An Apology to Future Generations
None of us asked to be born into the late stages of human civilization, but here we are. As we prepare for the coming transformation of human society, it is necessary to account for our failures.
Two “planetary boundaries” graphs showing the increased risk in all environmental categories after just seven years (source)
The world is about to change, whether or not our governments decide to allow climate change and environmental destruction to freely wreak havoc. Every day, new stories emerge confirming that the future is a death sentence darker and more inescapable than we previously knew. In recognizing our failure to stop or even significantly curb the inevitable breakdown of civilization itself, we should be honest and frank with inheritors of our mess so that they can more adequately prepare for what is to come—our parents did not do us any favors by remaining ignorant or hopeful or lying about our future, and we should not do the same to our offspring.
From The Atlantic (non-paywall mirror), a good summation of the unrealistically daunting task ahead of us:
Of the hundreds of scenarios that the IPCC analyzed, all fell into one of three buckets. In the first bucket, every scenario forecasts that the world will soon be removing tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Carbon removal is still a bit of a dream. Not only is it technologically unproven at scale; it is extremely energy intensive. But the IPCC report implies that within the lifetime of children alive today, the world might be spending more than a third of its total energy production removing carbon from the atmosphere, according to Zeke Hausfather, an IPCC author.
The world won’t derive any immediate economic gain from this waste-management exercise; it won’t turn that carbon into something useful. It will simply need to spend what could equal trillions of dollars a year on carbon removal to help rein in climatic upheaval. What’s more, this mass removal will need to happen while the world does everything else that decarbonizing entails, such as building wind and solar farms, expanding public transit, and switching to electric vehicles. Every climate plan, every climate policy you’ve ever heard about will need to happen while tens of gigatons of carbon removal revs up in the background.
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But now let’s turn our attention to the second bucket of scenarios. They tell a different story, one in which the world rapidly curtails its energy usage over the next two decades, slashing carbon pollution not only from rich countries, such as the United States, but also from middle-income countries, such as Brazil, Pakistan, and India.
By “curtailing energy demand,” I’m not talking about the standard energy-transition, green-growth situation, where the world produces more energy every year and just has a larger and larger share of it coming from zero-carbon sources. Rather, these scenarios imagine a world where total global energy demand collapses in the next few decades. There’s a good reason for this—as far as the models are concerned, this tactic is one of the best ways to crash carbon pollution within 10 years—but it is not how any country approaches climate policy.
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And then there’s the third bucket. In these scenarios in the new report, humanity fails to limit global temperature growth to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), blowing past the more ambitious of the Paris Agreement’s climate goals. Passing 1.5 degrees Celsius means that the world could encounter deadly droughts, mass migrations, and fatal outdoor temperatures by the middle of the century.
Perhaps you can see the problem: None of these outcomes is particularly easy to imagine. There is no international agreement—or even political will—to conduct carbon removal at the scale that the IPCC report envisions. There is even less appetite for the rapid energy cuts that must come in this decade to meet the low-energy-demand scenario. And if you give up on either of those approaches, that all but ensures the world will exceed the 1.5-degree-Celsius threshold, which will lead to widespread turmoil.
When you look at the three buckets this starkly, a few things become apparent. The first and the most significant is that humanity must invest more in carbon removal as quickly as possible. So far, most of the money spent on carbon removal has come from the private sector; two weeks ago, I wrote about Stripe’s effort. But the funding to remove billions of tons a year can come only from the government. Many climate thinkers hope that the federal government will step in and administer carbon removal as a public waste-management service, at least in the United States. There’s currently little bipartisan political will to do so, but it is beyond past time to begin implementing that.
The second is that coping with climate change will require disruption on a scale that our political system has yet to comprehend. In some cases, that change will come beforehand and prevent the damage; in others, it will result from the climatic damage. But it will come nonetheless. If I asked you, Forty years from now, will only about 5 percent of Americans own a car, or will the world spend a large share of its energy production sucking carbon from the atmosphere?, you would rightly respond that neither sounded particularly realistic. And that is the point: We have been backed into a corner. The scale of change headed our way is unimaginable. And it is also inevitable.
