The Hope Beyond “Emissions Reduction Only”
A first responder admonition is: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” When in urgent-mode, with fight/flight engaged, it’s hard for humans to use our prefrontal cortex to rationally think through the big picture and choose the most strategic actions. Our central nervous system’s fight or flight response steers us into narrowed vision and simple actions — that is, if we aren’t overwhelmed entirely, paralyzed by the freeze response. This brain wiring is super for escaping animal predators through a variety of means; not so much the big, diffuse, complex science/technology problem besetting us with climate change.
A wise, sophisticated, big-picture response can be trained. Doctors spend years (decades, sometimes) in training, so they can react quickly and appropriately in acute situations. No university as yet graduates climate doctors. So we, concerned citizens around the world, need to jump in alongside the best and brightest, and make up this new field as we go.
Global fossil fuel emissions continue to rise. Meanwhile, we advocates of emissions reduction and cap-and-trade policies have yet to make a convincing political case that these efforts will effectively counter the threats from extreme weather that people are recognizing, across the political spectrum. Understanding the role of fight/flight/freeze can help.
One-by-one and as a human community, an essential first step for dealing with climate change is to realize we are in the midst of a climate emergency. That sense of animating urgency is life-saving. It engages our sympathetic nervous system’s fight response, which drives us non-avoidantly toward a desired outcome; and flight can help us work to escape undesired outcomes. [Freeze is helpful biologically for rendering prey less visible or convincing a predator the prey is too long-dead to eat — but not so helpful in our climate crisis].
There is an effective path forward. Embracing it will require a deep breath, a quick pause, and reassessment of the current full-force efforts by many within climate activism.
Here is what may be news: Some of our climate actions have the drivenness of someone performing immediate CPR on a friend who collapses in an empty building. These actions, if they’re all we do, are doomed to fail, despite giving it our best effort.
There is a small window of time during which a person in this situation might realize the need to rush to an entrance, find good cell reception, and call for help.
This hypothetical situation has too-real parallels with our global climate situation. On one level, the analogy fails in practical terms: Emissions reduction is a preventive measure — akin to stopping smoking when diagnosed with lung cancer. However, the CPR analogy holds because of the way many of us, well-intentioned, threw ourselves into the most obvious way to help, without imagining that long-term survival demands a different, though complementary, approach.
The long-term, indeterminate, and so-far limited effectiveness of “climate solutions” to which we activists initially gravitated (emissions reduction, wise cap-and-trade and decarbonization policies) is beginning to wear on folks. We’ve been limited in catalyzing the needed widespread political support. More and more people sense something is wrong and/or not enough with this approach. Perhaps if we’d gotten emissions reduction done fifty years ago it might have been enough. However, science is showing it is not the most critical action during today’s quickly-narrowing time window.
The suite of what are commonly considered climate solutions are more preventive measure than treatment, though many of us leaped into supporting them as critical care. And perhaps they were, in a sense: The jump-start needed to get society thinking about climate urgency. Unfortunately, what enough people do not yet understand is that emissions reduction cannot fit the category of acute treatment. Why? Because of how long CO2 stays in the air. Emissions reduction will affect the atmosphere only on the time-frame of centuries, if at all.
Some people are correctly beginning to suspect that the current trajectory is too little, too late. We need an approach that fully acknowledges present risks and moves the dial — acute treatment. One way to transition into effective treatment mode is to focus on the clear-and-present danger of extreme weather. No need to wait for a future 1.5–2.0+ global average temperature rise. Extreme weather is here now, threatening national and international economic stability, harming public health, occasionally hammering agriculture, and devastating people’s homes and lives.
You probably know the drill: longer wildfire seasons with more intense fires and smoke, more flooding, stalled hurricanes, worse freeze-outs and snowmaggedons, more intense tornadoes and many-state windstorms (derechos), worse droughts, and killer heat waves.
With ice sheet instability and feedback loops in jet stream abnormalities, we may only have two years, four at the most, to recognize the not-enoughness of climate CPR/“emissions reduction only” preventive strategies (though important!) and seek additional care — the equivalent of speeding global climate to the hospital for life-saving treatment.
