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Here's an interesting piece by Jonathan Porritt, one of the UK's leading environmentalists, on why it makes little sense at this point for scientists to play down the ongoing climate disaster for political reasons and in order to get "taken seriously."
I tend to agree with his main thrust. I'm becoming sick and tired of all these efforts to appear politically correct and willing to compromise, in the face of what is actually the most unreasoned, unscientific, illogical, corrupt, and downright immoral movement of recent human history: organized climate denial.
The time for compromise may be running out.
Indeed, how can you compromise with a lie?
In twenty or thirty years' time we'll be talking about climate denialism the way we currently talk about communism and fascism -- how even smart, educated people were duped or soothed by the lies and manipulation of the apparatchiks, and how the whole thing was really run as a racket by a shady cabal of Stalinesque insiders -- except of course that these insiders aren't foreign idealogues and Homburg-hatted thugs, but rather the leading lights of major American corporations and, saddest yet, the rank and file of one of America's historically great political parties. Followed deliriously, of course, by an army of monstrously ignorant, ranting, drooling Internet trolls -- modern day "Orcs".
And don't we need the imagination of a Tolkien or an Orwell to simply grasp the full hideous meaning of it all? Billions of humans will have their lives impoverished, shortened, and made infinitely more stressful by what will happen to the planet's climate.
And not what may happen. What will happen. The amount of uncertainty about whether or not warming is underway, about what it will do to the planet's weather, and about whether it's happening too fast for human systems to deal with, was reduced to a irrefutably irrelevant statistic long ago.
The danger is, of course, despair.
I'm not particularly prone to despair myself. One of the special advantages of a military career, particularly one in military rescue, is of course that the training and the practice drives you to your physical and mental limits. You become fully familiar, even intimate, with the feeling of despair and learn to manage it.
As you get older, you may lose the physical prowess, but you keep the mental ability.
I was reminded of all this last night when one of my advisees and mentees came to class to give his internship presentation. Young Andy was in both the British Royal National LifeBoat Institution
and the US Coastguard before coming to Unity College to take a degree in Conservation Law Enforcement. He's had a lot of experience with Outward Bound, and made his first year as a Lead Instructor for Outward Bound into his required Unity College internship, which I have to say was a unique but ideal combination, because Outward Bound trains its lead instructors very well indeed.
His well-humored and humane presentation reminded me of the philosophy and reasoning behind the development of Outward Bound and its founder Kurt Hahn -- it was to learn to deal with despair and to manage it, to save lives in the Atlantic convoy system during World War II. (It also reminded me of what good human beings Unity College students turn out to be. Andy is a great credit to us all, although we can't take all the credit, with so many other great institutions in his background.)
Outward Bound works by pushing young people to and through what they think are their physical and mental limits, so that they experience the depths of despair, and the heights of victory over despair, all in a controlled and safe environment, if you can imagine.
If we are to survive the monstrous and fully avoidable idiocy we call climate change, we'll have to call on these old but trusted techniques for dealing with despair again, and again. Read Hahn's Wikipedia page, if you need a starting point. Of course, I've always loved the educational principles he used, especially the one about rescue service.
It's funny how you get so involved in the minor struggles of each day that you sometimes forget what your life has been all about. After literally years of working in the wilderness, these ideas were a huge part of why I came to Unity College all those years ago. I got so focused on climate change and the energy solution to climate change that I lost a little bit of my old focus on experiential education.
It may be time to move back in the other direction and in fact bring the two back together. After all, we're going to have to learn anew how to deal with despair.
A poet, nearly a hundred years ago now, may have figured a lot of it out for us. (Although the sexism must today be edited out. I'll let you do that part.)
If (Rudyard Kipling)
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
Part of the purpose of this blog is of course to watch the environmental news and post links and comments for students, faculty, staff, alumni and external visitors. The other purpose is to create connections between these groups, particularly in relation to our education, research and service work in sustainability.
So far I've refrained from commenting on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn't for the want of news and concern. Obviously the media abound with news, and also with concern about the situation, perhaps too much of both. Manufactured concern is part of the political process in this country and most other democracies these days, and the mainstream media tend to offer up a distorted mirror to the people, just in effect parroting various viewpoints and sound bites. And from this we're supposed to come up with enough information to participate, so enough information to vote, for instance. Obviously it rarely works well, and a lot of folks have ideas and opinions that are just plain unsound. Where's the real news in that?
I've been unwittingly complicit in some of this. Reporters call or email me from time to time to get information, and like most academics, I usually oblige. It's hard not to give out information when that's your job. But the results rarely feel like I've made a contribution to sound discourse.
Two recent examples stand out in terms of how little they helped with rational discourse: Before the spill occurred, a reporter from California spent nearly 40 minutes with me eliciting information about oil drilling potential on land in the lower 48. Like most workers who have any knowledge about the situation, I directed him to consider gas exploration, by far the greater part of terrestrial drilling in the lower 48, particularly coal bed methane, and also gave some technical details about directional drilling as it's used in methane extraction. Turns out that what he really wanted was a sound bite saying that the reason the earlier Obama drilling direction didn't include California's coast was purely political. It was and is, of course, but the guy clearly wanted that line and only that line and the minute he got someone with an energy-related PhD to say it on the record, all the other ideas, knowledge and considerations I gave him, which of course were considerable, fell by the wayside.
