for the environment than we thought. Denial in the form of "I'll just drive a little less to compensate for a couple air trips each year," isn't going away fast enough. Or, more recently and disturbingly, a friend's solution: "Travel more and have lots of kids and grandkids and enjoy life, and then we can all just take suicide pills when it gets too dark out there." Her only concern with her plan, if I'm remembering correctly, was if her kids died before administering doses to their children, leaving the little ones behind. Yikes.

Life After Warming

David Wallace-Wells's book The Uninhabitable Earth starts out with a repetition of facts that won't be news to anyone paying attention, but he has a lovely way with words.

Four of the last five extinctions were from greenhouse gases, and now we're adding carbon to the atmosphere 100 times faster than at any other time, and "guilt saturates the planet's air as much as carbon, though we choose to believe we do not breathe it" (5). In the last 40 years, more than half the worlds' vertebrate animals have died and the flying insect population declined by three-quarters (26). His focus is largely on humanity, but we'll be taking most other life forms with us when we go. Our continued actions are at the level of a genocide, and the "Kyoto Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; the the twenty years since, despite all of our clime advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, we have produced more emissions than in the twenty years before" (9). Even if we stop short of the two degree mark, we'll still have a sea-level rise "to draw a new American coastline as far west as I-95" (13). "Our current emissions trajectory takes us over 4 degrees by 2100" (27). At 5 degrees, "Parts of the globe would be literally unsurvivable for humans"(39). And "heat death is among the cruelest punishments to a human body, just as painful and disorienting as hypothermia" (48).

The Cost of Inequality: Davis 2019

This is a great video of some excellent speakers to listen to while you make dinner or, maybe, do your taxes. In a nutshell, governments need to stop taking out social programs since they cost so little of the GDP anyway, and they need to make sure the wealthy pay their taxes in full or maybe even raise their taxes, and we all need to get everyone involved to create a more loving and just world.




Rutger Bregman references William James's essay, "The Moral Equivalence of War" in a slightly different context from James in that Bregman thinks we need a war, for our survival, against climate change.

James establishes that wars continue as a necessary means to bring forth valour. But, he clarified, "War is not the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy." He proposes that the youth of the day (back in 1906) be trained to be strong and vital by being sent, not to wars, but to build infrastructure and factories, to fight a war against Nature itself. His essay doesn't hold up today in the specific way he hopes to establish peace worldwide, but the idea behind it is still viable. One flaw, even at the time, is that if we train the youth in compulsory hard work, they're missing the potential benefit war brings to a few of the youth: coming back home a hero.

So, instead of proposing a war against Nature, I propose something along the lines of what Bregman is getting at, but a little more concrete: a war against tragedies. Train them in the work of enriching lives and saving people from disease and suffering by clearing areas destroyed by hurricanes and floods, by rebuilding homes and schools in safer areas complete with solar panels and rain collection systems, and by helping people transport their lives as necessary. Instead of a war against nature, it can be a war against soil erosion, deforestation, and plastic bits everywhere. Now we need to fight in defense of nature.

Kids These Days!

Here's Greta Thunberg, 16, at Davos 2019, the World Economic Forum:

At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness. But Homo sapiens have not yet failed. Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we recognise the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance. . . . Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases. Either we do that or we don’t. . . . 

Some say we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight? Here in Davos – just like everywhere else – everyone is talking about money. It seems money and growth are our only main concerns. . . . We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

Here's the whole thing:

Why Protest?

This will be the shortest post ever! Here's my argument delineated in premises and a conclusion (P=premise, SC=sub-conclusion, C=conclusion):