This kind of essay will become more frequent as previously optimistic journalists come to terms with the truth and either adopt a healthy, realistic outlook as in the above article, or retreat into some nebulous hope for a future solution. The UN recently warned about the dangers of this kind of complacency regarding the possibility of technological or political fixes for climate change (the repercussions of false hope were already discussed in a previous entry):
Humanity is suffering from a "broken perception of risk", spurring us into activities and behaviours that cause climate change and a surging number of disasters around the globe, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) found in a new report that between 350 and 500 medium to large-scale disasters took place globally every year over the past two decades.
That is five times more than the average during the three preceding decades, it said.
And amid the changing climate, disastrous events brought on by drought, extreme temperatures and devastating flooding are expected to occur even more frequently in the future.
The report estimated that by 2030, we will be experiencing 560 disasters around the world every year — or 1.5 disasters every day on average.
UNDRR said in a statement that the sharp rise in disasters globally could be attributed to a "broken perception of risk based on optimism, underestimation and invincibility".
This, it said, had led to policy, finance and development decisions that exacerbate vulnerabilities and put people in danger.Ignoring the towering risks we face "is setting humanity on a spiral of self-destruction," UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed warned in the statement.
Ignoring risks has come at a high price, with disasters around the world costing roughly $235 billion each year over the past decade, the report found.
But most of that is incurred in lower-income countries, which on average lose one per cent of their national GDP to disasters each year, compared to just 0.1 to 0.2 per cent in wealthier nations.
From USA Today, about a recent study concerning marine mass extinction events already underway:
Unless climate change is curbed, Earth's oceans could see a mass extinction of marine life unlike anything the planet has seen for millions of years, according to a new study published Thursday.
"If carbon dioxide emissions accelerate unchecked over the next century, this would lead to extreme warming, driving extinctions in the ocean rivaling the mass extinctions in Earth's past," study lead author Justin Penn of Princeton University told USA TODAY.
The study said that climate-driven ocean warming and oxygen depletion would be the primary reasons for the potential mass extinctions. In addition, direct human impacts, such as habitat destruction, overfishing and coastal pollution, also threaten marine species.
The burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal that power our world releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the Earth's atmosphere and oceans.
As ocean temperatures increase and oxygen availability drops, marine life abundance plummets, according to the study.
Also from The Atlantic, an article detailing the connections between climate change and environmental destruction and the prevalence of novel infectious diseases. An earlier Vox article explains the mechanism behind the danger: human populations encroach on nature while climate change spurs simultaneous animal migrations, the combination of which reduces biodiversity and increases the risk of virus-spreading encounters between populations. Future life will not only be hotter, more miserable and more disaster-prone, it will be more infectious as well. Covid-19 is only the beginning.
On Friday April 22 (Earth Day), an environmentalist named Wynn Bruce set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court and died of his injuries. Even self-destructive and violent protests protests are largely ignored and downplayed by the media, a sad testament to the ineffectiveness of popular resistance in 2022. That same Supreme Court is set to hear a case that could soon destroy even the minor regulatory capabilities of the EPA, thanks to the dark money of the Koch brothers:
The Koch brothers have been using their vast fortunes to fight government regulation since 1974. Now, their empire may be on the cusp of one of its biggest wins in a generation: trimming the powers of the U.S. presidency and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to fight climate change.
That is—if the Supreme Court agrees.
In June, the Supreme Court will deliver a potentially monumental decision in a case that could change the way the U.S. government works, and potentially hammer the EPA’s ability to lower greenhouse gas emissions. If that happens, you can thank a billionaire named Charles Koch, the remaining member of the fabulously rich and notoriously influential Koch brothers, owners of the second-largest private industrial conglomerate in America.