And a BBC reporter recently, based in India, spent another forty-fifty minutes on the telephone with me to write an article evaluation airborne wind turbines. Forty-fifty minutes included a lot of discussion about the inherent physical limitations of such ideas: Betz law and the Power Law, and so on. Airborne turbines are very unlikely to produce significant amounts of energy for these very basic technical reasons, and any reasoned person would wish to know that. Kinetic energy extraction is inherently based on moving large masses, and fixed-wing flight, powered or otherwise, depends on reducing the ratio of mass to airfoil surface. This is an inherent contradiction that would limit airborne turbine output. And I explained this, of course, at length. But part of the job of the press is to boost ideas on behalf of entrepreneurs, and in this case partisan Indian entrepreneurs, so what appeared in the piece was one quote on tether lines and safety. I expect some poor fool who doesn't know physics very well will invest, and Indians in general may feel for a moment like their country has more of a stake in "the new green economy," which I think might be a good thing for them and everyone else, but come on! We're not going to get there by ignoring the laws of physics.
I expect that every reporter in the country that is assigned to the Gulf is similarly looking for a unique angle and a line or two to do some political work on behalf of the reporter or the outlet's own biases, despite the scientific and technical facts.
I'm not really sure I want to contribute to that. And as an educator and an academic working in what has come to be known as sustainability, do I have anything useful to contribute?
In a word: perspective.
If we were being serious about things and really trying to solve the problem, we'd be terribly concerned about the oil spill, but we'd be much more concerned about how, as a society, we got to the point whereby we passively accept the obviously unsound economics of drilling in 5,000 foot deep water for a dirty nasty product that will definitely help us get around and heat homes and run factories, but that will also pollute our skies, add to political destabilization all around the planet, and that is contributing to climate change.
Clearly the costs outweigh the benefits. And that's the greater problem, from which we are distracted by all the media hype.
How can I say this and still consider myself an environmentalist? Shouldn't I be jumping on the bandwagon for all it's worth, like the leaders of the so called "Group of Ten." ? Well, I'm a scientist and policy analyst first and foremost, not an environmentalist. And I know something about the science and economics.
Knowledge is power. In this case the power to avoid despair.
First the ecology: The Gulf itself will get fairly dirty and polluted for a while, and some of that pollution may even spread out of the Gulf. It's unlikely, because of the way that ocean currents work, to make it to Maine, although some local Maine journalists looking for an angle have suggested that. And the situation in the Gulf itself will eventually recover, ecologically speaking. Particularly the deep water oil plumes. The chances for oil at that depth to break down rapidly are actually much greater than on the surface, just because of the kinds of critters that live in that environment that eat this kind of stuff. On the surface things will take a while, but time and tide, weather and shoveling, will take care of much of the pollution.
As to the capping of the well, it would be better to get it capped right away but if that is difficult or impossible, the flow of oil will eventually stop by itself or slow to a ecologically meaningless trickle. Even if BP doesn't succeed in capping the well or drilling the relief well. The current buzz in the media seems designed to promote despair, that this will never stop.
Does the press honestly believe that oil wellhead blow-outs, "gushers," run for ever?
If they did, we wouldn't be worried about oil depletion. (Although I'd be terrified for our climate.)
So, if dear reader, I can get you for a moment to assume that what needs to be done, and physically can be done, by the government or BP, is being done, might we consider things in greater perspective? I tend to expect that this is close to the truth anyway. And can we disregard for a minute the local and regional short term impacts, which I concede are awful for the locals?
What is the real long term national and international significance of the oil spill? What should we really learn from all this?
The first thing I would say, is we learn that ordinary people and the media lack knowledge about energy and this is hurting us very badly. We need to know much more, as a society, about what energy really is and where it comes from. So we can make some better decisions at local, regional, statewide and national levels.
If we did, we'd be able to notice, for instance, that we can save energy, even oil, quite easily with basic conservation measures such as weatherization, insulation or using programmable thermostats. Here in Maine, we might save up to 20% of the oil-fired heat load of thousands of our houses just by fitting $42 thermostats.
And there are dozens of examples of other energy savings.
The next thing we should know is that we're surrounded by useful, clean energy all the time, if we would only care to use it instead of oil and coal. Sunshine, wind, geothermal heat, even in Maine, in winter. Careful modern solar building design, careful deployment of distributed wind and solar power, use of ground source heat pumps, moderate use of biomass, and sensible financing of all of the above, can reduce our need for fossil energy by a massive percentage, and with the development of a reasoned base load technology such as thorium "trailer" reactors, as well as electrical and hybrid vehicle systems, we can be done with oil completely, should we wish.
Of course, we'll have to teach some science to some people who currently don't know very much science, ordinary people, politicians, and particularly some of these journalists, to succeed in this. And we'll have to make some strategic decisions about who gets to bear the impact on energy extraction. Will we for instance, have coal mines destroying mountaintops in West Virgina, or wind turbines on mountaintops in Maine?
This is asking a lot of reason and politcs, I know, but I think we are up to it. A good kick in the pants, as this oil spill undoubtedly is, will help. The bottom line, of course, is that as long as we are willing to pay $60,70,80 or more dollars a barrel for oil, our ignorance is expensive. And BP, like any business, will take risks to win those profits.
On the sidelines of all this reality in the "reality-based community," our media is becoming a huge hindrance to discerning reality.
I'm really, really, starting to detest the modern journalist.
