Is Climate Inaction from Peak Individualism?

A recent article in The Guardian asked one of the UK’s top climate scientists, Professor Ed Hawkins, to bust the biggest myths about climate change. He tells us we can’t keep adapting to rising temperatures; burning fossil fuels is what’s primarily affecting climate; harvests are suffering; we’ve known the basics of all this for over 175 years, and it’s never too late to change. Does it help to clear all that up? I wonder if our reluctance to change has less to do with myths continuing to propagate and more to do with an increasingly pervasive ideology of individuality and independence. These myths might just be a way to rationalize our desire to be oblivious to our effects on one another.

From Met Office Hadley Center, based on Ed Hawkins' stripes model

I always enjoy Rebecca Solnit’s writing, and her 2025 book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain is no exception. The essays start with the need for a long view when we try to enact change, and she touches on several issues including democracy, masculinity, abortion, covid, and climate change, leaving us with some hope at the end. The thread I want to pull on is a much needed shift from a simplistic “us vs them” way of thinking into more complexity and nuance that comes with the acceptance of our necessary interconnectivity. I can’t help noticing some parallels with psychiatrist Frank Yeomans’ Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, which might imply that our personal development is important for the sake of the world. Maybe funding therapy would save the planet!

SPLITTING: The problem with clarity, certainty, and comfort.

It’s comfortable to have two clear sides to any issue or between groups and to know which side to root for. We like to have certainty and predictability in our world. It’s comforting when things are clear and stable. Old Westerns and WWE and cheering for our favourite sports team all play with a good vs evil narrative that’s familiar. We can get a sense of belonging from just wearing the colours of the home team. We bank on stats and polls and other bits of data to arrive at conclusions about each side. Even if our team or our politician of choice loses, there’s still a solace that we’re on the right side and can commiserate in good company. Solnit explains that it can be so painfully distressing to experience the tension of ambiguity that we’ll rely on the most dubious evidence for backing.

“When it comes to real life, this state of unknowing is both normal and so wildly uncomfortable that we engage in foolish and delusional imitations of knowing, whether it’s trusting untrustworthy authorities or making pronouncements about outcomes with no particular basis in fact, knowledge, or history.”

Our desire for predictability can prevent us from questioning our stance or attempting to change even when it’s vital for our survival. We sometimes choose a side and stick to it, ignoring the nuance of positions and the possibility of harm in part just to have that decision off our plate, rationalizing our stance if need be. Everything is simpler when we can look for signs revealing which side someone’s on and judge them accordingly. (Wait, is a Canadian flag on the back of a pickup truck good or bad now?) This tendency towards the comfort of black and white thinking is vitally important to consider at this point in history. We’ve been living through constant change, often imperceptible, but climate change’s effects will require overt adjustments. Solnit cautions,

“We are leaving behind our old familiar world whose stability we can remember as a great kindness and entering into a rough new set of circumstances. Like refugees leaving a place, we are leaving a time. What should we carry with us? … What will sustain us through this period?”

Frank Yeomans has a compelling take on this type of divisive perspective that fosters clarity and certainty. He calls it a paranoid-schizoid organization. It’s common and harmless in small doses; the problem comes when we get stuck there. His theory suggests it’s our infantile state of being, and something we need to grow out of:

“In the early year and a half of life, as it is posited, experiences with the caretakers by the infant are seen as either perfectly satisfying or totally depriving because there’s no concept of object constancy. If you’re being caressed and fed and kept warm and cozy, you’re in heaven, but if you’re uncomfortable, you’re cold, you’re hungry, you’re soiled, and the caretaker isn’t there, you don’t have this feeling, ‘Oh, I know mom will come.’ … You’re in pain. You’re suffering and you perceive the other as the source of the suffering. So you’re either in heaven or hell. … The mind is divided between the segment of the mind that’s about positive ideal experiences and negative persecutory experiences. …

If you go through life where things are either perfect or terrible, you don’t adapt well to the complexity of life. … The positive side of the split internal world is just as pathological as the negative side that’s all about paranoia and rejection and harm because the positive side doesn’t correspond to reality. You never find the perfect caretaker. No matter how much you’re in love with your partner, they’re not going to be perfect. …

It’s called schizoid because it’s split. It’s called paranoid because in that mental organization where fondness and aggression are totally divided, the person experiencing aggression is not comfortable seeing himself or herself as the source of the aggression. They tend to project the aggression and see it as coming from outside. So as soon as you begin to get close to somebody, you’re nervous because you think something bad is going to happen. … Splitting allows you not to think as much. Splitting is simple, but in a way it’s reassuring when your mind functions according to splitting. You know what’s good and you know what’s bad. There’s no ambiguity. …

You can allow yourself to regress, to forget about all the complexity of the world … enjoy that for two hours. The problem is that political leaders can appeal to splitting when they say we’re all good; the only problems are outside of our group. Everything bad is outside. … The system breaks down because in that tribe mentality, people are not taking responsibility for themselves, but only blaming the other, and then when you get enough of that going on, somebody’s going to get into violence, and it’s going to fall apart.”