No one is going to save us, and nothing can stop what is coming, and the belief that some new technology or regulation will meaningfully alleviate the ongoing and looming cataclysm is actively making it worse. Therapists specializing in climate anxiety are already becoming popular for the privileged who can afford them; those who are currently being harmed by environmental issues are the same who will suffer the most in the future, and they will mostly be unable to afford such luxuries. Therapy can only go so far—it cannot solve the climate crisis, which will cause more than just physical hardship. The anguish will be widespread and undeniable, though interested parties will likely attempt to downplay and cover up the extent of the problem as they have always done. Without a fully honest assessment of our situation, coping methods will take the form of unhealthy shifting of blame, the aforementioned false hope, or worse. The situation in the Western US is already so dire that droughts have spurred Utah’s governor to ask his constituents to pray for rain:
Utah has the right to use about 1.7 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado, but it cannot collect from Lake Powell (its major aqueduct, the Central Utah Project, connects only Salt Lake City with the river’s tributaries). Given Utah’s rapid growth, the state’s politics are increasingly revolving around the pursuit of more water. Late last year, Governor Spencer Cox gave an interview to the Deseret News in which he called the disinclination of many in the West to dam more rivers “an abomination,” and his office has pushed hard for a pipeline between Lake Powell and the city of St. George in the southwest corner of the state, about two hours from Las Vegas.
But pipelines and dams are useful only as long as there’s water to be stored and transported. That’s why Cox released a video last summer in which he told his constituents that the state needed “some divine intervention” to solve its problems. “By praying collaboratively and collectively, asking God or whatever higher power you believe in for more rain, we may be able to escape the deadliest aspects of the continuing drought.” The early returns from the pray-for-rain strategy have not been good, as this winter’s snowpack indicates that 2022 will be just as dry as 2021.
It is important to discern and admit to the truth of things even if it is momentarily depressing to do so. In this dark future, all we will have is ourselves and our fellow reality-attuned compatriots, and our sense of humanity will be even more important than it is now, during the late stages of the free market dictatorship that caused the ongoing cataclysm (only the latest and most destructive of many it has authored). To us, the indefatigability of the climate crisis is not a cause for resignation, but a call to arms and a recognition that community and mutual aid will be central to our stability (see David Fleming’s encyclopedic guide to post-climate change life called Lean Logic : A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It for some ideas about how our lives might soon be organized). Is the increasing awareness of the problem enough to save us? No. That so many are waking up to the coming troubles is encouraging, but it is too little, too late.
Climate change denial is almost an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, but there are denialists of another stripe on the left, who cling to the false hope that engenders only complacency and will lead to the resentment of the younger generations (the right’s hateful malice and avarice versus the left’s ignorant optimism and compromising nature, neither of which will be charitably received in a few decades). The climate crisis is not a looming inconvenience we’ll surely invent our way out of, nor an unnecessarily trumped up source of angst and hopelessness. There will be many who will persist in this delusion even as the process begins to destroy their lives. The Covid pandemic and the West’s non-response puts the lie to any conceivable hope in our capacity to deal with collective problems such as the ailing environment—it serves as a test run for societal emergencies, and by any worthy metric we have failed. Utterly preventable mass death and debilitation is ongoing, while the rich have gotten richer and the average American life expectancy was slashed an incredible two years as a result. The speed and viciousness with which we have abandoned children to daily exposure in schools and daycares and by extension all the common but presently unknown long Covid complications is mirrored in the carelessness with which we have sold their future out from under them by persisting with business as usual.
What will this future look like? There is some good news: the inevitable breakdown of human society will allow for some healing and reintroduction of nature on Earth, such as it is. The 2020 lockdowns did provide a brief respite from our unceasing pollution, and photos were shared on social media of wildlife in areas it was never seen in before, though this dip in emissions was fleeting and we have made up for it since. It is almost as if the planet itself is in the process of correcting its mistake in allowing the human race to become invasive, but the planet is not alive nor is it driven by anything other than naturally occurring, physically automatic processes.
