Author Page for Erik Loomis

The Problem of the 21st Century

Bill McKibben lays it out for us–climate change is the greatest problem of the 21st century by enormous levels of magnitude.

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

McKibben names a clear enemy: the fossil fuel industry and the greed of their executives. I don’t disagree with this, but I think it is a bit more complicated–the person who wants a monster truck that gets 7 mpg is also kind of the enemy, as is the suburban family who wants to commute 50 miles each way to work with an 9 mpg SUV. Of course, this is also too simplistic since we can have conversations about how and why capitalists stoked those demands. But that’s fine, I guess I understand the need to make this argument. Plus there’s no question that early 21st century monopoly capitalism is a huge issue. If the government made a good faith effort to open the energy market to clean innovators, maybe we could make some progress, but as we’ve seen with the Solyndra non-scandal, even the slightest attempts to do so will spark fake outrage among oil’s bought politicians in Congress.

More problematic is the false hope McKibben provides at the end of the article, when he suggests that we should put pressure on the petroleum corporations like activists in the 80s did to the apartheid regime of South Africa:

The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you’d still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies. But the link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world’s largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future – that’s when their members will “enjoy their retirement.”) “Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective,” says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. “The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change – now.”

Yeah, I don’t know. The environmental movement is really concerned that it doesn’t come across as too negative. The fear is that if they tell the unvarnished truth without providing hope that people will just shut off. So rather than give the full jeremiad, screaming from the rooftops about the horror about to change all of our lives if we don’t change our ways RIGHT NOW!!!!, McKibben suggest pressuring students pressuring college administrations to pressure corporations to change their ways. That’d be great if we were talking about social policy. But instead we are taking about the future of life on the planet. Given the very real nature of the crisis, something that during this horrible heat wave and drought most Americans are just beginning to feel (but nothing compared to what it will look like 10 or 20 years from now), the call for traditional types of campaigns that make liberals feel good just feel inadequate. Climate change writers shouldn’t pull their punches. The issue is too important.

Had A Nice Day?

No? It was scorching hot and dry, even if humid? Hard to imagine why, given that this week’s drought update shows the nation in officially the worst drought of the 21st century. An amazing 42% of the nation is in Severe Drought and 14% in Extreme Drought, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center.

The full report here.

Personal Experience and Environmental Change

As we see during most heat waves, the number of people who believe climate change is happening peaking. During cold spells in the winter, the number dives. This reminds me of one of the biggest problem in creating long-term environmental reform–everybody believes their personal experience in the norm. There’s a Facebook cartoon I’ve seen a couple of people put up recently that tells everyone to shut up because it’s the summer and it’s supposed to be hot. Well, no. Or at least not like this. 2012 is almost certainly going to go down as the hottest year in the history of the United States. Most of the other leading years are also in the very recent past. There has basically never been a heat wave in the history of this country like the current one plaguing the eastern half of the country for the last month.

Never.

But we very quickly internalize this as normal.

This isn’t just climate. I was talking to a environmental scientist friend of mine recently who recalled a conversation with the owner I think of a timber operation. The guy didn’t understand why he needed to comply with stormwater drainage regulations. He said the rivers turn brown anyway. And my friend was like, that’s not natural! It’s the result of logging and erosion and other issues. But if you see it for more than a short time, you can easily internalize it and assume that you are not responsible.

That’s hardly a recent phenomenon. Whites moved onto the western Great Plains in large numbers in the late 19th century. Places like western Nebraska and eastern New Mexico became exciting spots to start a farm. It seemed like a great idea at the time because there was enough rain. Everyone assumed there would always be enough rain. But the 1880s and 1890s were unusually wet decades and when the land dried up, it became impossible to live out there. That’s why you see so many abandoned buildings in these places–they are the homesteads of people from 50, 70, 100 years ago who finally gave up on the land. Plus the farming out there had major environmental impacts, particularly the plowing of the sod to plant grains. When the drought came, nothing grew and the soil blew away, leading to the Dust Bowl.

I’m not sure what you do about this. But it’s really really hard to create policies to fight climate change when we assume our own experiences are normal. Combine this with the right-wing propaganda machine telling everyone climate change is a liberal myth and you have a recipe for doing nothing.