I wonder how much of perfectionism and rejection sensitivity can be framed through the lens of operating from this earlier splitting phase of life. Either we’re successful or a failure, and either people love us fully or hate us completely. Either you’re with us or against us. The projection of aggression helps to understand the sense of increasing fearfulness of one another that can come out as actual rage against others: Canada’s Freedom Convoy, ICE’s itchy trigger finger, the US invasion of the capital, and an undisguised defensiveness in people ready to fight against any request to share or have compassion for others.

At the start of the anti-vaccine protests, I had a handful of students in my civics class insist that nothing should impede anybody’s freedom ever. I countered that all laws impede freedoms, and we had a discussion about freedoms to and freedoms from and the delicate dance to find the best landing spot between them. But it was unnerving to me how quickly some had bought into the extreme individualism idea that the best society is a society in which we each survive on our own, and we should be allowed to do anything we want, which is the absolute antithesis of civilization. It’s a simple narrative, often presented with unwarranted confidence: Freedom is the cowboy with the white stetson, and responsibility and compassion and care are part of the posse that’s threatening to burn down our farm. It’s me against the world! I’m not sure I changed their minds.

INTEGRATION and Interconnectivity: The importance of caring and community.

Solnit points out that we once thought trees competed for light, but now, with Suzanne Simard’s work, we know they work together to share resources. We’re slowly recognizing the network of cause and effect that we’re each a part of. If we can acknowledge that we don’t live separated from the world, but are of the world, then we have to recognize our impacts on virus transmission, world hunger, climate change, and so many other issues we’re facing or trying to ignore. Solnit questions if our political factions should be renamed to reflect this key marker: “Isolationists and interconnectionists might be more useful terms for the political divides of our time than left and right. … You could describe the position as: ‘Nothing is mutual, there is therefore no justification for aid” (53). And later,

“A lot of why the right doesn’t ‘understand’ climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility. … Recognizing the reality of climate breakdown means recognizing the interconnectedness of all things. That connection brings obligation: to respect nature, to build domestic regulation and international treaties that protect what’s needed, to negotiate the freedom of the individual in the name of the well-being of the collective. That is, of course, a worldview in direct contrast with free-market fundamentalism and libertarianism.”

Solnit points to the crafted message that all crime and trouble comes from outside, which allows the powerful to demonize targeted groups of people. We’re still stuck in a version of the American Dream that fosters the ‘achievement society’ values that adhere our worth to our capacity for production and consumption. If we have no sense of mattering to the world in our own right, of having inherent worth, we will need to continuously prove our existence is valuable with accomplishments and acquisitions. This misses the million tiny ways we each affect one another. It also means, as Solnit says, “If you equate your wealth with virtue, you tend to equate poverty with vice.”

For Solnit, the sense of predictability in the world, the illusion of knowing, provides “a false certainty that excuses inaction. Whether you feel assured that everything is going to hell or will all turn out fine, you are not impelled to act. … Not acting is a luxury those in immediate danger do not have.” Solnit provides many examples of people who appear to be powerless nevertheless changing the world over and over. It’s historically demonstrated to be possible, but our short-sightedness makes us wary of following a path that’s been overgrown. She says,

“We have been making short-term decisions for a long time, and the consequences have arrived. … People without much sense of history imagine the world as static. They assume that if the present order is failing, the system is collapsing and there is no alternative. A historical imagination equips you to understand that change is ceaseless. … The rescuers we need are mostly not individuals, they are collectives — movements, coalitions, campaigns, civil society.”

