Of Kafka, CCS, suicide machines and so forth – End of Days Diary #10

So, The conversation, (full disclosure, I have written for it)  has got a couple of excellent articles you should read. One is a summary of air and sea temperatures, and what it all means. It doesn’t talk about the Atlantic sea ice issue. But you’ve got 1000 words, you can’t talk about everything. The second is an article based on a new academic paper, where it turns out that hurricanes have been pushing more heat into the ocean than we thought. So this is the another example of “gee, we we have been doing more damage than we thought.” We have persistently underestimated the consequences of our actions, partly through, I guess, optimism bias. And nobody likes a party pooper. And for me, it’s up there with how we keep finding that animals have intelligence when we test it the right way. But of course, we like eating and exploiting animals. More examples of impact science. 

The other thing that’s happened, and that I want to talk about is that I was an attendee, not a panelist, at a very good webinar about carbon capture and storage and the European Union. And if I were to summarize what everyone said, it was basically that “this is a whole value chain issue. The capture people are not going to really move until they see the storage people move, who are not going to move and to see that they see the transport people move.” The EU Commission is trying to send a signal to market and regulators. But it’s not clear to me that this will work.  And as I’ve said in my unanswered question, this is a huge collective action problem with all sorts of information disparities, discounting the future, bad faith actors, regulatory capture, you name it. And I asked the panelists, did any of them have a previous example where the policy was created that drove the speed and scale of change that was required. But because I asked that question quite late in the webinar, and the speakers had used up their time, it wasn’t addressed. Personally, I can’t think of one. 

This comes back to the question of if we had started taking climate change really seriously in 1988 89, when we said that we were taking it seriously. And if for example, the various industry and manufacturing groups had not been able to kill off an EU carbon tax, and if we had made incremental carbon savings year on year, and incentivized technological innovation and behavioral, societal innovation, then we wouldn’t be facing the radical cliff edge that we are now. But if my aunt had… 

And that, of course, would have required, oh, I don’t know, cross-border cross-jurisdiction, cross-sector clumsy coordination, which would only come about, I suspect, if we’d had vibrant social movements within an activated civil society that was constantly pushing and badgering and resisting the siren sounds of industry, calling for delay and magic pixie dust technologies in the future.

To be clear, I really hope that CCS works. But even if it does, I just can’t see it working at the speed and scale that it needs to me. And if it does “work”, ( the word work is doing a lot of, erm,  work in that sentence,) then there will still be the mitigation deterrence issue, only probably more so.

I just think there is such a thing as too late and leaving it too late. And I think we have, and I think that is going to become more and more obvious over the coming years. And I want to say decades, plural, but it might definitely be a decade, because I want to come back to that question of all the heat in the ocean that is gonna start coming out and coming at us. 

Yes, I’m great fun at parties. Why do you ask? Just don’t get me on the subject of why people are still breeding, or how the international capitalist economy/growth economy, which has been busy conflating itself with democracy, freedom and choice is actually a gigantic suicide machine. Like in that story by Kafka. Keep me on the safe topics like cricket, and Doctor Who, nobody gets hurt. 

So this is how it feels in the third decade of the 21st century. Knowing that we’re a smart species, but that we’re not smart enough. That we’re doomed because we haven’t been brave enough and imaginative enough in the past few decades, and the age of consequences is here. And we haven’t acted on the warnings from the scientists that started in the late 70s. And by the late 80s, these warnings were loud enough even for George HW Bush, and Margaret Thatcher to hear. Instead we pretended that carbon trading or space mirrors or solar panels would do it. To be clear – I’ve nothing particularly against solar panels, but for the most part they have been additional to, rather than replacing fossil fuels. Now that is, I think, changing in some jurisdictions but on the whole, only at the margins. And anyway, it’s not just our energy systems that needed decarbonizing, it was also transport, agriculture….  Well, everything really. 

And I just keep coming back to it. We were warned. Clearly. Are we are living with regrets, recrimination, fatalism, despair. Or obviously when you point to the scale of the problems you get accused of being a Doomer, or too much of a pessimist. I come back to the fun line about a pessimist is someone who says that glass is half empty whereas a realist is someone who says that glass is twice as big as it needs to be (or has twice as much volume as it needs to be, if we’re going to go full-Piaget).. 

Anyway, now I am officially beginning to burble. 

I think we do need some new words. And I think Glen Albrecht made the effort with his Earth Emotions book – a review of which never appeared, even though I wrote it. I should post it some time, actually. But then, words are only useful if the person on the receiving end has a tolerably similar understanding and it comes back to this question of collective emotional intelligence, which we don’t have and won’t have in the time left to us – sorry, collective emotional literacy, not intelligence. (Emotional Intelligence is slightly different. I think.)Okay, I’ve been blathering for almost 12 minutes. So that’s probably 1000 words. And if it isn’t, well, you’ve been short-changed today. And I’m sure that will be the least of your worries.