The COP26 climate change talks just ended in Stockholm and Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist, told the world the truth about what went on. She summed up the conference as “they even succeeded in watering down the blah blah blah.”
While analysts such as John Kerry who are deeply involved in the give and take of climate negotiations may disagree with Greta’s big-picture view of the conference, it has hard for me not to defer to Greta. Her generation’s lives will be cut short by our collective failure and they know it. In fact, COP26 proved what they and I already suspected. Humanity is incapable of dealing with climate change in a meaningful way.
Look at the big picture. People were living basic, simple, local lives until the steam engine was perfected in 1720 and internal combustion changed everything. We started to move around by burning coal and we started to manufacture things. Burning coal and oil fueled our collective change from a horse and buggy society to the era of the space station and Tesla motors. Our economy is deeply rooted in fossil fuels. Billions of vehicles run on oil products, millions of buildings are heated by fossil fuels. Worse, the fossil fuel industry employs millions of people and they have the best lobbyists in Washington making sure their grip on our economy stays firm.
Pause to think about oil and coal. These fuels are the fossilized remains of millions of billions of plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. We are burning the biomass that existed on earth 300 million years ago. On top of that, we are burning much of the biomass that exists on the earth now. We imagine that the atmosphere can endure this assault? The atmosphere is only about 10 miles thick and most of it has too little oxygen to support life. Yet we fantasize that we can pump infinite amounts of pollution into this thin layer.
Other Countries
Other countries around the world depend even more on fossil fuels than the U.S.. Russia has only a rudimentary economy outside of its oil production to sell to its dependent European adversaries. Several Middle Eastern countries have almost no income other than oil revenue.
China is building 350 coal plants now, though it seems to have peaked with the coal burning. And China has been building coal plants for developing countries through its Belt and Road initiative. China is a dictatorship. Likewise, India depends on coal and oil. Will these countries rapidly switch to wind, solar, and nuclear? How do they restructure an economy dependent on oil exports after the begin to produce green energy domestically?
At some point Americans need to come to terms with the fact that we’ve outsourced most of our air and water pollution to China. And how about all the air pollution from shipping massive amounts of plastic merchandise from China to the US? Out of sight, out of mind….
Getting it Right
There is no question among honest people that climate change is rapidly overtaking humanity. Storms, fires, drought, diminishing rivers, heatwaves in the north, disappearing ice at the poles, water shortages in California etc. These symptoms are all familiar and they are killing lots of people.
And these events are just getting started while the extinction of millions of species in nature is speeding up. We don’t understand our relationship with most other species. At what point does the loss of a key species ally push us over an edge?
Elizabeth Kolbert points out in the New Yorker that COP26 was a tepid meeting where little of force and substance was decided. She also points out that all the previous climate summits accomplished very little if anything and that most countries don’t keep their promises anyway. Like Greta, I conclude these meetings may help remind people of the disaster, but we don’t take enough meaningful steps as a result. They are good exercises in group document writing.
And when President Biden told the COP26 summit that America is back at the table, nobody took him seriously because they know he barely has a majority in Washington and they know his opponents will reverse all his efforts on climate change when they assume the presidency, as soon as 2024. Maybe some of his efforts will outlast him. We can hope.
We can look at our personal health as an apt analogy. We can bop along in life doing things and feeling great until we get a diagnosis of a major disease from the doctor. Many people put all their attention into overcoming the disease so they can live longer. Some people go into denial and die young (like many unvaccinated conservatives dying of Covid today). Climate change is a diagnosis of major heart disease for the entire planet. Nature will dictate the terms, not politicians or corporate leaders, or think tanks or self-serving former presidents.
In fact, to solve the problem, we (everyone in the developed world) would need to change our lifestyles today. Today. (But we do little.) Our governments need to make climate change the top priority and dedicate massive resources to building clean energy generation and shutting down coal and oil fueled power plants. Instead Congress argues about the smallest steps in the right direction.
What to Do
We need to convert our entire transportation system to electricity but only after we’ve built adequate renewable energy capacity and modernized the grid to handle the huge load those vehicles will put on the grid. We could cut our red meat consumption by 80% because of many ways meat production damages the atmosphere. We might stop killing the oceans with petroleum based fertilizers and overfishing. We need to stop wasting energy on unnecessary activities like manufacturing cheap plastic junk that clogs our landfills weeks after it leaves the factories.
This needs to happen fast if we are to avert multiple huge problems from weather disasters (floods in British Columbia for example) to mass dislocations of millions of people in low elevation countries, mass starvation from crop failures, and wars sparked by drought and resource shortages in places like Israel and Africa.
All of this would be extremely difficult without our personal and collective investment in government subsidized fossil fuels. But the problem is made effectively impossible by the fact that a large portion of our society is opposed to taking any action on the problem at all.
Denial and Opposition
The Donald Trump movement in America (which has taken over the former republican party) sees the climate crisis as a hoax and a front on their culture war. Trump opposed environmental protections while he was in office. He gutted environmental regulations and filled the EPA with oil industry people. He removed protections from public lands and opened much of the public estate to oil leasing.
Trump’s movement is gaining power in American politics, and they are fast changing election systems to prevent their loss of power in the foreseeable future. From putting partisans in charge of elections, to keeping democrats and independents from voting, to gerrymandering key states, to electing red hats to legislatures and governor’s offices where they can thwart action on climate change, these people want nothing to do with international cooperation or anything that arises outside of their circles.
Before 2016, many republicans and democrats agreed that environmental protection was necessary and important even if they had different approaches to reaching common goals. Now we face a radicalized republican party that offers no ideas to counter democratic initiatives on climate and conservation. The Trump movement punishes republicans who compromise or work with democrats. Trumplicans vilify scientists. Our society is tearing at the seams.
Looking Ahead
When I visit young people with young babies and I see the love and excitement in their eyes, I worry. I don’t feel much hope for these children. I see the lives of their parents being ruined by climate change well before these kids come to adulthood. The problem is not in the future. It is rapidly overtaking us and dominating our lives already. We can rationalize and deny but nature will dictate what happens from here.
Collectively we’ve made choices for generations that have led us to the disaster unfolding around us. We were warned 4 generations ago about greenhouse gasses and we did nothing. Daily the news warns us that the problem is very real, and still we do too little.
Our urbanized society seems to see nature as antique or irrelevant. It is a place to go take a walk or a drive. We have a deep belief that technology will solve our problems if we keep working on new technology constantly. We focus on the near field of view – on our children, our immediate lives. This is entirely natural but the climate crises demands we raise our eyes and grow up.
We don’t control nature except on the margins. Nature is fully in charge. Disbelieving this fact is irrelevant. Nature will deal with the chain reaction we have set in motion like it deals with ice ages and asteroid collisions.
At what point will the feedback loop of greenhouse gas emissions slow or stop in the future? We don’t know and nature is already contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere because of the emissions we fail to control. For example, as permafrost melts in the Arctic, it releases methane.
Huge climate warming disasters happened long before humanity (60 million years ago for example). Nature rebuilt the beautiful biological world and the atmosphere, but it took millions of years. Humanity is such a major disaster for the natural world. But nature has time to rebuild after we are gone or surviving in much lower numbers. Nature has all the time in the world. We are just a tiny blip. A spark, a falling star.
- Tom Ribe
(I know this is a depressing and pessimistic assessment. I encourage people to work hard on the climate problem so we can limit the damage in the near and long term. Working on the problem means changing your own lifestyle, supporting groups that work on climate issues like EDF and NRDC, voting as if this issue matters etc.)
