# Stolen Future, Broken Present

### The Human Significance of Climate Change

*David A. Collings*

Stolen Future, Broken Present

*Stolen Future, Broken Present* argues that we are virtually out of time to ward off severe, irreversible climate change. As a result, our future is in doubt and, with it, the entire purpose of our present activities. All of our projects – personal, familial, political, religious – are disabled at their core; the challenge is thus to

Written with uncompromising lucidity, David Collings' *Stolen Future, Broken Present* argues that we have not yet undergone the ethical and philosophical shifts necessary to cope with the temporal dissonance associated with climate change. This is a deeply necessary book at a time when many of us have already become numb to predictions of

Collings' book is a timely and necessarily provocative exploration of the intersection between climate change's volatile history, and an overdue rereading of Romanticism and poetics. This book will open a new mode of

David Collings is Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He is the author of *Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment* (1994) and *Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780-1848* (2009). He co-edited *Queer Romanticisms* with Michael O'Rourke (2004-2005)

Cover Image by Valerie Hegarty – Bierstadt with Holes, 2007, Foam core, paper, paint, wood,

create an ethics of the ruins.

environmental disaster.

*– Anne C. McCarthy, Penn State University*

*– Penny Fielding, University of Edinburgh*

glue, gel medium, plexiglass, 103 x 85 x 7 cm (close up)

*Series*: Critical Climate Change

thinking for the humanities of the twenty-first century.

and *Romanticism and Disaster* with Jacques Khalip (2012).

*Collings*

### Stolen Future, Broken Present

The Human Significance of Climate Change

#### **Critical Climate Change**

*Series Editors:* Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook

The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and realignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of 'life.' There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the interface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemopolitical mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation.

### Stolen Future, Broken Present

The Human Significance of Climate Change

*David A. Collings*

## OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

An imprint of Michigan Publishing University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor

2014

First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2014 Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12832550.0001.001

Copyright © 2014 David A. Collings

This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may have different copyright restrictions.

Cover Image Copyright © 2007 Valerie Hegarty, all rights reserved.

ISBN-13 978-1-60785-314-5

Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at Michigan Publishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP's editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form.

www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

## *Contents*

#### Introduction

Lately the news about climate change hasn't been good.

Once upon a time, not long ago, the scientific consensus held that the northern polar ice cap, under the pressure of global warming, would melt eventually—"in the latter part of the 21st century."1 That estimate, released in 2007, appeared around the same time as Al Gore's documentary, *An Inconvenient Truth*, and reaffirmed a widespread sense that if we did not act soon to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases, the worst effects of climate change could be dire indeed—but would transpire some decades into the future.2 The threat from that ice melt, and from climate change more generally, was real but not absolutely imminent: we had time to fight for change through the familiar processes of public debate, the gradual formation of public opinion, the eventual forging of a coalition for Congressional action, and the patient negotiation of an international treaty.

That estimate turned out to be much too optimistic. Only two years later, new estimates suggested that the Arctic Ocean would be free of ice in the summer as soon as 2030 or 2040.3 Thanks in part to the blistering pace with which global economies were emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the climate was reacting far more quickly than most researchers had previously projected. That shift in the forecast—along with similar shifts all across climate science—had immense implications for anyone who hoped to preserve the biosphere in anything like its present state into the future. The threat no longer loomed far off, near the end of the century, but was only two or three decades away. In the wake of this and other developments, those following the science on climate change felt a greater sense of urgency, knowing the international community better act immediately to ward off severe changes to the global climate. That imperative strained against the limits of national and international political traditions, raising difficult questions. How could scientists bring this news to bear on the thinking of leading politicians, who for the most part still used the estimates and targets set in the early 1990s? Furthermore, how could nations alter their fossil-fuel economies so dramatically in such a short period? What could possibly break through the impasse?

But as it now appears, even *that* estimate has turned out to be too optimistic in its turn. Three years later, the stunning melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2012 prompted scientists to rethink those earlier studies and to propose instead that the Arctic might be ice-free in late summer before 2020. Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, who researches the thickness of Arctic sea ice, now estimates that the Arctic will become ice-free in the summer well before the end of this decade, and perhaps as early as 2015 or 2016.4 So in five years, the threat of that dire event moved up from the last half of the *century* to the latter part of this *decade*, almost obliterating the opportunity for serious action. The year 2020, it seems, is the new 2100. So much for having time—even *minimal* time—to address this crisis. The questions instantly multiply: What are we supposed to do now?5 What political actions are even feasible? And how exactly are we to alter our economic systems to meet this challenge in time?