People who saw the problem and acted deserve kudos. And the need for learning continues. We have an opportunity to look up from what can be an over-focus on emissions reduction to consider what medical treatment can save the patient. The science, once encountered, is clear enough for most everyone to understand [check out the three graphical presentations on the CO2 Foundation homepage]. Newish science, since 2008, on CO2 storage time and emerging understandings of how extreme weather is driven by jet stream loops, show the need for an expanded understanding of “climate solutions.”
What tunnel-vision from the threat response leaves out
To pause and muse about long-term considerations can be deadly when a predator is about to leap. Now, in the midst of the more-complex climate emergency, to recognize that our fight/flight/freeze response has been engaged helps us make a wise choice… To remember the human nervous system is supposed to degrade our long-term, big-picture thinking in a survival situation. Once we know this we can choose to compensate for the tunnel-vision.
We need to pause and learn about the carbon cycle and how the Arctic is warming more quickly than the rest of the planet — resulting in more extreme weather in the northern hemisphere. This impacts what climate solutions are planet-sized. Plus, there are several challenges in how climate ideas are discovered and communicated to account for.
The old approaches, followed by improved responses, include:
- Then — focusing on a gradual, future increase in average temperatures. Now — the clear and present danger from extreme weather.
- Then — assuming a quick natural cleanup after zero emissions is achieved, based on the incorrect notion that excess CO2 behaves like air pollution, gives false assurance. Now — accepting that, instead of dissipating quickly, there will be an inevitably centuries-long scrubbing of the atmosphere’s excess CO2 (left up to nature), during which time extreme weather will continually increase.
- Then, and now — continue to turn down the faucet (reduce emissions). Now — even more important is to create life-saving drains to empty the already-full atmospheric bathtub of fossil fuel CO2. Our global economic, technological, food supply, security, and public health systems show signs of drowning in extreme weather, which growing Arctic feedback loops will only make worse.
(These ideas are expanded upon in my article, “The 1,000 Year Ouch.”)
The only prospect left to humans that might walk back the growing effects of extreme weather is to remove excess carbon dioxide from the air. Yes, it may be too late to return to life as normal for adults today. On the other hand, there may still be time for our children and grandchildren if we act quickly on comprehensive, life-saving responses to remove CO2. They must meet these essential criteria: Big enough, fast enough, and sure-fire enough (immune to economic crashes and terrorism), with the fewest side-effects.
Working with our natural responses to danger
If you are one who recognizes the gravity of the climate situation and has engaged in actions to make it better, thank you. Your sympathetic nervous system is engaged in a life-saving response of fight to improve the situation. An upside of flight is when it impels us to work hard to avoid extreme weather/climate disruptions. On the other hand, flight often shows up as people’s refusal to believe climate change is real or as severe as described, or when we willfully distract ourselves — a response to which all have recourse, at least now and again. The human nervous system’s response of freeze has gripped many, because of the immensity of the problem. We may feel like we’re moving slowly through molasses, or overwhelmed and stalled out.
When we notice we have become immobilized by fear/overwhelm (which, again, is a natural human response to a terrifying situation), we can pause and ground ourselves, settling the nervous system enough to reengage our best mental/emotional capacities. The iChill app and any of Gina Ross’s books are superb for this, plus point the way to other effective resources.
Advanced climate medical care
The human population has a brief window of time in which to move action to the next level, before global economic and societal hits from extreme weather render null the possibility of wise deployment of effective climate-repair technologies — ones capable of safeguarding natural and human populations. The hope of such technologies centers around a field still in its infancy, collectively known as carbon dioxide removal technologies, or CDRs.
Fortunately, some scientists and technologists have made significant efforts to develop a variety of carbon dioxide removal technologies. However, these projects confront numerous challenges for getting the word out and coming to scale, despite practitioners’ efforts.
- Due to traditional professional boundaries, climate scientists, tagged by society as the main climate change “problem solvers,” are often uninformed about the work of climate technologists. This creates silos that hinder developing the technologies and getting sound scientific evaluation of projects.
- Perhaps as a manifestation of the freeze response, the majority of projects for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) still assume a backdrop of gradual global over-heating, with the goal of projects at scale in 50–100 years. The ideal would be to plan with the urgent threats to civilization from here-and-now extreme weather in mind, for which project completion within ~20 years is best.
