(photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters/Zak Bickel/The Atlantic)
Hope
and Despair: Can the Planet Be Saved?
By Rebecca J. Rosen,
Adrienne Green, Li Zhou, Alana Semuels, and Bouree Lam, The Atlantic
30 December 15
Experts on ecology, conservation, and climate change offer their
reasons for optimism and pessimism going into 2016.
The
two words “climate” and “change” are so routinely strung together that just
saying them as a pair—“climate change”—seems to somehow obscure the full weight
of the phenomenon they describe, to say nothing of its consequences. But in
those moments when one pauses to consider the ramifications of human activity
on the planet for generations and generations ahead, things can feel beyond
bleak. And yet: This past year saw the nations of the world reached their
first-ever agreement on an ambitious plan to rein in emissions, perhaps the
most significant progress yet made on this issue.
We
reached out to some of the leading scholars of climate change, conservation,
and ecology, and asked them what, as the Earth begins yet another trip around
the sun, is giving them cause for hope and despair. Below are their answers,
lightly edited for length and clarity.
Robert
Glennon, professor of law and public policy at the University of
Arizona
Reason
for despair: I despair that we don’t consider water to be scarce or
valuable. A century of lax water laws and regulations has spoiled most
Americans. We turn on the tap and out comes as much water as we want for less
than we pay for cable television or cellphone service. When most Americans
think of water, they think of it as similar to air—as infinite and
inexhaustible. In reality, it’s both finite and exhaustible.
Because
we don’t respect water as remarkable, we use needless quantities for frivolous
purposes, such as growing grass in the desert. And because we don’t pay the
real cost of water (only the cost of the infrastructure to provide it), we
remove the incentive to conserve. Perhaps most important, our innovation
economy has encouraged engineers and inventors to create water-saving
technologies that extend our supply; but the price of water is so low that few
of them have viable business plans.
Reason
for hope: We have a suite of options to confront the crisis and prevent it
from becoming a catastrophe. These options include conservation, which remains
the low-hanging fruit; reuse of treated municipal effluent; and desalination of
ocean or brackish water. We can also price water sensibly to encourage
conservation, while protecting access to water for persons of modest means.
Finally, we can use the power of market forces to encourage a modest
reallocation of water from low to higher-value uses. A low single-digit percent
reduction in agricultural water consumption would solve the municipal and
industrial water-supply problem. Modernization of farm irrigation systems, paid
for by cities and industry, would protect the viability of rural communities
and secure needed supplies for the urban sector.
None
of these options requires a radical change in our behavior, but they will
require the moral courage and the political will to act.
Margo
Oge, former director of the Office of Transportation and Air
Quality of the Environmental Protection Agency
Reason
for despair: Climate change is the biggest challenge our planet faces.
The science is clear, the risks are real, and the phenomenon’s impact on every
part of our planet is increasingly visible. In mid-December, nearly 200
countries met in Paris to secure a historic agreement to reduce the impacts of
the global threat. The negotiators for every single country involved have
accepted that we need to take immediate and substantive action on this threat.
Back at home, however, Congressional Republicans continued their decades of
denial. In a symbolic rebuff of global urgency on the issue, both the House and
Senate voted to repeal President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. By the time our
legislators—a few hundred people—finally accept the overwhelming scientific
evidence about the threat, I despair that time will have run out for future
generations. I fear that killing, or endlessly delaying, the nation’s serious
efforts to mitigate this threat will be catastrophic: rising seas swallowing
island nations, floods wiping out towns and villages, unprecedented heat waves
and drought destroying crops and lives, and even global instability that
provokes wars.
Reason
for hope: What gives me optimism is watching our country take a positive
role in the Paris international-climate agreements after decades of foot
dragging on the issue. When the United States leads, other countries follow.
This means that the U.S. efforts to secure strong climate actions in Paris and
at home will make a hugely positive impact globally on carbon emissions. The
United States has, in fact, long been a leader on environmental technology
innovation. In the 1970s, it was American car-emission standards that led to
the development of catalytic convertors. These devices were the first to ever
clean up the toxic soup coming out of cars’ tailpipes.
The
rest of the world followed America. Today you can’t find a car without one.
After
we banned leaded gas, Europe and the rest of the world came along. In 2009 we
initiated another world-leading effort, regulations that will cut automotive
carbon pollution in half as well as double the fuel efficiency of passenger
vehicles by 2025. For decades, American environmental efforts have led to
innovation, saved lives, and created jobs. As a result of these regulations,
our car industry is today undergoing a technological and economic revolution.
Our automakers are building the most fuel-efficient vehicle fleet in history
and are already ahead on a trajectory to doubling fuel economy by 2025. The
world needs the United States to continue and expand its technological
leadership in mitigating climate change.