The news about the Arctic sea ice is bad enough: it tells us that a massive transformation in the climate of the northern hemisphere is well on its way. As the Arctic warms, the difference in temperature between the far northern zone and the temperate regions decreases, causing changes in the jet stream, which now moves more slowly and more often zigzags on its course to the east. As a result, it might swing over Texas, then pull warm air straight north over the Dakotas, causing midwinter warm spells all across the Midwest, or pull Arctic cold down into the Carolinas or even Florida, freezing areas that in the past hardly experienced such frigid weather. Furthermore, because it is moving more slowly, it can stall over certain regions and cause them to be hit with weather over longer periods—leading to longer spells of rain or snow and thus to more flooding or harsher winter storms. The same situation applies all across the northern hemisphere. Such is the "new normal" of our time.6

But that is not all. Much worse news awaits. The melting of the Arctic sea ice will lead to substantially higher temperatures in the sea itself, high enough potentially to melt methane clathrates—frozen remains of organic life—deposited on the seabed on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf and cause the resulting methane gas to escape through the sea and into the open air. Scientists have long known about these submerged deposits of clathrates, but since most such deposits around the world rest far beneath the ocean surface in cold waters, they were not overly concerned that climate change would cause them to melt any time soon. But the situation on that Arctic continental shelf is different: it is so shallow—often only around fifty meters below the surface—that the clathrates there are vulnerable to rising temperatures on the ocean's surface. So it is not surprising that the warming in the Arctic has already triggered the initial stages of this process.

In March 2010, a team of Russian scientists led by Igor Semiletov and Natalia Shakhova published a study documenting a major clathrate melt on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a melt that is releasing quantities "on par with previous estimates of methane venting from the entire World Ocean."7 Because methane is around twenty-six times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though much less short-lived in the atmosphere, and because there are enormous deposits of frozen methane crystals in that region of the sea, as in many of the world's oceans, the National Science Foundation issued a press release stating, "Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming."8 On returning to that region of the Arctic in summer 2011, the research team found much larger "torch-like structures" of escaping methane than before, some a kilometer across, suggesting that they may have to raise their estimates of the volume of the clathrate melt; the most recent rate of methane emissions astonished the very scientists who have long been researching this phenomenon.9

But even that is not all the bad news. The Arctic ice melt is driven in part by what scientists call a "positive feedback loop": as the ice melts, open water appears, absorbing sunlight; as a result, it warms up, causing more ice to melt and repeating this process in a kind of death spiral. Now that the Arctic Ocean is melting rapidly, that process will build on itself no matter what we do. Such a vicious circle applies to the melting clathrates as well. The more clathrates melt, the more the global temperature rises, causing further warming in the Arctic and more clathrates to melt.10 In the Arctic, one positive feedback loop (the melting of the ice) may eventually trigger another, and both, taken together, may trigger similar vicious circles elsewhere on the planet. Once these processes kick in for good, they will bring into play such powerful physical forces on such a wide scale that nothing human beings can do will make much difference.

One can thus entirely understand why a group of scientists formed the Arctic Methane Emergency Group to draw the world's attention to this situation and its potentially catastrophic consequences. In the wake of the huge ice melt in summer 2012, and Peter Wadhams's new estimate that a full summer melt will occur as soon as 2015, that group now states openly that without a huge geoengineering project to *increase* Arctic ice, global climate catastrophe is inevitable.11 So far this is a minority view, albeit from those most directly involved in Arctic climate research. The scientific community as a whole has not yet endorsed those findings. Nevertheless, the fact that researchers closely attuned to this crucial region of the planet have arrived at such dire conclusions is a good sign that we've reached the final moments in which we might salvage a future for the biosphere we know.

The news about the Arctic is so bad that we must all be forgiven for asking two or three questions almost immediately.