P1. Human beings are wired for immediate, or short-term, survival, not long term survival. (Or, as Plato said, we are weak at the skill of measurement.) That's why we do many stupid (aka short-sighted) things.
P2 (SC1) - So, we need restrictions on our behaviour if we hope to survive (e.g. DUI laws. There's an unstated premise here that the government has the power to restrict our behaviour).
P3. The government is made up of people who are also human, so they are also wired only for immediate survival.
P4 (SC2) - So, they also need to be forced to behave in ways that work better longterm.
P5. Part of surviving in government, short term, is being re-elected by the people.
P6 (SC3) - So, politicians can be influenced by their perception of what the people want. (little side argument: They're also affected by cash-rich lobbyists, but they don't get any of that lobby money if they don't have a seat in office. They only have a seat if they follow the will of the people.)
P7. Non-violent protests with enough people affect the politicians in a real democratic country ('enough' being the tipping point that suggests to politicians that the tides have changed and they have to alter their message if they hope to be re-elected).
P8. (SC4) - So, if enough people protest against climate change, politicians will alter legislation to restrict our actions, to affect corporate practices, and to alter the governmental direction of spending in favour of longer-term survival.

P9. Boots-on-the-ground protesting is more effective than clicktivism as it adds the dimension of clarifying to politicians that the protesters are politically engaged and willing to act, thus more likely to vote. (And rallies have worked in the past.)
P10. When protesting doesn't have an effect, it's because it wasn't sustained and determined enough. (Okay, this one is circular, and there are places where protesters were ignored for years, like the protests against Coke drying up aquifers in India, so this also rides on the unstated premise that, in Canada, democracy works).
P11 Doing something in the face of our grim reality feels better and helps us cope in the face of trauma more than doing nothing.

C. We have to rally outside the offices of parliament if we have any hope of turning this corner!


Am I wrong? If so, which premise is in question? If not, then join the fight! This is our last chance. Thinking that we have until 2030 to change things allows for a bit more denial that slows us down from changing things NOW. Every day counts in those mere 4,000 days until we run out of options. (Yes, 2030 is just a little over 4,000 sleeps!)

On Fridays for Future

I went to the first #fridaysforfuture protest in our area with my youngest, yesterday, outside my MP's office. The idea is the brainchild of Greta Thunberg who wants all students to strike every Friday until the political system focuses on slowing down climate change so we can avoid hitting that dreaded 1.5 degree ceiling. We've already zipped passed the 350 ppm ceiling with nary an outcry (at about 410 ppm now). We only have 11 more years, until 2030, to act before we won't be able to have any significant effect. She says, "What is the point of learning facts when the most important facts given by our finest scientists are ignored by politicians?". Before I left work, I talked to a few colleagues, discussing the ethics of a teacher taking a half day "family care" day to go to a protest, and everyone I spoke with was supportive of the idea. What's a family care day for if not to fight to sustain the planet for our families! And I decided, even if it's seen as wrong, it's worth the potential consequences. It was a well-run event with about 40 people there on a bitterly cold day (the paper said 30, but I counted at least 40); unfortunately, I think a good 60 or 70% of the crowd were long past their school days.

Energy Conservation in the Home: I'll Show You Mine...

I know this is just one tiny piece of the puzzle, but there IS an effective way to get people to reduce their energy usage in their homes: publicize how much their neighbours use. A recent study found that if people think they're neighbours care about the environment, and if they're shown how much energy their neighbours use relative to their own use, then people will use less energy in a race to be the least wasteful.

"The US firm Opower sends over 60 million households around the world energy bills that show their own energy consumption in relation to how much energy their neighbours consume. Providing this information has led to customers decreasing their energy consumption -- to date, this intervention has saved more than $2 billion USD in energy usage."

On Arguing Facts

It never ceases to amaze me how often I'll be writing or thinking about something, and then the perfect articles drop in my lap. It might help that I've been scrolling through social media endlessly on my days off!

In my prior post, I discussed the need for teachers to step up and actively dismantle arguments based on a mistaken premise or altogether unfounded assumption rather than heed concerns about the self-esteem of our charges or other potential ramification born by speaking our mind, and then I hit this Aeon article from October.

Courage Over Hope

This got a little out of control, so I added in pictures! But there is suddenly tons in the news about climate change, and many excellent videos to watch.