Yeoman’s transitional stage out of the schizoid-paranoid organization is called the depressive organization, which is the preferable place despite its name:

“If you integrate those two radical polarized extremes, two things happen. One is you have to give up and you have to mourn your belief that you can ever find the ideal other or that you can ever be the perfect ideal self. You have to give up on thinking anybody can be ideal, and that’s kind of a sad awareness. The second thing that happens when you begin to integrate your positive and negative emotions is that you begin to have an awareness and take some responsibility and consciousness for the aggressive feelings you always saw as outside of you. It’s a painful trajectory from splitting and projection to integration and mourning the ideal object, and accepting that one has one’s own aggression. … In other words, does your identity allow you to assume and connect with the full range of who you are as an emotional being.”

There’s a grief that comes from realizing you were on the wrong path, and the ideals you hoped for were attached to inevitably fallible human beings. As that fantasy turns to dust, we need something else in its place. Yeomans clarifies a point he made that’s been previously misunderstood about where to look for ideals:

“Here’s what I said about religion, philosophy, and art, which is that that’s where you can idealize. … I don’t think you’re not allowed to have ideal beliefs, ideal values. They might be embodied in a spiritual system, an ethical system, an artistic pursuit, an aesthetic pursuit. So I think ideals are laudable, but look for them where they might exist, and not in another person or oneself.”

We have to look outside ourselves and other individuals for values and ideals. We need religion, philosophy, or art, or something to help us find the better path instead of glorifying the words of a politician, MVP, or influencer.

A couple years ago I wrote about the move over centuries from following religion to modernism to post- then meta-modernism, and Charles Taylor’s concern with our flattened horizon and lack of shared values. It’s a tumultuous trek to give up what’s familiar and comfortable in order to enable and enact change:

“From the pre-modernist time to now, we were encouraged to serve religiously, then to discover scientifically, then to grasp for all we deserve commercially, and now we need to recover a hierarchy of secular values that encompass more than ourselves. The problem with this retrieval of values is that we run into internal conflict and anguish — if we’re willing to acknowledge it — as we recognize how much exploitation we have become accustomed to in virtually every aspect of our lives. When we encounter cognitive dissonance as we recognize an internal inconsistency between how we think of ourselves and how we actually live, we have the choice of changing it or using defence mechanisms to protect ourselves from it. We’ve taken the latter route for long enough to destroy our planet in the process.”

We’re at a daunting yet privileged point in the timeline of our species in that we’re aware of the choices on the table and where they might lead. It seems like it’s up to us to see ourselves as part of the cause and effect of it all in order to be willing to work through the grief and anguish of changing direction.

 by Pieter Weltevrede 

Solnit’s hope for us comes with a description of the Hindu goddess Akhilandeshwari, which translates to “She Who Is Never Not Broken.” She discusses the meaning as it was explained to her:

“‘The whole is finite; in our brokenness we are infinite.’ I think she means that being perfect, being whole, means being sealed and shut off in some way, being that version of complete that needs and welcomes no more. To be broken is to reach out, to be open, to be incomplete and therefore to welcome outside in. Maybe a break opens up room for yearnings as reaching beyond.”

The illusion of completeness and perfection means we don’t need anyone else or we shouldn’t need anyone else, which merely keeps us separated and isolated. The alternative is to embrace imperfection, uncertainty, and the incompleteness of the self that leads us towards interconnection with others, in solidarity, in order to build a more compassionate future, or maybe even the only possible future. When we see ourselves as just a piece in a larger puzzle, it gives us the impetus to join together, the space to welcome what comes next, and the courage to step into the unknown.

Something like that.

Facing the Backdraft

Climate analyst Barry Saxifrage explains how the CO2 from fires is adding significantly to greenhouse gas accumulation. His charts show the dramatic increase in Canadian wildfires:

"Wildfire is now incinerating four times more forest carbon than during the 1990s. In addition to the surging immediate threats of choking smoke, wanton destruction and disrupted lives, rising wildfire is also pumping billions of tonnes of forest carbon into our atmosphere, intensifying long-term climate breakdown. ... It is piling up in an ever-thickening blanket in our atmosphere that will overheat generations to come. The extra heat being trapped by humanity's CO2 now equals the explosions of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day. And rising. ...

Wildfire emissions totalled 30 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) [in 1990]. The much taller bar on teh far right shows that this year's wildfires have already burned massive amounts of forest. Emissions are around 500 MtCO2 so far, with many weeks of fire season still ahead. ... It is tempting to think that this current level of wildfire is our 'new normal.' But it's going to keep getting worse until we take our foot off the wildfire accelerator. ... Levels will keep rising until we stop the primary source of them, fossil fuel burning. ... 'It ain't rocket science -- when it's hotter and drier fires burn more easily and more explosively.' ... Burning fossil fuels burns Canada's forests."