*Why didn't anyone tell us this was happening?* Major media outlets have at times covered the astonishing ice melt in the Arctic, but they have seldom discussed its wider implications or its potential impact on the future of the planet. But their relative silence in this regard is not surprising. The national media in the United States, at least until the recent past, has pretended that there are "two sides" to a "debate" as to whether climate change is real and whether human activities are causing it—questions that have been settled in the scientific community for over twenty years. Their hesitant, half-hearted, and often inaccurate reporting on climate change is so notorious it has led scientists to issue firm, even resounding statements on the subject, to ponder at length how they might get the message out—and to throw up their hands in frustration that all their efforts in this regard have gone for naught.

*Why has the situation changed so fast? Isn't climate change supposed to be a gradual process?* The response of the biosphere can take many forms, not all of them gradual. But we could assume that at least *our* contributions to the problem might increase at a steady pace. As it turns out, however, that assumption is wrong. A few years ago, we might reasonably have expected global greenhouse gas emissions to rise at a gradual pace. But as it turns out, those emissions have risen much more rapidly since the early 1990s than anyone expected. Scientists have been warning us for a long time to change our ways, but instead we have dramatically *worsened* the problem. Why should we be surprised when the biosphere responds accordingly?

*What are we supposed to do now? Do we have time left to do anything at all?* Anyone who tries to answer these questions is in a real dilemma. To say that we *do* have time is to endorse what might be a false optimism, supporting the belief that our usual approach to political problems the slow, incremental task of building support and crafting a coalition for Congressional and international action—will work in time. Nothing could be less sure. In fact, given our deplorable track record in recent years and the enormity of the challenge, our chances for rising to this challenge in time seem ridiculously small. On the other hand, saying that we are truly out of time is to pretend to have a knowledge we don't actually possess. Things are not looking good for planet Earth, but we cannot yet be *certain* that all hope is lost. Our understanding of the clathrate melt in the Arctic, for example, is still at its beginning stages, as further comments from the primary researchers on that topic suggest.12 Moreover, the global climate is so complex that certain geophysical patterns might be emerging of which we know even less. We can't claim to have mastered the situation. Without that mastery, it would be foolish to declare with some fanfare that we are truly out of time.

For the last decade or two we have known that we live at the crossroads of history, charged with the task of deciding the fate of the Earth and thus of humanity. So far we have been incapable of resolute action, still caught within the tides of our traditions and habits, as if utterly disabled in the face of the task.

In the meantime, time is passing. The developments in the Arctic and elsewhere—suggest that we may have already made our choice, that we are now venturing down the path of destruction. We can't be sure this event has taken place, but we certainly can't proceed with the confidence that we still have time. We are now caught in a surpassingly strange, horrific moment—a moment when we cannot help but think, is it too late? Do we still have a future?

Other books have described the physical realities of the climate. Others have reviewed the host of things we could do to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and discontinue other practices that damage the biosphere. Still others have explained very well our options for using new technologies, converting to renewable energy, and adopting new policies on the national and international scales for making those transformations possible. All of these books and others have urged us to take action in time.

This book will take up those themes as well; it must do so to describe the basics of our present situation. Without question, we must grasp the essentials of the problem, the practical dimensions of the solution, and the implications of both for what we should do.

But the emphasis of this book ultimately lies elsewhere. If we stick only to the scientific, technical, and political questions, if we imagine that we can face this challenge as knowing and planning creatures, we neglect the implications of this moment for *every* level of our human being. Moreover, if we urge action now, as we must, and then stop there, we sidestep the wider implications of the possibility that, despite all the warnings and efforts of the past couple of decades, we will not take action in time. What if it is now too late? What if we now face a disappearing future?

Once we ask these questions, the entire conversation changes. We have long known what is at stake; no one aware of climate change has doubted that it threatens the viability of the world we know. Climate change is not just a crisis for the biosphere; it is a crisis for our very significance and purpose as human beings. It represents a stunning change in the climate of all human emotion. But now we face the possibility that we will not be able to avoid passing the point of no return—of triggering severe, irreversible climate change.

In the past those who have commented on climate change have warned us to act before reaching this point, drawing on this dire threat to motivate us. Nearly every book on climate change has ended on an optimistic note, explaining how this crisis is ultimately an opportunity, a chance to turn things around, to create an environmentally friendly economy and a newly responsible society. This way of thinking about the challenge corresponded well to the nature of the threat over most of the last two decades, when we still had confidence we had time to make a difference. Over that period, it made sense that we could scarcely confront the dire realities of climate change without a certain optimism, without that shift from horror to the possibility of transformation. As a result, we have seldom if ever truly looked into the prospect of a disappearing future.