Peter
Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University
Reason
for despair: One thing that brings me close to despair is the fact that, just
in the West, we seemed to have turned a corner in regard to meat eating and
factory farming—both are now on the decline—the resulting reduction in animal
suffering and greenhouse gas emissions is being swamped by the growth in meat
eating in China and other parts of Asia. Nevertheless, I don’t despair because
the situation is not hopeless. As long as there is hope of change for the
better, I’m too busy trying to bring about that change to lose myself in
despair.
Reason
for hope: More and more people are seeking fulfillment in their lives by
turning away from the consumer lifestyle and instead living in accord with
their values. The emerging movement known as effective altruism is one outcome
of that, and it is having an impact. I’m encouraged by the tremendous progress
made over the past 25 years in reducing extreme poverty and improving life
expectancy worldwide. Infant mortality, for example, has been cut by more than
half since 1990, despite rising population. If we continue to put more
resources—our intelligence and our skills, as well as our money—into using
reason and evidence to make the world a better place, then I am confident that
we can make even more progress over the next 25 years.
Elizabeth
Marino, assistant professor of anthropology at Oregon State
University
Reason
for despair: As an anthropologist working alongside indigenous
communities in the United States, it’s hard not to see climate change as
another wave of violence inherent in the colonial ideal. Colonized geographies
like communities in Alaska, small nation states in the Pacific, and large
nations in sub-Saharan Africa all share the heaviest burdens of a rapidly
changing climate, all share vulnerabilities to those changes produced by unjust
economic and political systems, and all are limited in social and cultural
expression by the narrow-mindedness of what is deemed culturally acceptable by
the “West.” These burdens are all part of climate injustice.
But
even aside from this new form of colonial violence, I despair because, more
than any other crisis, climate change needs alternative cultural models for
framing problems and non-Western solutions. Unfortunately, many accept as
“natural” merely one set of ideas borne from very particular “Western”
worldviews: the necessity of growth; monetary value as determinant of inherent
value; the nature/culture dichotomy; competition as the driver of production;
technological “fixes” as paramount. I despair when the solutions and rhetoric
around climate-change mitigation and climate justice are embedded in these presuppositions;
when the world stays narrow.
Reason
for hope: The rest of the world is talking back. We see organizers
using hashtags such as #pachamama, #indigenouscop21, #AOSIS, and
#indigenousenvironmentalnetwork. We have growing innovative
collaborations among scientists and Native American leadersand we
see strong non-state-based international alliances, political organization,
and advocacy by non-Western leaders. It's going to be
an interesting century.
Juliet
B. Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College
Reason
for despair: Despair? Yes, it is there. Not because I don’t think that
eventually we will have a low- or zero-carbon world. We will. But how can one
not despair at the certain destruction we’ve already ensured with the warming
and chaos that is now built in to the climate system? This month flooding in my
husband’s home city of Chennai reached second floors, with more than 1.8
million people displaced. In one 24-hour period there was nearly 11 inches of
rainfall. California remains in the grip of a powerful drought. It is 60
degrees in Boston, in December, in what’s likely the world’s warmest
recorded year, a distinction which may be eclipsed 12 months from now. All the
while, the politics of hatred are rising, like the sea levels.
Reason
for hope: COP21, the UN talks in Paris, ended with a degree of hope that is
unprecedented in the world of climate. Despite the absence of a binding agreement
or emissions promises that have any hope of avoiding catastrophe, there has
been almost delirious optimism, even from many environmental activists. (Not
from all, of course. James Hansen and Bill McKibben have
been outspoken in their criticisms of the weaknesses of the treaty, and they’re
right.)
But I
find four major reasons to be hopeful. The first is that China is acting
decisively to reduce emissions from coal. The second is that renewable energy
is now an economically viable alternative to fossil fuels, and will be even
more so if we can eliminate the $450 billion a year in subsidies for the dirty
fuels. The third is that the fossil-fuel companies are without doubt on the
defensive. From the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline to government
investigations into Exxon’s cover up of its own climate research, the behavior
of this industry is finally on view. True, it is still quite powerful in
Congress, but the combination of science, economics, and exposure is sounding
the industry’s death knell. As we’ve already seen with coal, I predict that oil
and gas won’t survive the mounting pressure to “keep it in the ground.” And
that brings me to my fourth reason for hope: the growth of a global grassroots
movement for climate justice and ecological sanity. It has taken a long time
for us to get here, but it’s now unstoppable.