Jeremy Deaton wrote in the Huffington Post last week:

Ultimately, the idea that regular people can’t be told the full implications of climate change is condescending. Scientists, writers and advocates might consider that they go to work every day understanding the enormity of climate change, and yet they are able to do their jobs. The men and women who work on climate change are not made of tougher stuff, and they need not obscure the awful truth about the carbon crisis. People can take it. In fact, they’ll have to. Perhaps what makes it possible for advocates to continue their work is not a surplus of hope or an absence of fear, but a sense of duty. They respond to their grief with a righteous anger, to their panic with bravery, to their desolation with solidarity.

Climate Change Education: Maybe Too Little, Too Late?

I've been teaching about climate change since I started teaching in 1991. Back then, most students just laughed, and I came across as a crazy person. I was fine with that mainly because my favourite teacher from high school was also seen as a bit looney. Thinking the bearers of bad news insane is a handy defence from a difficult reality.

In the early 80s, my old history teacher, immersed as he was in details of war, turned his basement into a bunker with 2' concrete walls and a two year supply of food and water, just in case. He'd show us, on a globe, that Canada was smack dab in the middle of the U.S. - U.S.S.R. conflict, and if we lived through a nuclear strike, we'd be scrounging for clean food and water for years. The fear of that potential sat at the back of my head until the mutual disarmament started. Whew! Dodged that missile! (Except, not so fast....) I wasn't openly troubled at the time, but I do continue to blame Reagan's election for my teenaged drug experimentation. How could we possibly make it with that cowboy in command? In hindsight, it could be argued that he wasn't nearly as bad as what we're dealing with now. That's not good news.

In the early 90s, most students thought climate change was a hoax despite my well researched and carefully compiled data to the contrary, and some tried to soothe my concerns, genuinely worried that I had been sucked into a conspiracy theory. It was 15 years of slogging through a sea of profound disbelief until Al Gore's movie finally opened some eyes. An Inconvenient Truth changed everything - for a little while. We had the smallest of windows to get things going, and we failed. When the time was finally ripe for action, we had Bush and Harper at the helm.

And then that moment of belief and concern and burgeoning action largely went away again for about a decade. Since the widespread sharing of the most recent IPCC report that suggests we've got about a dozen years to turn things around before we're completely out of options, lots of regular people are suddenly paying attention again.

Some students still think that climate change is a myth started by companies to sell green products using the same methods Nestle used to sell water bottles: they convinced the masses that we don't absorb any water from food or beverages, so we need to drink 8 glasses of water a day but never from the toxic tap in our homes. They created a multi-million dollar scam that most people fell for. Some people still won't drink tap water despite the reality that it's far more regulated than the bottled water industry. But people with any wherewithal or common sense could look up reputable studies on necessary water consumption and tap water regulations and easily see the lies. This is different. The top climate scientists in the world agree that we have a serious problem. People can easily look up the research.

Yes, absolutely, some companies are using this current reality to try to make a buck. But most reputable scientists will tell you we can't buy our way out of this problem, that consumerism has to stop and that includes greenwashed products. No company would propagate a myth that we should stop buying anything that's not absolutely necessary. It's definitely the case that companies are making products to profit if off climate change, but that's not evidence that climate change doesn't exist. That's evidence of corporations benefiting from a traumatic event, something we should be used to by now. And absolutely any shift in consumerism that actually takes place will affect the economy. We didn't always follow an economic growth model, and we can't continue on this way. There are alternatives.

Now that we're at a very critical point of no return, if not completely past it, teachers have finally been sent curriculum and lesson plans, from Ingenium, to help talk to students about climate change. The lesson plans start with brainstorming what we think we can do about it. If my classes are any indication, many people really think littering is a significant contributor. I hit the last straw (ha!) when someone used examples of littering as mitigating factors on a test, and I wrote and posted a poem to help them remember, but they still forget (or just can't possibly hear it). The Ingenium site links to a useful site that demonstrates flaws in the denialist arguments. As a proponent of direct instruction, I'm not big on all the brainstorming and word cloud creations, but at least this huge dilemma is becoming a bigger part of our lessons.

More importantly, for the first time ever I feel like I have overt permission to discuss this in class. I have had students question my discussions because it can be upsetting just to consider the idea that, as George Monbiot suggests in Heat, this will be the last generation to luxuriate in long, hot showers. Just considering the privations we'll have to attempt is too much for some teenagers. I don't even much touch on what the world will look like if we don't. Now I feel like I can.