To some extent this way of thinking must still apply: after all, the demand for urgent action is now greater than ever and has, if anything, become a supreme ultimatum. Without question, we must do everything humanly possible to change our society and to avoid triggering ultimate calamity.

But if we are honest, we must admit that the events of the past few years undermine the prospects of a happy ending more than ever. Nearly all of the time for action has slipped by. It is thus time for us to face this crisis in a new way—not to abandon our efforts for change, not to forget the range of excellent initiatives for shifting our economies onto a new basis, but to contemplate, for the first time, what it means for us if we fail. Doing so will be difficult; it will require new resources of honesty, new capacities to endure dark thoughts, and new reserves of patience for the intolerable. It may ask more of us than we have to give.

If we continue to insist that we have time in the face of increasing evidence that it is running out, we would be less than honest: sticking with that familiar optimistic scenario to the exclusion of all else would commit us to a form of repression, defensiveness, willful blindness—indeed, to a version of denial itself.

This moment thus requires us to do something we seldom imagine: fighting for the planet *even if* it may be too late, sticking with all our efforts—and increasing them—precisely when we begin to admit that the cause may be lost. The developments of these recent years suggests that our whole way of imagining the crisis must change: these days we are stuck with the anguish of the last-ditch effort, the attempt to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat—with that minimal, desperate slogan: never say die.

We cannot turn away from the new realities of this moment. We now face questions not simply about the scientific, technological, economic, or political dimensions of this crisis, although they remain crucial, but also about its *human* significance. If we cannot face them, we will have lost something precious: our capacity to live with at least a minimal dose of integrity and truth.

These questions are among the toughest we will ever have to face. In some sense they are impossible to answer. But in this book, I will attempt to face them nevertheless—not to answer them, not to give the illusion we can truly know what we are doing under their pressure, but to explore what it is like to dwell with them, to live under their weight and darkness: What is the present for, if the future is on the verge of disappearing? How are we to live if that future is in doubt?

Those questions are supremely tough in part because they come to us *in addition to* the demands that our existing discussion of climate change impose on us. Those demands are already considerable; they have been so stark that we have scarcely been able to engage them well. Before taking up the core questions of this book, then, it may be wise to linger over these latter demands, familiar as they are.

Why have we been so stuck? What has made it so hard for us to face the current crisis as if we were actually sane and responsible people?

The honest answer, I think, is that this is an unprecedented crisis, posing challenges to us that we have never faced before and in response to which we are utterly at a loss.

First of all, if we are to tackle the fundamental aspects of climate change, nearly all of us are forced to examine realities well outside our expertise, to read, learn, and judge scientific findings for which we often have little preparation. Previous crises did not demand this task of us. For most of the modern era, people could read the newspaper or speak with friends to assess for themselves the state of public affairs; no special expertise was necessary. Even in the nuclear era, citizens did not have to learn the physics of the nuclear reaction to realize what had taken place at Hiroshima and Nagasaki: those events were real and the devastating effects of those weapons palpable.

In our era, however, we are asked to grapple with a phenomenon that is not a singular event, not a known threat, but the *context* for possible events—a context that we must learn about through the careful work of hundreds of scientists. Moreover, it is never obvious whom we can trust to mediate that work to us, to explain what the science has actually found: since so many participants in the debate deny that there is a problem, or suggest that there is genuine disagreement between scientists about whether climate change is real, we are not sure whom to believe. For no previous crisis has a similar situation been the case.

Our hesitation in accepting the reality of the challenge arises as well from the tendency to trust our own experience. If our lives and environments feel mostly familiar to us, it is hard for us to accept that something is dramatically amiss. Intuitively, we hesitate to act on any claim that is not evident to us in our own experience, not visible to the naked eye, not confirmed by authorities we have already chosen. In this regard, climate change is truly unprecedented: it touches us right where we live, calls us to consider our moral responsibility to ourselves, to others, and to the future—without offering us any obvious confirmation. It asks us for a serious moral commitment without providing us with the foundations we usually ask for when taking that kind of step.