Not Strategy but Symptoms

 So, things are a mess. But here's an interesting take on Trump from Andrew Wortman: 

"Trump's 2 a.m. meltdowns and dictator cosplay aren't part of a predetermined strategy--they're collapse. A malignant narcissist, weak and unhealthy, colliding with the one thing he can't escape: DEATH. And his team knows it, which is why they're going full-fascist now. As a psychologist, I can tell you: when malignant narcissists lose control, they don't fade quietly. They escalate exponentially--rage, smear campaigns, humiliation, projection, even violence. Every move is about punishing those who expose their weakness to claw back control. This isn't 'toughness.' It's disintegration. In my field we call it narcissistic mortification: the sheer terror, shame, and dread of being forced to confront one's own fragility. To them, it feels like annihilation--as the false self they've lived behind for decades shatters. 

Mortification hits with both physical and psychological shock--chest pain, burning, panic, humiliation, obsessive thoughts. They feel exposed, worthless desperate. That desperation is what fuels the meltdowns you're watching play out in real time like an SNL skit or horror film. For Trump, the trigger is being faced with his own mortality. He can't sue death. He can't cheat it, bribe it, or con his way out of it. It's inescapable. And for the first time in his life, he's powerless--and the panic shows in every crazed rant and wild attempt to project control. That's why you see him suddenly fixated on things like getting into heaven, legacy, and being remembered. Humiliation is the narcissist's deepest wound--and nothing humiliates more than colliding with the truth that you can't escape the end.

The Epstein files serve to make this terror far worse. Not only do they expose what he's spent 30+ years concealing, but if they surface after he's gone, he can't spin them. The thought of being defined by that humiliation--with no power to control the narrative--is devastating. When narcissists face both mortality AND exposure, collapse deepens. They don't reflect or accept responsibility. They deflect, rage, lie, smear, and escalate authoritarian grabs. Anything to keep the mask intact just a little bit longer--no matter who gets hurt in the process. 

Anomy: A Disturbance of the Collective Order

A few articles have come out recently concerned with the trajectory we're taking, particularly choices being made by young adults. But we need to acknowledge the upheaval we're currently living through to have any hope of traversing it well. 

Emile Durkheim wrote Suicide back in 1897, a lengthy report on the four ways people are provoked to give up on life: egoistic, altruistic, fatalistic, and anomic. His discussion of anomy is a useful warning for today: 

"Whenever serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men [he's talking generally of people here] are more inclined to self-destruction. .... Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience. ... But when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence. ... Appetites, not being controlled by a public opinion become disoriented, no longer recognize the limits proper to them. ... The state of de-regulation or anomy is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining. ... A thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once known. ... What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. ... He cannot in the end escape the futility of an endless pursuit. ... Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things." 

Suppression is the Goal: A Final Covid Plea for 2024

We've survived 2024, but excess mortality compared to pre-pandemic rates is quite high for young adults (18-44), and in school-aged kids, it continues to increase year over year, with 2024 the deadliest year since the pandemic began. 1 in 15 people in the US is immunocompromised (possibly two kids per class), and getting a simple virus could be much more dangerous for them. It's safe to say that we'd still be wise to take some precautions to prevent harm to one another.

Gregory Travis's graph above clarifies the benefits of wearing masks for anyone that cares about reducing childhood mortality rates. Lockdowns were lifted in most places in the US in August 2020, but the mortality rate decreased substantially below baseline in 2021 because of masks until the just before school started. In January 2021, Biden called for compliance with the CDC in respect to wearing masks, at the lowest mortality point on the graph, but in April 2021, he started suggesting that people who are vaccinated didn't need to wear one, and in May 2021, the CDC dropped mask recommendations. Remember when Biden said those fully vaxxed earned the right to greet others with a smile?? In July 2021 the WHO started using the term "breakthrough infection" when people got Covid after being vaccinated -- until it became too common to maintain that farce, and the excess mortality of children started rising. If it's just a spurious correlation, what else could have caused that dramatic fall in deaths for the exact period that kids wore masks in class? 

Developing the Capacity for Rational Choices

"As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?" -- Furiosa 

Imprisoned climate activist, Roger Hallam, recently wrote about the necessity of expanding emotional well-being as we face bleak events happening around the world. While climate scientists try to "help people through the horrific information that they are being given," they also need a way to manage their emotional reactions. We can no longer afford to merely distract ourselves from the inner turmoil. Beyond climate, we could very well be entering into a period of much greater conflict at a time of even more viruses, some destructive to our food system. When the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.

