I’m more hopeful on climate than The NYTimes in “Losing Earth”
Today the New York Times boldly devotes its entire Sunday Magazine to Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.
It’s presented as “a tragedy in two acts.” It says we’re all the problem. How many people will see that as a reason to give up? What about Act Three? Can we be the solution?
This story gives the subject the weight it deserves. It suggests we talk all the time about how we feel about climate change and what we can do now. It helps that we have good news in the global campaigns to get off fossil fuels. And the recently published Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken, has spread the recognition that we can actually reverse global warming, not just slow down its impacts or avoid its worst consequences.
This gripping reporting by Nathaniel Rich chronicles a decade of missed opportunities through the experiences of activist Rafe Pomerance, who spent the 80s waking people up, and scientist James Hansen, who took his role as citizen as equally important.
It begins and ends darkly. But where does the article leave us? Many people will conclude we’re cooked: we lost too much time and too many opportunities. I see it differently.
Where Hansen ends up
He and his team have concluded that the only way to avoid dangerous levels of warming is to bend the emissions arc below the x-axis. We must, in other words, find our way to “negative emissions,” extracting more carbon dioxide from the air than we contribute to it. If emissions, by miracle, do rapidly decline, most of the necessary carbon absorption could be handled by replanting forests and improving agricultural practices. If not, “massive technological CO₂ extraction,” using some combination of technologies as yet unperfected or uninvented, will be required.Hansen estimates that this will incur costs of $89 trillion to $535 trillion this century, and may even be impossible at the necessary scale. He is not optimistic.
MY TAKE: I’m thrilled Hansen highlights the need for “negative emissions.” Of course we must switch from fossil fuels to renewables ASAP. But we can’t reach even the stop there. We can’t reach even the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement without removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The American Geophysical Union proposes “climate intervention” to counter centuries of destructive geoengineering inflicted on our planet. We can set new goals: to return our air and water to pre-industrial quality levels. “Unperfected and not invented” is not a direct quote from Hansen, and I await his conclusions that the solutions can scale and the costs will be lower. (By the way, even $500 trillion is only a few times our annual global product. It will be too bad if we decide the benefits don’t outweigh the costs!)
How Pomerance sees it
It is true that much of the damage that might have been avoided is now inevitable. And Pomerance is not the romantic he once was. But he still believes that it might not be too late to preserve some semblance of the world as we know it. Human nature has brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. Rational argument has failed in a rout. Let irrational optimism have a turn. It is also human nature, after all, to hope.
MY TAKE:Yes, human determination and ingenuity can save us. “Hope is a word with its sleeves rolled up,” says Oberlin Prof. David Orr. I’ve been a full-time volunteer on climate awareness and solutions for many years. This year, I began working as a strategic advisor to an emerging new organization, the Healthy Climate Alliance, with a hopeful new goal: give our children a climate as healthy as our grandparents had. And I’m working with a “climate restoration ecosystem” emerging in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere of projects and companies looking for the enormous opportunities in Air Miners and related efforts.
I’ve noticed people talk about “the planet, the environment, the climate” as if they were far-away abstractions. But it’s “our planet, our environment, our climate.” And it’s not too late if we start right now!
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FOOTNOTE: Losing Earth gives only one perspective on why 1979–89 unfolded as it did, and many are questioning its explanations, especially of the motivations and impacts from the actions of the people and institutions involved. While appreciating the impulses of the author and of the NY Times, I share the views of many of the critiques. Here are a few — if it takes you two hours to read the article, these will be quicker! (UPDATE: as compelling new responses appear, I’ll add them to this list.)
- The Problem With The New York Times’ Big Story on Climate Change: By portraying the early years of climate politics as a tragedy, the magazine lets Republicans and the fossil-fuel industry off the hook by Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic
- The New York Times Fails to Name and Shame Climate Villains What it gets right and wrong in its blockbuster story, by Rebecca Lieber in Mother Jones
- Looking for the Enemy: NYT Magazine’s Nathaniel Rich Goes Full Pogo by Hunter Cutting in Medium
- Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature” by Naomi Klein in The Intercept
- Scientists aren’t impressed with New York Times’ new story on climate change by Joseph Romm in Climate Progress
