Fate of the World, 2016

I was born with environment in the blood. My father is a world expert on some fiddly specialty, and one of my first memories is of him making me and my sister a spreadsheet about all the different kinds of power plants, and what is good and bad about each. From the moment I learned that my father wasn’t going to single-handedly stop global warming, I have been torn between throwing my hat into the ring to stop it myself, or running away to live as a hermit, and leaving the world to burn. When I learned I could get paid to do the former, the choice was made for me.

I have lived an itinerant lifestyle my whole life. When people ask me where I am from, I say “earth”. I was born and raised here and I never plan to leave. I have however lived in 6 countries on 4 continents in the past 10 years, and don’t plan to settle down in one place for a long time to come.

This global gypsie lifestyle means I have never grown the deep roots that most people do. I have not watched a beloved homeland slowly twist as it’s climate undergoes historically unprecedented shifts of some kind. What I have seen, though, is how there are shifts of some kind every place I go. In Paris, heat waves have come in summer. The first one was in 2003, and killed over 15,000. We thought it was a freak global warming event, like hurricane Katrina, which would have been bad enough. But then it came again in ’06. And again in 2010, and 2012. Now it pretty much comes every year.

In New England, it’s the ocean temperatures are changing, wrecking lobsters’ migration habits. In Kenya, and in California, its drought. In Britain, floods. In Philippines, summers are getting hotter. There are some places on earth where people have the luxury to disbelieve in global warming, but they are getting rarer and rarer. I watched my uncle realize that global warming was not really something he could discount any more as every year his lobster harvest on cape cod got thinner and thinner. He went from ‘this is a fluke’ to ‘what is going on’ to ‘Oh. Climate change. The pundit deniers are wrong’ over the past few years.

I have been aware of global warming since before many of my fellow millennials were born, and long before knowledge of it entered into the zeitgeist. This has meant I have had ample time to watch the political and economic establishment deal with the problem. And what they have dealt with is the big problem of people finding out about global warming, and their resultant terrifying shift to the left. Between 1990 and 2012, when something should have been done about the problem, it was instead the height of freewheeling neoliberalism. Quite a bit of effort was put into not talking about global warming, equating it with other problems we had solved, like ozone depletion, and of course, growing the economy. On aggregate every dollar of GDP has an associated puff of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere.

This means that I am not an environment optimist. Back in ’95 when we talked about acting before it was too late, 2016 was well beyond the ‘too late’ deadline we were talking about. The problem with global warming, though, is that that doesn’t mean we can just throw up our hands in despair. The longer we go on with business as usual, the worse it gets. These days, optimists talk about 1.5° of warming and doom criers like myself talk about 6°. But it we continue to burn coal with both cylinders, pop out teeming throngs of children, and spill plumes of methane into the atmosphere, there is actually no upper limit on how hot it can get. There have been times in earth’s history where palm trees grew on the poles.

In fact, geological records have a precedent for our current situation. There was once a species of plant, similar a water hyacinth, that grew on the surface of salt water, and did very well for itself. Over the course of its life cycle it would take carbon out of the air, to form its cell structure, and then when it died it would sink to the bottom of the ocean where the carbon couldn’t return to the air. These plants prospered, and in time began to have a significant effect on the makeup of the atmosphere, as they sucked CO2 into the depths. Not a happy ending unfortunately for our hyacinths, they eventually made the earth’s atmosphere so cold they extincted themselves.

We of course have a significant advantage over the hyacinths. We are brain-monkeys who know what we are doing ahead of time. Still, as of 2016, the intractability of our socioeconomic systems has meant that we have gained zero advantage over the hyacinths from our intellect. Hopefully that is set to change. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I and many like me plan to make a career out of changing it.

Now is a time of optimism for the movement. COP21 was heralded as a great climate breakthrough, but it is an open question whether the media would have heralded it as a great breakthrough no matter what had happened at the conference. Nonetheless some agreements were reached, that in practice mean mitigation efforts should start seeing some funding. 2015 will probably be remembered as the beginning of the solution, and if there isn’t a solution there will be no hyacinths left to remember. Too late, by any reasonable standard, but better late than never.

The question now become how we invest best to solve the problems, and that will likely be a question for the millennial generation. No pressure guys, just save the biosphere. A lot of millennials are directly employed in changing the diapers of aging boomers. Seems many more of us will be employed in cleaning up their messes in some way.

The other issue on the horizon is that the cost of global warming adaptation, like building higher sea walls. In this my pessimism remains. Adaptation costs will begin to rise as temperatures break through every cap people optimistically set, and there is a real possibility that spending on adaptation could crowd out mitigation. In other words, spending the solar panel money on sea walls and leaving the coal plant pumping. We need the percentage of our GDP dedicated to the “environmental” sector to keep climbing, as adaptation costs rise and we use all the low hanging fruit in terms of prevention. We can do all we can to cut costs, and increase efficiencies, but I’m afraid that by the 2030s we will need to be putting quantities of money into “environmentalism” that seem preposterous today. Or else the planet will just keep heating.

The take away of my pessimism is that at the end of the Bush era, it became fashionable to say that the Chinese proverb “may you live in interesting times” applied to us, and during the great recession the times were indeed interesting. Since the recovery, though, times have gone back to being happily boring. I am afraid it seems like that was just us hitting the snooze button, and that going forward times will get interesting again in a big way. Enjoy the boring while it lasts folks, maybe get some debts payed down, or have a fun love life, because the news is going to be taking up all you time again at some point, and very possibly stay that way for the rest of our lives. As for the environmental movement, let’s see how many solar panels we can put up before that huge ice sheet in Antarctica falls.