The only thing about current journalism that gives me any hope for our ability to reason out energy problems is that the Internet now offers a way for folks with knowledge and ideas to bypass these so-called professional journalists. Such as this blog.
Someone has to say this, but it's not going to be popular:
In the ongoing Greek tragedy of climate denialism, it seems more than just merely ironic that the states suffering the most from extreme weather, such as Texas with hurricanes and drought, or Missouri and Oklahoma with tornadoes, are those that return climate denialists to power year after year.
While here we sit in New England, relatively safe from such things, having returned relatively sensible politicians for year after year.
The only word I can think of to describe the feelings we have as a far-away witness of such things is macabre, but even that doesn't begin to describe the depths of futility and despair that come up. And this is only the beginning of this "bitter cup." There's more, much more and much worse to come.
This all sounds callous of me, I know. I'm not unaware of the horrific tragedy, believe me. I'm an emergency responder and so would be having some of the hardest working days of my life right now if I lived in or close to Moore, Oklahoma. I have a very good understanding, from first experience, of what it must feel like to be a firefighter or paramedic right now in Moore.
When the best that can be done for folk in a pitiful state is triage, then it's time for pity and mercy.
I was taught to run triage, as part of my military medical training. Triage means that you sort the casualties logically into three groups: Those who will survive untreated, those who will almost certainly die if treated or not, and those who will live if you treat them. It's a method for economizing on scarce medical resources in a mass casualty situation.
When your shift ends, if it ends, all you will be able to do is weep. I've been there.
So, Senator Inhofe, where's the pity and mercy?
Because this is only the beginning. These kinds of things will happen more and more.
Whereas, if we reduced climate emissions beginning now, and found some reasonable way to get some of that carbon sequestered out of the atmosphere, if we were lucky enough to get CO2 down below 350 ppm, we would almost certainly have far fewer such events.
I think the good senator probably thought that this climate denial thing was a political game that he could play according to the normal political rules.
Here's the first of what seems very likely to be a series of posts about the news this week that the West Antarctic ice sheet is on the verge of collapsing. This is one of several tipping points that climate scientists have pointed to over the years and that has been a feature of my classes on climate change, including the previously-required third year "Human Ecology" class.
(The others, of course, are the arctic albedo and arctic methane feedbacks, both of which also seem to be well under way.)
The first connection I want to make is to this editorial here by Eric Rignot at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Rignot, quite sensibly, asks in near-despair "what next?" The time to act is now, he says, and yet rightly implies that climate scientists have no power to do so.
Our politicians, who do have the power, are grievously irresponsible, but the greatest opprobrium is to be reserved for the Koch brothers and their paid denialists.
Ordinary people, kept ignorant by the press and the denialists, have no idea just how much grief is now stored up as a result of these events.
Most of the news is about western places like Miami, which will disappear, but whose residents have resources to cope, the backing of a great nation, and inland, upland territory into which to retreat.
The place I'm most worried about is Bangladesh, a country of millions, most of whom are living on the global poverty line, a third or more of whose territory will disappear beneath the sea, possibly politically destabilizing the entire Indian subcontinent.
It will take a Churchillian act of leadership on the part of some as-yet unidentified politician or group of politicians to produce the action Rignot requires
Will it also take the loss of territory, a Rhineland, an anschluss, a Czechoslvakia, and finally a Poland?
I know mental illness isn't usually one of my topics, but to be honest, the worries I normally post about are enough to drive anyone to depression.
But I did once spend a fairly long stint in a past life working with troubled youth as a house counselor and adventure therapy instructor, so I do have some experience and training in this regard. And I have posted on the problems of despair and of mental health approaches to reducing consumerism.
I'm also very interested in Winston Churchill and have a large collection of books on the subject. I'm attracted to his very colorful personality, probably the most important human being in 20th century history. But his was also a very complex and multifaceted personality. His warnings about the increasing threat from Hitler in the 1930s, the era of appeasement, remind me of current events in climate denial. This took incredible vision and stoicism. And he was able to maintain outwardly high morale and indeed pure defiance in the face of the Nazi threat in 1940. All this, despite occasionally slipping into what he called his "black dog."
You can't help but be fascinated and even sympathetic. Some people manage to do great things in spite of mental health difficulties.
So I was immediately interested when a friend posted about the "Black Dog Institute," an Australian non-profit that helps people suffering from bipolar and mood disorders, and depression, using expeditions and other adventure therapy approaches, named of course after Churchill's "black dog".
I'd never heard of it.
Very cool. Almost makes me want to become depressed.
I saw you speak in Belfast when Waterfall Arts had their symposium with Pliny Fisk. I am a writer/editor for XXXX and because I have a degree in landscape architecture I usually get assigned the stories with that kind of slant. As you may know, a couple of weeks ago we printed Tedd Benson's commencement address on our cover and many people were captivated by his Rules for Living. Our publisher wants to follow up on the story by having me drive to Unity and do something on the current Unity House construction. But I feel < and this is strictly MY feeling < that the project is very hyped up and I honestly am struggling with finding the sustainability of a building that uses five tractor trailers to deliver its components hundreds of miles away. There doesn't seem to be much future in that. I also don't see anything about how it will be heated, a major energy issue in Unity.