But that is not all. If we *do* accept the reality of climate change, and our responsibility for causing most of it, that realization is so wounding that we may not wish to grapple with it any further. The prospect that the planet's future is in danger is most likely to fill us with anger, horror, and desperate hope. Underneath all these responses lies a sense of great dread. And we have almost nothing to help us live with that dread.

There is little or no precedent for that emotion. Even at the height of the nuclear arms race, when people were forced to contemplate the possibility of global annihilation, at least they were aware that the conflagration could erupt from something *other* than the ordinary course of their lives. A nuclear war would be a devastating interruption of the way things were. Climate change is different: it threatens to transform our entire world if we stick to our *current* habits, founded as they are on the extravagant use of fossil fuels. Our way of living threatens *itself*. No previous generation of human beings has ever confronted that possibility—at least not on the planetary scale.

This shift from a singular horror to everyday disaster is hard for us to accept: somehow, a cataclysmic event is easier to understand than climate change. After all, such an event isn't that different from the thought of our own deaths. Most of us are quite aware that our lives might go horribly wrong at any moment. We know that a random accident could kill us, disfigure us, or change our personalities before we have any warning at all. Even worse, a freak event could destroy all the people we love. That's just the way things are.

But climate change is different. Nowadays, *our everyday lives are the source of the problem*: everything we depend upon to live as we do the energy we use to get around, to heat or cool our homes, to power the industry that produces the goods we use—is also pumping enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that eventually our climate will be transformed. The societies in which we live are causing events to take place that could directly threaten how we live.

Even worse, once we decide to confront this pain and take action, we realize that the task may be beyond our capacity. The most dire challenges of the past look easy in comparison to what we face. Consider the long drive to abolish slavery in the United States. Abolitionists fought for generations to eradicate that institution without success. Slaveholders, however moved by moral appeal, often felt incapable of liberating their slaves because in doing so they would lose too much "property"; to treat their slaves as free human beings would simply cost them too much. Most chose prudence over humanity, allowing financial considerations to trump ethical principles. The same thing is happening today: we in the developed nations are the equivalent of slaveholders, resting easy on the fierce subordination of the world's ecosystems (and more).

In the United States, it took a war to bring about abolition. That event came at a great cost and nearly tore the republic apart. Yet that fight could succeed in part because abolition sought to undo an institution that was closely linked to one region of the nation. Today, climate change arises from the actions of people throughout America and around the world. No force will wage war against us to force us to change. As a result, we in the United States and elsewhere will have to renounce our privilege *voluntarily*. We will have to call on all our ethical reserves to make a wholesale renunciation of privilege. There really is no historical precedent for our doing anything of the sort.

The problem is not that we are uniquely corrupt, hopelessly selfish; it is rather that history now confronts us with a challenge to which *no prior generation* has ever arisen. We're being asked to do the impossible.

 None of us really wants to believe it is happening. We almost automatically put up great resistance to accepting it. Even those of us who react with despair or anguish typically move on quite soon to the realities of ordinary life. On some level, *all* of us are in denial. Who would welcome the thought of such a profound transformation? Facing the facts is the *last* thing any of us might wish to do.

If that is the case, then the strangeness of our response to it begins to make sense. The prospect of climate change is so unwelcome that the widespread outcry against its reality seems virtually inevitable. Climate change is nothing less than an assault on who we think we are: it exposes the fact that the economies of the developed world are founded on a lie, that our way of life takes for granted the eventual destruction of the Earth, and that persisting with it makes us complicit in a great crime. Nobody wants to accept those realities. It is thus remarkably satisfying for many people to turn our instinctive denial into a full-fledged, explicit, and articulate claim that nothing is amiss.

It is quite obvious that in doing so, we would cease to function as sane and responsible adults. At this stage of the evidence, to embrace denial is ultimately to *choose* the destruction of the Earth. But it does not follow that doing the opposite—choosing a sane response—is welcome to us, for it asks us to transform the foundations of our lives. To overcome denial requires us to accept that we have been living a lie for many generations, that our entire civilization is on the course toward committing ecocide—a crime much greater than genocide, though intimately bound up with it—and that our most intimate assumptions are monstrous if not worse.

If we do manage to rise to this challenge, we will have accomplished a feat virtually unique in human history. If we do not, our failure will be understandable, even if it will make us uniquely horrific. Either way, our generation will be the only of its kind in the history of the species. No wonder this moment feels so strange.