Robin
Bronen, executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice
and a senior research scientist at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Reason
for despair: Living in Alaska, the only Arctic state in the United States, I am
witnessing the fast-forward of geologic time. My despair increases as I watch
Arctic ecosystems collapse. The recently negotiated Paris Climate Agreement
includes aspirational language to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5
degrees Celsius.
But in
Alaska, winter temperatures have already increased 3.5 degrees Celsius since
1975. Ice and snow, iconic elements of the land and sea in the Arctic, are
disappearing. The winter of 2014-2015 was the lowest snow season on record in
Anchorage, Alaska’s largest urban center. Glaciers are losing 75 billion tons
of ice annually. Arctic Ocean sea ice has decreased by 36 percent in the last
three decades.
For
indigenous communities in Alaska, these changes are life-threatening. Kivalina,
Shishmaref, and Newtok, are three of the most imperiled communities. Each has
chosen to relocate as a long-term adaptation strategy because sea ice no longer
protects their communities from hurricane-force storms that eat the land on
which they live. In presentations to U.S. government agencies and
Congress, Shishmaref residents plead:
The no
action option for Shishmaref is the annihilation of our community …
We are
unique, and need to be valued as a national treasure by the people of the
United States. We deserve the attention and help of the American people and the
federal government ... Shishmaref, we are worth saving.
Due to
intense and prolonged advocacy efforts, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and
President Obama traveled to Alaska this past summer. Despite these visits, no
community knows when or if it will be able to relocate to higher ground to
protect their unique way of life and connection to the land of their ancestors.
The gross injustice of their experience adds to my despair because those who
have done the least to cause our climate crisis are bearing enormous losses.
Their experience also shows that we are completely unprepared to respond to the
humanitarian crisis which will be caused by rising seas forcing millions of
people from their homes, their heritage, and the places they love.
Reason
for hope: Solidarity—the recognition that all of humanity is connected to
each other and to the Earth—gives me hope. This understanding that we are one
people living on a shared homeland is embedded in the climate-justice movement.
The
Arctic, the harbinger of dramatic environmental changes, reminds us of this
connection. Decreased Arctic sea ice affects the polar jet stream and
contributes to the drought in California and the epic flooding and snowfall
events in lower latitudes. The melting of Greenland threatens coastal
communities all over the world. More than 50 percent of Greenland was melting
in July 2015. In protests across the planet, people are standing together,
across countries, Indigenous nations, ethnicities, age, gender, and class to
demand that our human rights be protected, that the Earth’s ecosystems be
protected and that those least responsible for our climate crisis be provided
the resources to adapt and protect their lives.
Gernot
Wagner, senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund
Reason
for despair: Climate change. It’s the perfect
problem: more global, more long-term, more irreversible, and more
uncertain that virtually any other public-policy problem facing us. Climate
change is a lot worse than most of us realize. Almost regardless of what we do
on the mitigation front, we are in for a whole lot of hurt.
On the
policy front, we have now talked for more than 20 years about how we need to
turn this ship around “within a decade.” Not unlike the ever-elusive fusion
technology, that hasn’t happened yet. Global carbon emissions declined slightly
this year—for the first time ever without a global recession—but the trends are
still pointing in the wrong direction. Worse, turning around emissions is only
the very first step. It’s not enough to stabilize the flow of water going into
the bathtub when the goal is to prevent the tub from overflowing. We need to
turn around atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. That means turning
off the flow of water into the tub—getting net emissions to zero and below. It
doesn’t help our efforts that many people seem to confuse the two. A study involving over 200 MIT graduate studentsfaced
with this same question revealed that even they confuse emissions and
concentrations—water flowing into the tub and water levels there. If MIT
graduate students can’t get this one right, what hope is there for the rest of
us?
Reason
for hope: Climate change. Many signs point to some real momentum to finally
tackle this momentous challenge.
The
Paris Climate Accord builds an important foundation. It enables transparency,
accountability, and markets to help solve the problem. Many governments are
moving forward with pricing carbon: from California to China, from Sweden to
South Africa, we see ambitious action to reign in emissions in some 50
jurisdictions. Meanwhile, lots is happening on the clean-energy front. That’s
particularly true for solar photovoltaic power, which has climbed up the
learning curve—and down the cost curve—faster than most would have expected
only five years ago. That has also provided an important jolt for sensible climate policy.
Then there’s R&D for entirely new technologies. Bill Gates leading an
investment coalition with $1 billion of his own money is only one important
sign of movement in that direction. The excitement for self-driving, electric
vehicles is palpable up and down Silicon Valley, to name just one potentially
significant example. In the end, it’s precisely this mix of Silicon Valley,
Wall Street, and, of course, Washington that will lead—and, in part, is already
leading—to the necessary revolution in a number of important sectors, energy
and transportation chief among them.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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