So, before I call Mark Tardiff and drive out there, I was wondering if you'd give me some of your ideas on this project. Despite my RISD degree, I'm much closer to your sensibilities, I believe when it comes to sustainable building and while I appreciate the idea of what they're trying to do with flexibility and use of HVAC systems, I am having trouble seeing how this can be as sustainable as it needs to be when oil reaches $400 a barrel.
If you can reply to this, I'd appreciate it It would be strictly for my information and off the record.
It gave me food for thought, and I always appreciate that. And, if you like, this can be on the record. (There's no secret plan for sustainability.)
I'm going to say this as gently as I can, but it was a hard-minded question (my favorite kind) and so I know you won't mind if I give you a hard-minded answer.
I think we might be confusing "sustainability" with "de-urbanization and de-industrialization" here. Do you assume sustainability means "back-to-the-land". If so, I think you're plain wrong.
What this question really implies, or the question it begs, is, do you assume sustainability means doing away with factories and shipping of factory goods, and the towns and cities they serve?
I don't.
Factories, and the towns and cities that serve and depend on them are inherently more comfortable, more safe, and certainly capable of being as energy efficient as otherwise isolated self-sustainable farms and homesteads. They can also produce essential stuff, like housing or hospital equipment, as easily as they make nasty useless ticky-tacky. I think we will have to find ways of running factories on renewable energy, on sunlight, and ways of recycling the physical raw materials embodied in pretty much all consumer goods at the end of their life back into useful new goods. But I think these are actually questions of renewable energy production and of industrial process design. Even the recycling industry is an industry, using industrial processes and engineering.
I think we should keep industry around for the benefits it gives, but cut back on it for the sake of reducing its downsides. Prefabricating housing, the industrial case-in-point can be more energy and materially efficient than building housing on-site. I also think we might want to begin to get the population to go down, so the burden of running industrial civilization falls on a smaller part of the planet every decade.
So my overall understanding or vision of sustainability is not "back-to-the-land" but a reinvented industrial urban civilization, backed by a flourishing and more localized agriculture and forestry, and obviously a plan to reduce numbers by encouraging (not forcing) folks to not have quite so many kids per family.
Bensonwood experimented a bit in this direction by making a prefabricated building using renewable energy and recyclable materials. The building also has a longer useful life, which helps a good deal, and reduces the lifetime energy consumption, which is much more than the shipping energy consumption.
(Think about it: It takes a few hundred gallons of oil to ship an efficient, prefabricated, non oil-powered building, while a badly designed, on site-built, oil-powered building might burn millions of gallons of oil during it's lifetime.)
Although I didn't have much to do with it, I thought this was a useful experiment in moving industrial housing production towards sustainability, and certainly a high-quality finished product.
On ticky-tacky in general, I think we might want to even keep some factories that make otherwise wasteful consumer goods. Some at least.
I don't like much cheap plastic ticky tacky much myself, but I don't want to get in the business of saying who can have it and who can't. That seems a little totalitarian.
In this kind of theory, I'm pretty much a Dalian thinker, which is not surprising, since I was a Daly graduate student. You can read Daly and Cobb's 1994 second edition of "For the Common Good" to get the academic theory, if you are interested in going that far.
I will say I do enjoy practicing the "back-to-the-land" theory of sustainability, like that found in the works of the Nearings, for instance, in my home activities. But I wouldn't confuse that notion with, or advocate it, for the entire population. That would be unsafe and unwise, I think. I just do it for fun, for exercise, and for the pleasure of growing my own food.
It's also my family's plan B. If we don't fix industrial civilization on time and on schedule, it will fall apart and then we will have to do without it. But a lot of people will die or get hurt in that process. I tend to wonder about my friend who emigrated to New Zealand, or instance, to set up an intentional community. That seemed very selfish and non-communitarian, when I think we can save this current community called America, and save much of most other countries, and the people in them, if we rally. I prefer we fix it all properly and on schedule.
Regular readers will remember that I occasionally depart from my normal diet of student activities, technical bulletins and climate science news to spot a few somewhat random paint drops on a wider canvas of ideas. I'm full of personal contradictions in this respect: patriotic English ex-patriot, pacifistic drill sergeant ex-serviceman conscientious objector, Quaker militarist, and on and on, so I sometimes wonder if I follow too many threads at once for my own sanity. At other times, I feel that if I try to carry only one idea at once and concentrate on it, I might go crazy. So I like to have two or three pots on the boil at any one time and don't care very much if the flavors clash or seem irreconcilable to other chefs.
For this reason, I like Orwell. Mr. Eric Blair, to give him his real name, somehow managed to reconcile many of the same threads, and in his time boiled a lot of the same pots.
At this point in the development of political ideas in the English-speaking world, we might fess up to a few Orwellian contradictions of our own:
One in particular I'm thinking about, American capitalist or free-market political economic theory, has somehow quietly expired of its own internal intellectual weakness in the last six months, to be replaced by, well, nothing much, as yet.
It was always too simple, too uncomplicated a creed, with none of these eternal internal human contradictions.
And now it's gone. Good riddance. But what will replace it?
For a generation and a half, since the Reagan revolution, the English-speaking world was somehow incrementally bludgeoned out of any reliance on the state as an organizing force in commerce. Keep private industry and international trade free of the trammels of social control, we were told by the likes of various Friedmans, Thatchers, Bushes, Clintons, and Blairs in succession, and the swelling tidal force of private exertion and production would trickle down to lift all boats. We would all be rich eventually. Capitalism could succeed so brilliantly, if only it were allowed to, that even the homeless and mentally deranged would somehow be trickled up to become owners of capital and property themselves.