But the difficulty of our situation is still greater. Even if we are entirely persuaded we must do something and we attempt to do so on our own, it's not as if any one of us, or even a large social movement, has the power to do enough. In our own lives, we might take many steps to do much less to harm the biosphere, but those individual actions can never be enough as long as industrial and agricultural enterprises, and indeed entire nations, continue on with business as usual. As a result, we are caught in the contradiction between our willingness to act and the radical limits of our agency, between ethical principle and pragmatic reality. We might fight hard to push beyond that contradiction, to force the nations to change, but so far very little transformation has taken place; accordingly, we have little choice but to live within a social context still shaped by a denial we may not share, still caught up in habits we wish to break. Because we cannot produce the infrastructure of our society on our own, or manufacture the goods we use, we may end up inhabiting an economic system we deplore.

Faced with these seemingly impossible odds, we may resort to any number of plausible responses. We might, for example, simply throw up our hands in despair. In all bitterness, we may conclude that the task is too huge, the cost too great, the resistance so formidable, that it is impossible to worry about climate change any further. After all, we might argue, its worst effects won't happen until after we are dead: let later generations face them.

 True enough, the idea that those effects will take place well into the future is surprisingly familiar across the political spectrum. Many people evidently assume that climate change will really come down hard on someone *else*, probably their grandchildren. Even James Hansen, one of those who first brought the concept of global warming to the attention of Congress and an advocate for greatly decreasing our greenhouse gas emissions, titled his recent book *Storms of My Grandchildren*. And James Garvey, in his excellent book, *The Ethics of Climate Change*, bases his analysis on our ethical obligation to others, especially to those in future generations.13

But do we really think that what happens to later generations is only a matter of our ethical obligation to them? The attitude we display as we carry out most of our activities tells us otherwise. If we build a city, don't we want it to endure? If we enjoy our local traditions, don't we want them to retain their charm? If we educate the young, don't we want them to flourish? If we bring about a medical breakthrough, don't we want it to help people live long and healthy lives? If we create a work of art, don't we want it to be enjoyed by posterity? If we write a book, don't we want it to be read? If we cherish the great cultural and historical achievements of the past, don't we want to pass them down to others after us? In short, what actions do we take that do *not* imply a relation to the future? What would be the point of our lives if the future were to disappear?

*The future is never just for the people of the future; without that future, what we do now loses its force*. Without a future, there is no present and not much of a past. Climate change isn't just about our obligation to others. It's about our *own* lives, too.

If we give up on climate change, we cancel the present. We choose to make all of our ordinary activities meaningless, as if we want to become shadows of ourselves, or as if we want to float forever in a world without foundations. None of us would choose such a fate. Yet choosing the opposite—a radical change in who we are—is immensely difficult as well. One option is horrific, the other impossible. But no other options are available.

At every turn, climate change puts us in new situations. It is truly unprecedented, not just as a material reality, but in its impact on our ordinary lives, our ability to understand it, our willingness to face its implications, and our capacity to discuss those implications for our societies. If it throws us off, if it inspires odd reactions in us or others, we shouldn't be surprised. Climate change is intrusive, insidious, anonymous, implacable. Yet it won't let us turn away. Endlessly, ruthlessly, climate change *interrupts* us, throws us off, and asks of us what we barely know how to give.

To take the full measure of that challenge, this book must of course bring into view the practical realities of our time. But the purpose in doing so is always to ponder their further dimensions, to *think* about their implications for all that we are.

In the chapters that follow, the first key step is to assess our current situation as honestly as possible, confronting it without denial and without reserve. Only on this basis can we begin to ponder the full implications of our dilemma. The task is not simply to review the facts but to allow them to sink in, to speak to us where we live, and to overcome our resistance to their full implications. Accordingly, I will first go back to the basics and grapple with climate change itself—to understand its impact on any one of us where we live. The next step, equally essential, is to consider what we can do to remove the causes of climate change and to ask whether we can take action in time to make a difference. The third step, key to any understanding of our present dilemma, is to consider why we are so hesitant to take action on the scale required—and whether, given our enormous population as human beings on a small planet, doing so will finally solve our environmental crisis. These initial steps will be the concerns of chapters one through five.