Assuming the coming changes are inherently good or bad is anthropomorphizing them; the simple fact is that a sufficient number of us have conducted ourselves in such a way that the natural environment can no longer support us. This is a value neutral cataclysm, a similar outcome to one’s inevitable weight gain after years of gluttony. We might bemoan the coming scarce lifeless silence, mass death, widespread suffering, and profound change in quality of life, but it is only nature acting as it always has. Play with fire, and you get burned. This is not the fire’s fault, nor is there any greater lesson to learn from the injury beyond “don’t play with fire.” It is tempting to draw conclusions about humanity’s inherent worthiness and adaptability, and certainly all species on the planet have some natural instinctual rapaciousness and capacity for self-defeating habitat destruction, but this was not always our predestination. There are a few options to at least lessen our individual guilt, such as refusal to procreate. Abstinence should go a long way to assuage our guilt at our inability to fix the system as well as our reinforcement of it in our everyday lives—driving a car, using consumer goods, and going to work in a late stage capitalist system are all unquestionably immoral actions, but pale in comparison to reproduction in terms of harm to a potential life and facilitating that potential life’s own harm. However, even through the worst, humanity will persist in some form. What do we tell the younger generation? How do we account for our actions when they ask us why the old paintings and pictures and movies they see are so full of life compared to their observed reality? When they hear stories of insects splattering all over windshields or abundantly available seafood or flocks of birds so thick they used to block out the sun, will we have the nerve to lie to them about why these things no longer exist?
The future was at one point unwritten, but those with the greatest control over our destiny chose chaos, destruction, and history’s greatest program of lies and propaganda, the latest of which concerns the newly discovered problem of plastic pollution (dangerous amounts of microplastics have been found virtually everywhere on Earth, even the deep sea, as well as in human blood and tissue):
California’s attorney general has announced an unprecedented investigation into the fossil fuel industry — not for its knowledge about climate change, but for its role in causing the global plastics pollution crisis.
In a press release on Thursday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta accused fossil fuel and petrochemical companies of disingenuously promoting recycling, even though they knew it would never be able to keep up with growing plastic production. “Enough is enough,” Bonta said in a statement. “For more than a century, the plastics industry has engaged in an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.”
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Whatever the investigation’s findings, it’s clear that the world’s recycling infrastructure has failed miserably to deal with the past several decades’ proliferation of plastic. Between 1950 and 2015, the world produced some 5.8 billion metric tons of plastic waste and only recycled 9 percent of it. The vast majority of the rest has either been littered or is accumulating in the world’s landfills, where it takes hundreds of years to degrade and leaches hazardous chemicals into the soil and groundwater. A smaller amount has been incinerated — but that too causes problems, as burned plastic clogs the air with nasty pollutants that are linked to lung disease, heart problems, and cancer.
Efforts to get at the root of the problem by limiting plastic production have faced opposition for decades from the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries, which insisted to the public that more and better recycling infrastructure could deal with a growing glut of plastic. However, documents unveiled in a 2020 investigation from NPR and PBS Frontline suggest they were lying through their teeth. One industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech that there was “serious doubt” that recycling plastic “can ever be made viable on an economic basis.”
The inherent flaw in our brains is not some inborn avarice, aggression, or destructiveness, but rather the short-sightedness and gullibility that allowed us to be exploited by powerful resource holders throughout our history. These are the perpetual enemies of the human race: the brutes who lorded their strength over others in the early days became the kings who claimed a divine right to their authority and then transformed into the capitalist robber barons who hold us all hostage and justify their position by providing us with new kinds of fast food and cars and overpriced medical care, expecting us to say “thank you” for it every step of the way. In the end, they won. They’ve always won, and in this late hour they’ve so thoroughly doomed the rest of us that they’ll be following along shortly.
It is only a pity that so many who had little to no hand in creating the crisis will suffer disproportionately. The Anthropocene extinction is our gift to you children, though the groundwork for it was laid many generations ago and you may well choose to embrace and exacerbate it as we have done. If we couldn’t rise above the propaganda and false hope, will you capitulate similarly and choose comforting lies as civilization breaks down around you? Or will the silence of our dead world spur you to resentment and action?
To the younger people who happen to read this: we are sorry. Know that at least some your elders tried, risking life and limb in the process. The controllers of our destiny would rather pull the walls down around us than suffer even a minor inconvenience, and we weren’t organized or powerful enough to stop them in the end. Will you be able to rise up and salvage what life remains?