And to give the insane this sterling opportunity to thrive, Mr. Reagan promptly freed many of them from their publicly-funded asylums and put them on the street, where many of them remain, struggling manfully to beg in the best capitalist fashion.
Just give it a little time. Say, 28 years or so, to do its work.
But, to let everyone get so wonderfully rich, we would have to tolerate the sight of some of us getting almost impossibly rich. A single family, the Gates, for instance, or Google's founders, might have tens of billions. Their just reward for being so incredibly inventive.
So when these ideas had had their 28 years, and there still were homeless in the streets, and all of our factory production had been exported to Mexico and China, away from even the timid remaining ghosts of our unions, and we still somehow still got ourselves into a recession, what then happened?
I don't think we quite know yet. But somehow, the managers of all this capital, much of which is now overseas, the technical experts who ran the exchanges and the banks and the insurance companies and mutual funds, when it came to the crunch, were revealed most definitely not to be Friedmanites. They suddenly wanted some socialism, a little intervention on their own behalf. Never mind that they were ridiculously better off than the homeless beggars they walked by each day on the streets of New York, San Fransisco, even London, who still lacked decent asylums and health care. And so the governments in all the major English-speaking countries, desperate in their economic illiteracy and naïvity (because honest decent questioning political economy, the subject matter of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Dickens, and Orwell has been so out of fashion these twenty-eight years that it hasn't even been taught in the universities), rolled over and borrowed millions more of other countries' money, much of it Chinese, to keep them in business.
The only thing we're debating is who gets their bailout first!
And now we're waiting to see what sort of political economist Mr. Obama will be. Will the bailout and handouts go just to the businesses, or will we get a new New Deal and Great Society, a new system of safety nets and recovery organizations? How green will it all be in the end? Will we really get on with this project of stopping emissions and shifting to a new energy economy, or will we pay mere lip service and instead keep the old one propped up as long as we can?
It's an unformed, unscripted moment. No-one quite knows how it might all work out. We're hopeful, I think. But not very knowledgeable. And still impressively naïve in political economy, to the point where I'd give fifty-fifty odds as to whether or not we'll be fleeced, the great mass of us essentially taking on a massive 24.9% APR credit card to the tune of trillions to keep a very few of us in business, while the coal and oil companies set up an energy economy that will lead to almost certain catastrophic climate change.
A new holocaust awaits for all of us, if some of us can't see these things sufficiently clearly and presciently.
During a similar unformed, unscripted moment in history, writing in his wartime best-selling pamphlet, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, Orwell looked to the future in a clear-eyed unsentimental way. He correctly predicted the wartime system of political economy that Churchill and Atlee and the war cabinet would find purely necessary. He understood the few seemingly tenuous but massively strong threads that held the disparate British class system together, and how the whole thing could be used against fascism. He even predicted in its entirety the Labour platform of 1945 that would win the election that year, junking even the wartime hero Churchill, and founding the first truly democratic welfare state in history.
It's worth a fresh read for those of us seeking a lesson in political economic writing applied to holocausts.
American should understand that when Orwell wrote, there was still massive doubt as to where America's loyalties would lie. The German-American Bund, Lindbergh and the Isolationists were working freely to subvert Congress and winning. Even Lend-Lease, just recently begun, was weak and massively controversial.
As Orwell wrote, most Americans honestly thought that Europe could be left to Hitler, and Britain's fate was none of their business.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Wannsee Conference would soon be underway and the Final Solution established, intended as a permanent program in the Thousand Year Reich. After the feeble, the Jews, the homosexuals, the gypsies, the Slavs, who would be next?
Orwell knew. as he wrote at the time,
"If Hitler wins this war he will consolidate his rule over Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and if his armies have not been too greatly exhausted beforehand, he will wrench vast territories from Soviet Russia. He will set up a graded caste-society in which the German Herrenvolk (‘master race’ or ‘aristocratic race’) will rule over Slavs and other lesser peoples whose job it will be to produce low-priced agricultural products. He will reduce the coloured peoples once and for all to outright slavery. The real quarrel of the Fascist powers with British imperialism is that they know that it is disintegrating. Another twenty years along the present line of development, and India will be a peasant republic linked with England only by voluntary alliance. The ‘semi-apes’ of whom Hitler speaks with such loathing will be flying aeroplanes and manufacturing machine-guns. The Fascist dream of a slave empire will be at an end. On the other hand, if we are defeated we simply hand over our own victims to new masters who come fresh to the job and have not developed any scruples.
But more is involved than the fate of the coloured peoples. Two incompatible visions of life are fighting one another. ‘Between democracy and totalitarianism,’ says Mussolini, ‘there can be no compromise.’ The two creeds cannot even, for any length of time, live side by side. So long as democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form, totalitarianism is in deadly danger. The whole English-speaking world is haunted by the idea of human equality, and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we or the Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still, the idea is there, and it is capable of one day becoming a reality. From the English-speaking culture, if it does not perish, a society of free and equal human beings will ultimately arise. But it is precisely the idea of human equality – the ‘Jewish’ or ‘Judaeo-Christian’ idea of equality – that Hitler came into the world to destroy. He has, heaven knows, said so often enough. The thought of a world in which black men would be as good as white men and Jews treated as human beings brings him the same horror and despair as the thought of endless slavery brings to us."
