> As for the amber stream pouring into my gas tank as I stand at the self-service pump on my way to Walden, I now take it and all the other plant-based fossil fuels to be an infinity of petrified sunlight, best understood through the compound lens of the Lyell-Darwin eye.
This is the most nihilistic essay I've read in a long time. It contemplates climate change and the extinction of humanity with a lyrical nonchalance that is misanthropic at best. Keep pumping that liquid sunshine, Lewis.
Every single one of us needs to wake the fuck up. The author is right that the planet itself will be fine without us. If we want to survive as a species, we can't bask in decadence and romanticize the decline.
There is also a sort of blindness to the same sort of processes Hyde is quite reasonably (and evocatively) gobsmacked by: if Darwin could be said to have invented a sort of integral Calculus to grapple with deep time, a differential version is just as needed to look at changes in the rate at which the rate at which changes are changing, and perhaps on to even higher derivatives.
Too many of these melancholy (or as you say, nihilistic) takes are rooted in a model of the form "we are here, now, and if things go on as they have been will inevitably wind up there, by then" and fail to acknowledge that things are not going to "go on like they have been". Things are changing, but the rate, manner and even direction of changes are also changing, and we need to recognize that as well.
> The author is right that the planet itself will be fine without us.
Who would have thought geology would cause people to think they should just go kill themselves to make the world a better place. I mean, I know people are messed up (including first person pronoun) - but we are seriously far gone if we can't imagine people somehow, some way making the world a better place.
Great identification of a problem, big miss on identification of a solution.
"Fine" in the sense that life will probably go on in some form or another. The planet's climate has whipsawed countless times, causing many mass extinctions. My point is: when people talk about "saving the planet," what they really mean is protecting the ecosystems that we've grown accustomed to. I think words matter. The planet is not in danger. We are.
> Every single one of us needs to wake the fuck up.
And how do you plan to achieve that ? The denial of reality of human psychology and politics is one of the reasons denial of climate change is still rampant. Yelling at people with urgency only works that much, and it also amplifies resistance.
In the end, everyone needs to wake the fuck up implies a sheer resolution of the need for change, and you won't bring that by schooling people, yelling at them or even violence. The inevitable is there, do what you think is best, tell what you think is best and you'll probably have maximized your contribution already.
Contemplating how things plays out in the end is not nihilistic, it's a form of acceptance of the real hard truth about the grip we have, as individuals, on the mater.
I guess you're right—if people are not resolved in the need for change now, they never will be. Are you willing to just say our extinction is "inevitable" and face it with "acceptance?"
Donald Trump was on the UK national TV news yesterday, at his golf course in Scotland[1] and the reporter said that he was still complaining about 'windmills'[2] spoiling the view and vowing never to allow any to be built in the USA.
Sorry to make everything about Donald Trump, but in the face of the most powerful country on earth voting a climate change denying party into power where they are happy to shut down green movements for personal reasons, and promised to "drill, baby, drill" what do you, turnsout, think it matters whether we HN peanut gallery "accept" that our extinction is "inevitable" or not? It sure seems inevitable no matter what I do or don't accept and I assume that's the case for most people reading your comment.
[1] where he was caught on camera cheating at golf
[2] off-shore wind turbines visible from his golf course, which he tried to get stopped years ago, and lost, and is now holding a grudge about it.
If we feel hopeless, that works well for Donald Trump. "There's nothing an individual can do" is just a story—a narrative. As an example, the Target boycott had a real impact on Target's revenue. Who knows if that may eventually lead to a change in their policies.
I'm not saying every person in the world needs to become Greta Thunberg, but perpetuating the narrative that we're powerless just makes the narrative stronger. We all have to do what's workable and feasible for ourselves, but let's not treat our extinction with the same "gee, shucks" resigned fatalism that we treat our elections. The stakes are slightly higher.
afaict, the situation can be roughly summarized as :
- global climate is warming by around +0.3C per decade
- its caused mainly by humans burning carbon chains for energy, emitting CO2
- we are currently sailing thru +1.5C above pre-industrial mean temp
- Methane CH4 is also a strong warming agent, around 20x more potent than CO2, on decade timescales
- humans are emitting all time high levels of C02, around 40Gtonnes / yr
- Carbon capture / CCS / DAC need to be millions of times more efficient to be significant
- we dont have enough room or time to plant trees to remove the CO2
- net-zero when we reach it, corresponds to max-Co2 which means peak-heat
- net-zero aka peak-heat might occur bu 2060, by which time we'll be near +2.5C
- extreme events are not linear in increase in temp [ think of shifting the mean of a bell curve ]
Even if we do a great job of electrifying everything, moving away from fossil/carbon fuels by 2060, we still have a heat problem to deal with - will we be able to grow our normal crops under +2.5C, and deal with extreme heatwaves, floods, storms ?
It seems we will need Solar Radiation Management Geo-engineering "SRM" in order to survive that peak-heat and buy us a few decades in which to slowly remove CO2 [ even as we move full steam ahead to de-carbonize our energy system with wind, solar, battery packs, hydro, fission, geothermal and hopefully fusion power ]
Particulates from volcanoes are well known to cause a cooling effect, and its now becoming more obvious that particulates in pollution in Asia, and sulphur impurities in shipping fuels were having a measurable cooling effect - we seem to be warming faster now that Asia and shipping fuels are not producing as much particulate pollution [ thus less cooling effect ]
It seems to me the only "Hail Mary" we have to address the heat problem, is to use SRM to exert a cooling effect - we humans geo-engineered a warm planet over 150 years of burning carbon fuels, and we will need to geo-engineer our way out of this mess.
tldr : Abundant clean energy is needed, but we also have to address the heat problem - with SRM geo-engineering
Alas, net zero carbon is not peak heat. It’s peak carbon dioxide. It’s peak rate of temperature change due to greenhouse gases. Global average temperatures will continue to rise past 2060 (or whenever we get net zero). I’m not sure what the models predict. Perhaps the total temperature rise could be 3.5 degrees by 2100.
Every single one of us needs to wake the fuck up. The author is right that the planet itself will be fine without us. If we want to survive as a species, we can't bask in decadence and romanticize the decline.