To move forward with compassion, at a time when divide and conquer strategies have created polarization and infighting, seems to require an effort from each one of us.

Hallam writes,

"We might want to think about why saint-like people are enormously influential, even powerful. . . . They see the world as dependent upon the mind. . . . They are not enslaved by the world; their minds are intent, driven even, to change it. They do not see this as an end in itself."

Only When It is Darkest Out Can You See the Stars

These are my summary notes from this excellent podcast from Andrea Pitzer on Next Comes What, "How We Survive This Mess." 

Pitzer previous wrote a history of concentration camps, One Long Night, and she relates much of this new US admin regime to historical cases. Some similarities: first, Hitler rose to power through legitimate means, but laws were stretched to allow him to run. Pinochet's coup used similar rhetoric, and we need to be aware of the similar tactics already on display: terror, shock, making a show of force, and trying to seize more power than they have. And Putin, who was brought in as a useful stooge, then stepped out only to return to be more powerful by removing moderates. 

The benefits to the current situation include that we have a date. It's not coming unexpectedly, but in a couple months, which provides a window to play in. The US military is officially non-partisan, so won't necessarily follow Trump's orders. Governors in key states are standing up, and it's important to build that out of the gate. There's still a partially functional court system and civil bureaucracy that can slow down any legislation. And the odds of Congress being up for grabs in 2026 are still good as there will likely be a massive backlash. She also claims that "these people are not that bright" which can help anyone trying to subvert their agenda. They got in only because it's really easy to generate hate; "it's not a sign of genius but of money and the willingness to do tremendous harm," which provides an opening for resistance and a likelihood of infighting that could decimate their control. They ran on ideas, not on governance.

Letter from a British Prison: An Experiment with the Truth

 I write more about Covid than climate because we can actually dramatically decrease the problem with rampant viral transmission in the next few years with tools on hand if we make a global concerted effort. The climate is much, much more complex and multifaceted and just maybe beyond our most intense efforts. 

But check out Roger Hallam's letter sent over a phone from prison. He just started a five-year sentence. 

"This is not about five nice white middle-class people being banged up for 'protest' on 'the climate.' It's about a few million not-so-nice white people deciding to have a few hundred million brown people die. Just for starters. This is not about 'climate change'; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad things, a very bad thing, and evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being 'melodramatic,' that economies will be 'devastated,' they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that's what 1,000 public statement have said. It's what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It's coming. It is what it is. At some point, you'll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going 'well, you know.'"

We're going to see a dramatic upswing in climate refugees, and at some point we'll all close our borders as we gather around the last bits of agricultural land that's still viable and not been paved over. As the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.

Hallam takes on both sides of the political spectrum:

"Conservatives are the bad guys and liberals are the bad guys who pretend to be good guys, and the latter are the worse, which is why historically they are held in more contempt. They knew, but they did nothing. As Martin Luther King said in a letter from a Birmingham jail, it's the moderates that repress, distract, sabotage the resistance to injustice."

I think they all know. I can't believe that all those conservatives see the floods and fires and still don't think something is happening to our climate and connect the dots. I could be wrong, but I believe they're more corrupt than naive. Ford, for instance, is stripping the province for parts, and lining his pockets so he and his family will be well protected for the coming collapse. The liberals are open about knowing, and then don't do anything substantial to change things, for sure. Even the NDP advocate for more pipelines. They said we're not ready for the big transition, but that transition's coming, ready or not.  

The fact that people largely don't say that climate change isn't happening, or even that it's not human caused, because both of those have been largely debunked, shows that it's not ignorance but greed that fuels them. The new denialism from those with ties to fossil fuels now say that climate solutions don't work, climate science is unreliable, and climate impacts aren't that bad. We're all just alarmists! 

Hallam writes,

"This trial was not about 'the right to protest.' It is not about 'a cause,' 'an issue.' It's civil resistance against the biggest death project in human history, the greatest ever act of criminality. This trial was an experiment with the truth. . . . We continue to speak even when the judges shouted at us to stop, had us dragged from the dock, banged up in jail. This is what evil looks like. It's what it does. And it's just the beginning. Integrity at the present time is resistance. . . . Integrity is a hard path. Your ego has to burn in a fire that destroys its desire to control. Integrity is humiliation, failure, being forgotten. As the greatest soul of the 20th century, Simone Vale [sic - Simone Weil], said: When you have an important decision to make, choose the most costly option." 