That political equality that Orwell predicted is here now, as on Tuesday we install the first black man to be the American President.
A kind of rough economic equality has also transpired, for the middle classes at least, as all of us are just as dependent on the market for our security and pensions. Not that we all have the similar incomes that Orwell envisaged. We're simply about as insecure as one another, the twenty-year UAW worker as dependent on market earnings as any fund manager. The homeless are merely the most insecure of all. There is no yawning economic class divide, as there was in Orwell's day when a young middle class Englishman had to deliberately try to be the tramp of Down and Out in Paris and London. Any of us could be homeless, in the right circumstance.
We have very little educational equality. The real class divide is between those of us who get a successful high school education and those who do not. The worst public inner city high schools, in Britain and America despite eight years of No Child Left Behind, and sixty years of social democratic education policy in Britain, remain mere warehouses for hip-hopped up thugs of a dozen different cultures and skin colors, who each have about as much chance of getting a elementary education or getting to university as Holocaust victims had of surviving the war.
If we ever have to draft these youths, we will soon discover how bankrupt our education policy has been.
But what we lack most of all in all of this is a voice of decent, honest, political economic criticism about how weak-minded and unfair and foolish it all has been. For our fecklessness in allowing political economic debate to become unfashionable and even vaguely disloyal to the capitalist creed, we face the obvious danger that all we will be able to think to do is bailout and patch up this tottering system.
If we don't grasp the nettle and start to argue for a better economic and energy future for everyone in the west, we will abdicate that future to the Chinese. As it happens, they already own a lot of our future anyway, right now. They are becoming the masters of the world.
We could just as easily let them succeed as fight them with ideas in our own interests. At which point we'd better hope that they will be nice enough to let us remain democratic and open societies.
A version of this is available for each of my classes. This one is for Global Change.
When you get done with everything in this announcement, you're done with the study materials for GL4003. (You still have the final exam to take.)
It's up to me now to try to make some sense out of climate change and the fate of humanity. I'm going to do so based on some of my own life experiences and academic thought. There's a strict limit to how useful this kind of thing is. Instructors shouldn't inflict their own history or ideas on students too forcefully. Too much, and it slops over into egotism. It can also be very confusing for weaker students, whose understanding of key ideas may have been shaky to begin, to endure having an instructor picking apart those ideas at a much higher level. But in the end, I feel you have a right to know what I think about all these big questions, particularly since I've been in this business a long time.
I've been working on this problem since about 1984 when I first became interested in environmental sustainability. At the time I was a corporal in Her Majesty's most excellent Royal Air Force, an engine propulsion technician-supervisor and trade trainer, and a mountain rescue "troop." (MR team members in this branch of the UK service are called "troops," for some reason long lost to history.) Always an avid outdoorsman, in the UK working-class style (which tilts to mountaineering, hill-walking, and associated activities and away from hook-and-bullet sports), I'd become interested in the natural history of the British mountains. I found what study materials I needed in the local university libraries and became a self-taught geologist and moderately expert in the ethnography of the British Isles. The UK mountains are filled with Roman camps and bronze and iron age villages and hill forts, so this too was natural curiosity. I just wanted to know why the landscape I saw around me was the way it was. My buddies on the team thought I was strange, but the British are generally tolerant of eccentricity, so they were still good to me, and still are.
My researches in natural history eventually led to my discovery of the then-relatively new idea that humans were simply not going to be able to keep growing in both population and scale of economic impact on planet earth -- that there would eventually be some kind of carrying capacity for humans. This was a problem for me because we were then deep into one of the hottest periods of the Cold War, the Reagan arms build-up, and my job was clearly to fight that war, or at least help do so. I wanted instead to join the environmental movement and work on this problem because I saw it was more important. This was the early days of modern environmentalism, which for me meant Greenpeace and the Green Party, both of which I joined. I thought that neither side had it right. Untrammeled industrial development would be the end of all humanity, not just the other side.
The Royal Air Force was remarkably good about things. They let me go two years early through a compassionate discharge (still an "honorable discharge"), and allowed me to keep my pension (which will kick in shortly). I also stayed friendly with my buddies on the MR teams. I've even had some come talk to my classes at Unity College.
But I was discharged. And I immediately went to live in a so-called sustainable commune. It didn't take too long to discover the denizens of the commune were quite nuts and incredibly blinkered to reality. Too much meditation, not enough hard thinking. But I was introduced to green building and solar power. I also worked in education for the first time there, through the commune's Youth Program. And a lot of the residents were American. I married an American girl there in 1986 (not Aimee), and a year later, tired of the commune, we found ourselves in California.
Eventually I was able to go to college in the US, and went right through to the PhD, twelve years studying ecology and ecological economics full time. I studied under Herman Daly at the University of Maryland, one of the founders of ecological economics, which is a pretty big deal in my circles. I got the job at Unity College in fall 2000, and have been here ever since. I'd rather teach here than somewhere more ritzy, Colby or CoA. I may be fooling myself, but you guys seem a bit more deserving. Most of the time.
But my life's real work hasn't changed so very much from what it was in 1984. I still do a little search and rescue. I still fix things, and teach people how to fix things, although these days they are buildings and solar panels, not aircraft. And I think and teach and write about human ecology and ecological economics. (Here's an example.)
