Issue of the Week: Environment, Population, Hunger, Disease, Economic Opportunity, War, Human Rights, Personal Growth

Published August 7, 2018

The End of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Four.

In the US today, one of the many forest fires in California reached the point of being the largest fire on record in California history.

California is the world’s fifth largest economy, passing the UK two months ago.

The decision some time ago by the US under the new Trump Administration to not abide by the Paris Climate Agreement was another marker of the end of civilization as we knew it.

In reality, the agreement was toothless and the exclamation point on failures to reach an actual treaty on the issue going back decades. But it was also the only thin possibility left to build on internationally, to take far more radical action needed—not to avoid horrible suffering, too late for that—but hopefully to avoid complete catastrophe. The entire direction on environmental issues by the US now, domestically and globally, is terrifying.

The US, and the world, are going through another summer of record-breaking environmental disasters.

And the frightening scientific reports continue, a number recently, including today. We leave the researching of the above to the readers.

On these issues, China, a capitalist state dictatorship, now the world’s largest nation by population, and India, the largest democracy on earth, challenged by nationalism, and soon to be the largest nation by population as well, have equal significance to the US. More in environmental impact in many ways now.

But China and India are also more pushed internally to act because of greater clear and present intolerable environmental damage, conflicting, as everywhere, with international reliance on the old model of growth created largely by the US and EU nations.

The EU (with others) is barely holding the Paris Agreement together, while it has been challenged more than ever to hold itself together.

In the end, the US must lead. Thus, at the moment, we stare more deeply into the abyss.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine devoted virtually the entire issue to one article.

On climate change.

And how it was almost averted 30 years ago.

It is a strange, and yet not strange at all fact, that the starting point of the decade that almost led to this happening, was virtually the same time the opportunity to end hunger, as the focus of a US-led commitment to provide basic needs for all, also almost happened.

It was all inter-related then and is now.

It all then, and does now, need to happen simultaneously and sustainably, to work.

For some time after various events we have visited on world hunger and related issues occurred, and to which we will return as noted, hunger became the issue du jour.

This contributed to both getting something meaningful done and to avoiding the real issues involved over time in favor of, compared to systemic change, token action. In looking back, the opportunity for decisive action had probably passed, and even with the progress made, vastly more suffering has and will occur for all humanity–until the moment is created again and acted upon, likely by force of events.

The next issue du jour was climate change (this doesn’t include event-driven issues such as the sudden discovery of the HIV-AIDS pandemic, also related to all other interdependent issues, but a different dynamic, and different outcome hopefully, worth exploring separately again, as we have before, another time). By the time it was, the moment for decisive action had also probably passed–until the moment is created again and acted upon, likely by force of events. Hopefully in time to survive.

If there is time. Some argue persuasively there is. Others not. Virtually all say radical action is needed immediately, as with its companion issues of a sustainable life on earth for all, before enormous preventable additional suffering and death occur.

The long read on climate change in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine does not attempt to entirely explain the interrelationships of basic needs, rights and environmental issues, and it misses some important things in this regard.

But this really could not be less relevant to its importance. It tells an extraordinary story most people don’t know that impacts everything else.

It is a mini-book. And a must read, to put it mildly. An awakening.

It was published online a week ago tomorrow.

It’s been in the top ten most read (for days at number one) for a week.

Here’s the Editor’s Note and Prologue, with the link at the end to the article, photography and video.

“Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change”

By Nathaniel Rich. Photographs and Videos by George Steinmetz

AUG. 1, 2018:

Editor’s Note

This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it. Jake Silverstein

Prologue

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the “greenhouse effect” — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring,” and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.” The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. More than 30 percent of the human population lacked access to electricity. Billions of people would not need to attain the “American way of life” in order to drastically increase global carbon emissions; a light bulb in every village would do it. A report prepared at the request of the White House by the National Academy of Sciences advised that “the carbon-dioxide issue should appear on the international agenda in a context that will maximize cooperation and consensus-building and minimize political manipulation, controversy and division.” If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at the first World Climate Conference in Geneva, when scientists from 50 nations agreed unanimously that it was “urgently necessary” to act. Four months later, at the Group of 7 meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the world’s seven wealthiest nations signed a statement resolving to reduce carbon emissions. Ten years later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than 60 nations attended, with the goal of establishing a global summit meeting to be held about a year later. Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.

The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga is over. In that chapter — call it Apprehension — we identified the threat and its consequences. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds. But we did not seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? Why did we do this to ourselves? These questions will be the subject of climate change’s second chapter — call it The Reckoning. There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.

That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours.

“Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change”

To be continued.