Simone Weil is one of the greatest souls to have ever lived! 

This is all about caring more about larger things than yourself, and that's not something most of us were taught in our current society. Instead, we've learned to laugh at that lesson, to scoff at people who want to protect others, who bike instead of driving and don't fly on vacation and avoid eating meat or buying anything they don't need. We've been trained to see them as weirdos because environmentalists are very bad for profits. 

But so is climate change, as we'll soon find out. 

Our Current Consumerist Culture is Doomed AF

Business as usual means we're risking our lives for conveniences we didn't expect to have when I was young, and we pretty happily lived without. It's not a call to go back to the stone age, just fifty years or so. 

In my house growing up, we rarely drove places despite being almost 5k from the closest mall. As kids, if we wanted to go anywhere, we could bus, bike, or walk. My parents lived their entire lives without ever being in an airplane. That's a luxury of excess, they said. That entire Aristotelean ethics is gone now. "Waste not, want not" was successfully drilling into our little heads. Now we'd rather buy new than get something fixed.

We Can't Unknow What We Know

 I occasionally get anon comments telling me, in one way or another, to stop writing about Covid and/or climate change. 

It's really bizarre to me. I mean, I get that people don't want to hear about the crap going on in the world, and I get that a lot of people don't believe any of this is true despite lots of citations from many reputable sources. But what baffles me is that this is a teeny-tiny, little blog. They'd have to really go looking for this content just to tell me that I'm wasting my time writing it. That seems like a whole lot of effort with no result since I largely ignore them and they could easily just ignore what I write. You would think people had better things to do with their time.

Water Wars

There's an extreme water crisis in Mexico City right now. They could run out of water within weeks. 

From Peter Dynes of MEER, 

"'Day Zero' is counting down to June 26th. The whole country is in drought conditions, and huge parts are in extreme drought. A society can't run without water, and that could become a reality very soon in some regions. This is due to the drying up of the reserves of the Cutzamala system."

Some commenters mentioned how Coke, Pepsi, and Nestlé have moved into areas with weaker political defences in order to suck their aquifers dry to sell their own water back to them. (That includes Aberfoyle, Ontario).  Other point out that they will have no choice but to migrate further north. Maude Barlow predicted that the next wars will be over water, and Canada will be the next Iraq a good 16 years ago in the documentary FLOW: For the Love of Water. 

"The rich will drink; the poor will die. 

Adam McKay added,

"Most populated city in North America, and there's very little coverage. I never imagined the disconnect between news and reality could get this wide. And I made Don't Look Up." 

I watched Furiosa yesterday. Not nearly as good as Fury Road. But both are a bit frightening in their depiction of a future that's feeling more and more possible. We're not coping by massing together in order to help one another like one would hope when times get bleak. We're at a point where hospital staff will refuse to do the bare minimum to prevent harm to babies by wearing a mask, and people are going gangbusters to burn up every bit of fuel flying around to see stolen stuff behind glass in museums on the other side of the world when we could just look at it all online (or maybe give it back), and to develop AI, which is something we didn't think we needed just yesterday, which is using up a ton of fresh water! It's all pretty fucked up. 

And then there's this:

Billions and Billions

Would you rather have the convenience of being seen quickly at a local ER that was funded to stay open OR the convenience to buy mixed drinks at select grocery stores? Such a hard choice!!

Our public, taxpayer funds are going to companies outside Ontario so we can get booze easier, sooner. Brittlestar did the best video explainer:

The biggest issue is the money it's costing to open up August 1st instead of letting the contract run its course to December 31, 2025. It just means that supermarkets currently selling beer will be allowed to also sell larger cases and mixed cocktail drinks. It will extend to some convenience stores in September. 

Giving Up or Letting Go

In September 2010, John Holdren, Harvard professor and Obama's science adviser, gave a speech on climate change arguing that people aren't aware enough of the ways we're affected by the changing climate: availability of water, productive agriculture, fisheries, forestry (paper and lumber), and the spread of disease. 

Almost four years earlier, in a New York Times article, he said, 

"We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We're going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be."