Being a military veteran in the environmental movement, especially teaching at an environmental college, gives me a somewhat unique perspective, one that I think you deserve to hear.
Veterans are rare in the environmental movement. I've learned to be more tolerant of some conservative viewpoints than many environmentalists often are. I believe that we need the military and by extension the police services to protect us from bad countries and bad people. But I don't think that gives them license to abuse human rights. Human rights are instead what they are there to protect. I believe that some aspects of environmentalism are overblown. But that doesn't mean to say that I'm foolish enough to disbelieve what scientists are telling us about climate change and other limits to human growth.
I appreciate service. I still serve, or try to, through my work in SAR. Right now the health care workers are heroes. I deeply dislike selfishness, especially civic selfishness. There are times when we clearly are all "in this together." Imagining that it's a good idea to "open up" the economy when there are clearly still millions of people carrying this virus is a recipe for disaster, especially for old folk, and an opinion quite ignorant of the science basis for epidemiology. It will kill people.
This is important: Just because one person or a group of people consistently holds the same particular set of ideas doesn't mean to say they have the right set. Some of their ideas could be right, for sure. But some are probably wrong. And this is especially likely if the consistency of these ideas is rigidly enforced within the group and the group tries hard to make everyone adopt the same set: if you believe a, then to be part of this tribe, you have to also believe b, c, d, and e with the same foolish intensity. This is as true for left wing nut jobs as it is for right wing nut jobs. (They're all nut jobs in the end.)
You can for instance, understand that climate change is happening and a terrible problem for humanity and still be a moderate second amendment advocate. You just have to think about it a bit harder than the others in your peer group may do, accept belief a, but reject belief b. But that doesn't mean that it would be smart if everyone gets to have their own bazooka! Imagine how hard that would be for the police. Moderation is nearly always wise.
I also realized from the commune experience that if I wanted to live sustainably and create a resilient lifestyle for my family, we would probably do better if we did it mostly ourselves and didn't try to rely on other people too much. Self-improvement is, as Adam Smith believed, the best motivator. Call this environmental libertarianism if you want. But this too can only go so far. I need to rely on government and other people and businesses from time to time too.
This spring, particularly with the lockdown and the power cuts, I feel somewhat vindicated to be a homesteader, although it has taken years of very hard work to get the farm where we want it to be. Our farm is safe, healthy, and productive. We have useful things to do, planting food and birthing lambs and stacking firewood, and that gives healthy exercise, even under lockdown. We can go outdoors as much as we want. We have water, food, heat, and shelter, and even solar electricity, all from our own resources. This is good because it saves stress on other resources, which are then available for other people. But I also see the farming and homesteading we do as an adjunct to teaching sustainability. If I think society needs to be more resilient, I should be capable of modeling that resilience. It's only fair on you, and, to boot, true to the ethic of service.
So, now you know why I do what I do and how long I've been doing it, let's talk about what I think is going to happen with climate change and renewable energy.
My ideas on this have changed dramatically since 2016 when leading climate scientist James Hansen and several eminent colleagues came out with the paper I now build much of this class around, Hansen et al 2016.
Below is the movie in which Hansen explains the paper in lay terms. Unless you think you remember it really, really well, the movie is required. This time you may wish to take notes at key points. There will be questions on the exam.
Here is the text of the movie for those who like me, read faster than they listen.
Basically, and this is repetitious, I know, but very important, Hansen and his co-authors hypothesize that we are either close to or have passed a point of no return with regard to Greenland and Antarctic ice melt. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to collapse. This changes the calculation with regard to climate change mitigation. Because the melting can't be stopped, mitigation of greenhouse gases won't help. Instead we'll need to adapt, and perhaps very quickly, to the rising seas.
This means that the current prediction from the IPCC (page 25) for only three further feet of sea level rise this century is probably off. We may get instead several meters. We may get meter-scale sea level rise as soon as the late 2060s, or even earlier. The current doubling time for Antarctic ice loss is six years. We are currently getting about 4mm of sea level rise per year. Assume all this water ends in the ocean. Do the math with me:
Sea level rise due to Antarctic and Greenland melting may easily go even faster than this. Some important ice scientists expect it to do so (although not all). It certainly has melted faster in other geological periods. We still need to mitigate, because to continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere risks another climate catastrophe after this first one. But, as Hansen states, we will know within a few years if the pace of Antarctic and Greenland melting is keeping up with this scenario, decelerating, or accelerating yet faster.
I've been a major advocate for rapid mitigation for a long time now. Here's an example of some of my work, in which I try to reconcile mitigation with Keynesian economics and geopolitical realism. Notice that Vladimir Putin is mentioned in my talk as a "fossil elite" trying to hold onto power as the leader of an oil state. I don't claim any particular prescience, but this was a full year before he interfered in the US election. It didn't work out well for him in the end because of the US Congress's refusal to go along with the Trump administration's efforts to reduce sanctions, and now the oil price war and the corona virus, to which Russia is highly vulnerable because Putin delayed the response, and there's no free press to tell anyone what's really happening. So the 2016 election interference was a tactical success and a strategic failure. But you can be sure that he likes the tactic and is trying it again. (This movie is also required.)