I think, for students, it will be like it was with me in the cold war. I largely ignored it, but there was a tiny bit that got in and made me worried. If I avoided the news it would quiet down a bit. In the 80s, ignoring it all was fine. We no longer have that luxury. All the legal pot and free beer won't mitigate that reality.

Here's the thing: some scholars think we have to abandon any misplaced notion that we can still avert disaster. The best we can do at this point is to postpone the inevitable. However, prolonging our future for a few more decades isn't nothing. Jem Bendell's "paper’s key point — that the velocity of climate change appears to have shifted so dramatically upward since 2014 that its progression is no longer 'linear' — aligns with other mainstream research." We had a window that closed, and now we have to deal with the consequences. We've ignored it too long for the option to turn it around through GHG cuts or technological fixes, and our only option left is Deep Adaptation:

"He has a three-part strategy in mind. It starts with that “resilience” component that everybody is already behind — seawalls and reinforced roofing, etc. . . .  a second stage of “relinquishment” (giving up treasured things that make climate chaos worse, like present-day living standards and homes that overlook the ocean). And then a third: “restoration” of cultural values and practices “that our hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation eroded”: Examples include re-wilding landscapes, so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support."

A reporter from Australia describes the corporate and political system that got us here as a form of crimes against humanities:

"A small number of insanely wealthy individuals and immensely powerful corporations are making out like bandits from the business of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They don’t much feel like stopping. . . . if human civilisation somehow survives this existential threat, climate-change denial will come to be thought of the way postwar Germany conceived of holocaust denial; an intolerable danger. . . . But time is running out. Twelve years, according to this latest IPCC report. To put that in context, we have a lot less than half the time The Simpsons have been on air before we may as well just give up and start lobbing nukes at each other over the last few drops of clean drinking water and arable land. But they have to stop, or be stopped."

If this weren't bad enough, we're also running out of oxygen. We've got several centuries left, so it's not as urgent an issue, but the quality of the air we're breathing sure is. I once wrote a short story about four elderly residents of a retirement centre who were the last survivors in the area because they were all breathing from oxygen tanks. I'm horrible at story writing, and I failed to finish it because I got too swept away researching what the world would look like with too much sulphur dioxide and not enough oxygen in the air and whether or not solar panels would continue to work to continue to have electricity in the centre and how oxygen tanks even work, but it was really going to be a vehicle to explore various philosophies of death and dying. I'll make a comprehensive chart one day (that's more my speed), so we can each identify our attitude of choice for our remaining time here.

And then there's the fact that mammals can't evolve fast enough keep up with the extinction of the species.

Absolutely, we should be discussing this in schools, and, much more so than my old history teacher, we'd be very wise to take some real life precautions, but I'm in a different place on the climate change education curve. I'm not sure it matters that the next generations mind maps their thoughts on some pretty images, or play some games that explore their individual footprint. They should definitely aim to reduce their own impact: forgo that pivotal first car purchase as a measure of adulthood, learn to tolerate the heat instead of blasting the A/C, and understanding the importance of meat-free meals. It would be really useful to teach them all how to grow and preserve their own food and how to fix their own clothes (and the general attitude that fixes things instead of throwing them away). But most importantly, we need to teach them how to take to the streets to force a much more pivotal change in the direction we're headed. If we can't get Trump and Trudeau to really get involved, then I can't see how we'll possibly turn this corner.

ETA - And then I just read activist Bill McKibben's article about getting death threats. I'll give him the last word:

"It was, in this case, a public call for someone to murder me, and not long afterward another commenter, 'Carbon Bigfoot,' supplied my home address. All of which stopped me cold. I thought I was inured to social media abuse. But this was something new: a calm public discussion about how to find me and what to do to me. . . . 207 environmentalists or defenders were killed last year around the world. . . . What does it say about a society when people just routinely call for the killing of those they disagree with? . . . A society in which critics fear death is a society with fewer critics, and hence with fewer chances for change."