- Most nascent CDR technologies are focused on making money for the originators. In part, this is because of the need to pay for research and prototypes. The array of market-driven CDRs may thus be more complex (because developers seek patents) and expensive than is necessary for effective broad deployment. In addition, technically complex and market-driven solutions may become unserviceable in a severe economic crash.
- Carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDRs) are still mostly bottom-up — arising from technologists’ and scientists’ sometimes narrow professional interests, not yet adequately balanced by encompassing, top-down criteria focused on the common good: Big, fast, sure-fire, and with the fewest side-effects.
- The field is hindered by both a lack of government-level funding that recognizes CDRs’ importance to the common good, and lack of adequate and wise policy oversight. Government leaders and the public are still under-informed about the urgency of climate action due to extreme weather, and/or focused solely on the most obvious climate intervention — CPR-like “emissions reduction only.”
These institutional challenges are complex, and can be improved with more widespread public awareness as climate activists learn about, influence, and champion the best carbon dioxide removal proposals. Some climate activists who don’t understand the underlying science have decried CDRs on the basis of “moral hazards” and “technological hubris.” But important insights and cautions of climate activists are lost when folks write off the whole field. Unfortunately, the science that makes CDRs essential—that “1,000 year ouch” again — is clear. Fortunately, a growing number of climate activists do acknowledge the necessity of CDRs, especially since the need for them was included in the latest IPCC report [this article provides an overview, though excludes ocean-based CDR systems (where so much of the planet’s photosynthesis occurs) and the urgency of extreme weather]. The sooner more activists get up to speed on the field and its complexities, the better we can contribute to wise decision-making.
This is the best time for climate activists to become knowledgeable participants in the effort to develop CDRs. As extreme weather escalates, at some point the need for carbon dioxide removal interventions will be irrefutable — and Hail Mary passes will become the order of the day. Will these interventions be big enough, fast enough, and sure-fire, with the fewest side effects? Unlikely. Our prospects will be enhanced if today’s climate activists, the natural first-response allies of CDR technologists, who are also trying to better the situation, work together to ensure attention to climate justice and a common-good approach.
We can celebrate that “emissions reduction only” actions, while unable to solve the problem, reflect a constructive desire and do help. Imagine how much worse the global emissions curve would be without these efforts! At the same time, key scientific details call for us to keep an open mind and continue learning. Easier said than done when fight/flight has narrowed the vision. Yet possible.
Risks
The longer activists focused on “emissions reduction only” wait, the more out-of-touch this approach will appear in light of the latest science and lived experience of people who now see the urgency of extreme weather. Linking climate change responses to extreme weather has the potential to garner support from across the political spectrum, especially if easily-imaginable solutions that include CDRs follow close behind. Those in the climate activism field are still best positioned to get word out and educate government leaders. It would be an absolute pity to squander this reputational advantage.
More importantly…
The longer we wait, the more likely that eventual climate-rescue treatments will be too small, too slow, too prone to failure, and with damaging side-effects.
Now is the time to demand of our political leaders the large-scale investment in researching and building what is the equivalent of “climate hospitals.” To save the patient, who is not only the planet, but us, we must remove excess CO2 from the air. Instead of becoming discouraged, acceptance of the need to repair and heal the climate can give us hope.
What to do going forward
The “Do something — Anything!” impulse of the fight/flight response may kick in. A better alternative is to breathe, steady ourselves, and nurture access to our big-picture, complexity-handling wisdom — the prefrontal cortex. Keep learning, keep training, keep reassessing.
The so-natural freeze response may kick in — a sinking feeling that there is too much to do and the prospects are bleak. That does not stop dedicated health care professionals, who often succeed against daunting odds.
We as specialists and members of the general public have an opportunity to become ever better schooled in the field of “climate medicine.” Whatever else we do, we can do this, too.
If you see value in this story, please tweet or email it to your favorite climate activist(s).
Special thanks to Dr. William Calvin, with whom I worked at the CO2 Foundation from 2018–2020. Bill is a “climate clinician” — an emeritus professor of the University of Washington Medical School. He’s followed and explained climate science to the general public for 35 years. He introduced me to wise climate treatment and relevance of medical analogies for the climate emergency.
Please learn more about my work at Patreon/ClimateMinister