Some people think we're too late for significant mitigation, and we need to work on adaptation. Rupert Read takes a page from Vaclav Havel: 

"To change the narrative from the evidently-failed 'Yes we can' to 'Can we please just face up to how badly we've failed, and admit where we really are now' might sound to some like 'giving up'. It is the very opposite of giving up. For the energy which will become available once we stop rather desperately staving off grief, depression, despair at the state of our world and the extent of our common failure, the energy that then becomes available to us is incalculably huge. . . . emotional power that is latent within us all, but held back by a dam of fake optimism. . . . We have to acknowledge what must be let go of, such as hopes for a smooth transition and of staying within the climatic safe zone. It all begins with admitting our incapacity. . . . For what you are then picturing is the game being changed. Soft denial being punctured. The media and political leaders unable to hold back the tide. . . . Havel wrote brilliantly about the power that anyone can touch and become by naming the truth, and confessing their own incapacity to act directly on it so as to change it sufficiently. This power of the powerless strips legitimacy away from failed ideologies, false dreams." 

There's a small but real danger that some people will let the grief in and then be paralyzed by it. Some psychologists over the last century have referred to depression as being stuck in grief. And this isn't just grief over a loved one, but grief over all the potential for loved ones, the secure and comfortable futures of children and grandchildren, and all the many, many amazing plants and animals in collapsing ecosystems. 

But if we can get to the other side of that, to an authentic place that is able to acknowledge the impermanence of it all anyway, then our task isn't to hope to save any species, but just to do our very best each day to care, to offer help, to teach, and to love while doing as little harm as possible in the very short time we have here without any expectation of success or completion. 

From the Tao Te Ching (ch.29 - Stephen Mitchell trans.):

Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it....
The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

And from Pirke Avot:

"You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." 

It's the same message from Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gospels and the Stoics and Epicureans and Plato: Act rightly today without clinging to the fruits of your labour. I think we need to hear it over and over again because it's so hard to learn!  

AI - Stealing Voices, Artwork, and Water

AI is an environmental issue. 

Microsoft-backed OpenAI requires water - massive amounts of the limited resource:

"pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowas to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing. . . . Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research. . . . ChatGPT gulps up 500 millilitres of water every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions. . . . Google reported a 20% growth in water use in the same period." 

Check out what's happening in Mexico City right now. Taps are going dry for hours a day, water is brown, and key reservoirs are running dry. 

Last February an article in Forbes addressed this same topic:

"1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to water, and a total of 2.7 billion find water scarce for at least one month of the year. Inadequate sanitation is also a problem for 2.4 billion people. . . . At the same time, our world is racing ahead to advance AI into every aspect of our world. With the rise of generative AI, companies have significantly raised their water usage, sparking concerns about the sustainability of such practices amid global freshwater scarcity and climate change challenges. Tech giants have significantly increased their water needs for cooling data centers due to the escalating demand for online services and generative AI products. AI server cooling consumes significant water, with data centers using cooling towers and air mechanisms to dissipate heat, causing up to 9 liters of water to evaporate per kWh of energy used."

Transformation of the Self

Over thirty years ago I was in an on-again-off-again relationship that I just couldn't shake. After months of a variety of attempts of different types of therapies, I lucked into a therapist who walked me through a version of the Gestalt exercise of talking to a chair that ended my longing for this guy on a dime.

The exercise had me reimagine many ways he had enraged me, bringing all that to the surface. Then it raised any guilt I had around my own actions towards him, sadness around missing him, and finally ending with celebrating what I learned from him. It took just an hour, and I left feeling completely finished, excised of any clinging or craving, and able to effortlessly say "No thanks!" to his next late-night phone call. Pairing words and actions with emotions in a contained and structured time and space, that gives some order to the chaos, might do next to nothing -- but it might help to move through a difficult transition. I was so impressed with this power hour that I went to grad school to study ritual work. Gestalt psychotherapy is a far cry from cultural anthropology, but I perceived a connection to rites of passage that help neophytes transition from one state to another.

I recognize the cringe-factor in all of this, but it's worked for thousands of years to take children into adulthood, and we've kept at it when marrying and burying, so there's likely something useful in the process. And it feels like we need something transformative more than ever.

Self Organizing Criticality: Slowly, then All at Once

 Alex Walker, Climate Finance Program Manager at Environmental Defence, wrote about spotlighting and mythbusting this week's government studies on climate change and finance:

"The Senate Banking commmittee had a study on Thursday of Senator Rosa Galvaz's amazing Climate-Aligned Finance Act. I wouldn't call all the witnesses experts on climate finance. Let's bust some of the less-than-expert myths that were said. 

Gina Pappano, CEO of an anti-divestment organization, who is so unaware of climate change that she asked Suncor to scrap their net-zero plan - which they rejected. If Suncor believe in climate change more than you, it's an issue. 