Mitigation means reducing the risk of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mostly through renewable energy and energy efficiency. A big problem with mitigation has been the way that conservative groups and corporations have lied to the public and managed to convince a lot of people that mitigation is an environmental hoax. This deliberate effort to mislead the public is one reason why, for instance, a lot of second amendment advocates feel they need to also oppose climate science. You can see the same phenomena in almost all conservative causes from same-sex marriage to abortion. It all gets lumped in together and as I said above, if the tribe is required to believe one dogma, they have to believe all. This is partly explained by the Yale "Cultural Cognition" work, but not completely.
Denialism has been the bane of my life since the 1990s. My PhD thesis was essentially an attempt to to find a way around conservative denialism through understanding religious advocacy for the climate. Despite the college's mission, I've had climate deniers in every single one of my Unity College classes since Fall 2000. Most of them have gone away thinking differently, but there has often been enormous friction as I challenge their mistaken ideas.
In the movie I make clear that the problem with climate change mitigation is that it is opposed by "fossil elites," my term for the owners of fossil fuel capital, who will resist to the end the devaluation of that capital, even though they have children and grandchildren. Some of these fossil elites are de-facto owners of nation-states (or at least kleptocracies). They use their money to fund denial propaganda. Ordinary Americans that embrace denialism, especially if they are themselves vulnerable to climate impacts, are to them what Stalin called "useful idiots."
That's one problem. The other is that mitigation as proposed by some left wing thinkers and even some climate scientists might cause a recession. A recession might weaken the democracies vis-a-vis the dictators and fossil elites, and lead to a setback for mitigation. This is why the Green New Deal is a superior approach. It uses Keynesian thinking to avoid the trap of recessionary mitigation. This is what I advocated in the movie above, before the GND came out. Again, I don't claim prescience. It's an obvious solution. And it turns out others were working on this idea long before me.
That still leaves denialism. Unless we defeat it, we won't get mitigation in time. Fossil elites have bought themselves time on the throne by funding denialism, including casting doubt on renewable energy's effectiveness and cost-efficiency, even though renewable energy prices are lower than fossil energy. As I said, I have beat myself to death for many years now tackling denialism in the classroom and in public. At times it has driven me close to despair.
But these new data from Greenland and Antarctica may mean I no longer have to do so. If Hansen is right, mitigation can't help us stop sea level rise in any case, and we will soon have very convincing proof that the rise is accelerating (by 2025 or at least 2030). By the time we have this proof, denialism will be yet weaker because the average age of climate deniers is quite old. (It's already weakening over time.)
This, to be honest, and despite the bad news that caused it, has been something of a relief. We won't get mitigation in time to head off this first great climate disaster, and that is bad. But this disaster, along with the aging out of denialists, will be the end of denialism, and we should get some sane mitigation policy shortly thereafter.
Hansen shows that a regional cooling in the north Atlantic, or even a general global cooling, will accompany such vast ice melt, by adding cool water to the parts of the oceans where thermohaline circulation starts, hindering poleward movement of atmospheric heat, and by the melting ice just cooling the oceans, period. That should help human agriculture, previously in grave danger from warming. The bad news is that this increased temperature gradient will lead to superstorms. But you can't have everything. I think humanity and liberal democracy will survive sea level rise and superstorms. I doubt it would survive the collapse of global agriculture. Here's the relevant graphic from the paper. The accompanying explanation is section 3.4 on page 3766 and 3767.
So I'm optimistic for a partial resolution soon. It's not a great basis for optimism, to be sure. We'll lose Florida, or much of it, and quite a lot of some major east coast cities. Adapting to the loss will be very hard and will cause great disruption, something we've had practice in recently. But we will enter a new political reality in which it will become almost impossible to deny human-caused climate change.
The bad news is, this is just the beginning of the Great Human Ecological Crisis of the 21st Century. Scientists believe that there are other ecological limits or boundaries to human economic growth looming in the background.
This is usually covered in your Environmental Issues and Insights core class. Here's a quick reminder:
In this video there are nine planetary boundaries, but of course, others may surface. A few years ago it was proposed that "novel entities" are a similar human ecological issue. Novel entities are chemicals or diseases introduced into human habitat, often by economic growth, as human development expands into wild habitats to find disease or finds new chemicals both of which we have had little exposure to.
Examples include PCBs, Agent Orange, Ebola, and now the novel corona virus. Just as Ebola found a way to get from African wildlife into the human population, so has Covid 19. And I should think we are not done yet with pandemics and poisons. And don't forget the superstorms.
So this is, as Churchill said of appeasement,
"...only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time."
Apologies. I'm fond of Churchill's rhetoric. It can be bracing in a crisis. At least my parents and grandparents thought so at the time. But, in other more prosaic words, you are all going to have interesting lives. I hope it works out well for you. But keep smiling and remember, a couple generations ago there were lots of people still alive, like my own grandparents, who had survived the Great War, the Great Depression, World War 2, and much of the Cold War. You won't have it nearly that bad. (My grandfather, a British Army private in both WW1 and WW2, taught me how to garden. I think of him every time I plant something.)
Another thing to remember: The planet has melted down before. It knows how to do it and survive. It's the humans we have to worry about. And especially democracy. That's what is really threatened by all these ecological problems and especially the fossil elites. I'll be dead by the time this is all worked out, and your generation will be in charge. If you manage to save democracy, you'll have done well. I'll be rooting for you.
Just listen to the scientists (or be one), and don't buy a house on the coast.
A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all.
But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them.
So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum.
If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.