Some great quotes include “energy is our economy…our economy is energy”. Seems to have missed the stat that Canada’s largest economic sector is real estate.
* “Investment [in oil and gas] leads to emissions reductions because investment leads to innovations”.  Lie. Reports found $10 billion+ loans made to O+G companies to reduce emissions, but every single one increased production. Investment = more oil and gas.
* “This bill would undermine the Canadian economy itself”. Also false. Not sure she actually read the bill. CAFA is designed to protect the Canadian economy against the systemic physical and transition risks of climate change.
* Finally “Nobody is doing any costing on what net-zero means to our economy”. False! Extensive modeling exists on the cost-savings of reaching net-zero over letting climate change run rampant. Climate change will cost Canada $5.5 trillion by 2100. Net-zero looking a lot cheaper now, huh?

Government Provoked Global Suicide

Governments around the world have discussed solutions to climate change, but not enough are seriously acting to reduce this threat.

From environmentalist Stephen Barlow:

I'd far rather not have to spell out uncomfortable truths, and I have no agenda, other than to stop humanity committing global suicide by ignoring the seriousness of the climate and ecological emergency. If our governments had done what they'd promised to do, after these UN Environment Summits I've highlighted, there would be no need for me to spell any of this out. But the thing is, they didn't take any meaningful action to change direction. In essence, our governments have not merely carried on with Business as Usual BaU, as if the climate and ecological emergency did not exist, but they are planning to reinforce this globally suicidal policy for the foreseeable future. Hence, why we have a crisis. It's not that the things I'm saying are extreme, it's our governments, which are pursuing radical extremist policy, putting our civilization on course for global suicide and an unliveable future. It's not even just me saying that, but António Guterres [Secretary-General to the UN].  

No Going Back

Conflict, climate, and covid are showing us the worst of ourselves, but it might be what we need to find our collective humanity.

Tiberius wrote:

"The old world is no longer dying, it is dead. There is no going back to how things were after this genocide has been live-streamed in high definition and Technicolour for the world to see and our leaders to endorse. The bloodthirsty status quo has been revealed to too many people, and some cats will simply not go back into their bags. 

I know what the inside of skulls look like now. I know how bodies burn and how limbs come off. I know that children never look more devastatingly innocent than when they’ve been killed by a vicious army using the world’s most advanced weaponry. I know this because I’ve seen so many of them now—so many more than the sum of all the living children I will likely ever know. I know how much pain a person can bear and still exist in this world—just ask any Palestinian still alive. There are so many images I will never forget that everything outside of Gaza seems as meaningless as what colour socks I wear. 

Climate Misery and Hope

 Despair limits future actions, but knowledge is power. We must know and act in order to stave off despair.

A depressing thread followed by an uplifting video today:

Writer Matthew Todd wrote, 

"Sooner or later we're going to have to face the reality that conservatism and capitalism are killing us. It's not a debate. It's a fact. It's literally happening right now in front of our eyes. If you can't see it, you either don't understand it, or you are intentionally lying to yourself. It seems that we would rather all die than face this terrible inconvenient truth." 

That provoked environmentalist Stephen Barlow to respond at length:

"We're in a dire climate and ecological emergency, which is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization unless we urgently change direction, and hardly anyone realizes the seriousness. It is now being framed by those committed to business as usual (BaU), as if climate activists are overreacting, catastrophizing. No, the situation is far worse and far more dire than most could imagine, as Peter Kalmus has been trying to point out. We find ourselves in a dire situation. Yet only a small proportion of people really understand how dire the situation really is, and most are in some level of denial. How, do you discuss this situation, when most people, to some degree, are in some form of active denial?

Climate Projections and Anticipatory Grief

Media aren't free to report on it honestly, and politicians won't act on it. How can we possibly remain optimistic?

Matthew Todd wrote about the possibility that the Gulf Stream could collapse in the next few years based on an study in Science Advances:

"The day has come when the Daily Mail is reporting climate change more accurately (on one story) than the BBC who have not even reported this story, despite it being real, and being the number one lead story on CNN on Friday. The BBC seems absolutely unwilling to tell its viewers the full magnitude of the threat we face - because of a mixture of political interference and a lack of editorial interest and understanding. For the still stupid: This is how the richest people on Earth conned you. Facts: NASA, Oxford, Met Office, Margaret Thatcher, and Stephen Hawking. Then the oil PR campaign against the facts. Same story from The Guardian." 

It looks like our reality has finally hit a high enough level of clickbait outrageousness to be carried by tabloids, but now it's too far gone for mainstream news.