After exploring the physical and political realities as directly as possible, the book will then take up its core challenge of thinking about the human implications of the dilemma before us and to delve into their ultimate consequences. It will ask, what is it like to be alive at this strange moment? What is the present for, if the future is disappearing? How can we respond, if the point of our lives is dissolving, yet we live on? In exploring these questions from chapters six through eight, the book will bring forward the impact of the environmental crisis on our own lives, sketching the outline of an intimate disarray we are now beginning to experience in full force.

Having considered these tough, harrowing questions, the book will then seek a way through that disarray to a basis for living with integrity even in the midst of the ruins. What can anchor our actions on behalf of others and for the sake of all living things if the damage to the Earth is nearly irreversible, if the prospects for warding off disaster are dimming? How might we respond to natural forces with respect if they now threaten us with greater violence than before? Here the book will propose that our best option is to own disaster, to accept responsibility for what humanity has done to the biosphere, and thus commit ourselves to making reparation—and on that basis, to take concrete ethical actions in our own lives no matter what others may do. It will suggest as well that we may greet the ferocity of the whirlwind with awe, accepting at last our limited place within the biosphere and finding a renewed foundation for enduring whatever may come.

#### *Notes*

#### *Chapter 1*

### **Climate Change Will Happen to You**

By now, many of us have some sense of the basics of climate change. We've seen images of melting ice, stranded polar bears, and calving glaciers. We've examined the charts depicting the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide or heard about them. We've surmised whether Hurricane Katrina and various floods or droughts were caused by global warming. Maybe we've seen *An Inconvenient Truth* or read books about climatology. In fact, if polls are to be believed, most Americans accept the basic reality of climate change and would like the nation and the international community to do something about it.

But many of us might also hesitate to accept aspects of the science about climate change—whether it's actually happening or whether human activities are causing it. Since nothing I will say in the rest of this book will make much sense unless readers grapple first with these questions, if you are still cautious in these respects I recommend that you turn now to the Appendix, where I discuss them, and then return to this chapter.

Working through those concerns carefully is essential: if our decisions are to have a firm basis, if we are to live with real deliberation, we should not skip over any stage of the process. It's not likely we can become fully conscious of our situation as human beings without having paused to learn the fundamental physical facts of climate change. If you have already done so, keep reading: this is the chapter for you.

As it turns out, recognizing the reality of climate change—and its being caused by human beings—is only the start of a deep engagement with what confronts us. The further we go and the more we recognize the potential impact of climate change on our own lives, the more we may try to protect ourselves from what we learn so that we can continue with our lives in good conscience. Often it is quite easy to do so. For good reason, the typical discussion of global warming sticks close to the science; the difficulty of the subject for lay readers and the need for an explanation that can cut through the fog of rancorous debate require that the subject be handled with as little fuss as possible. But as a result, even the best presenters of the science write as if the facts will speak for themselves, as if there are no obstacles in our lives that would interfere with a full acceptance of what they say. In fact, few of us are free of such obstacles; most of us filter what we hear in some fashion or indulge a tendency to simplify or deny, misconstrue or exaggerate, the full import of the facts—at least in part, and perhaps unconsciously.

Delving further into climate change, in short, requires an increasingly direct confrontation with realities that we would rather ignore. Accordingly, for nearly all of us, the chief task is to break through the tendency to keep the entire problem at a distance from our actual lives. The challenge is to identify and confront the most representative ways we evade what the scientific research teaches us and thus to encounter the truth as fully as we can.

So let's begin with perhaps the first key objection one might make to the notion that climate change is a serious and immediate threat to humanity.

*Yes,* a voice protests, *climate change is real and will have serious consequences, but not right away; we have plenty of time to figure out what we'll do to keep its worst effects from taking place*.

To some extent, my discussion of our current situation in the opening pages of this book may provide an adequate, if hasty, reply. But to respond more fully to this objection, it may be valuable to slow down here and outline the overall context of contemporary scientific thinking on this question.

This objection relies on the scientific uncertainty with regard to exactly how much harm greenhouse gas emissions will eventually have. The estimates in the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (henceforth IPCC), the international body that assembles and summarizes the current state of scientific knowledge for the benefit of the world's governments (and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Al Gore, in 2007), have indeed varied widely. More importantly, however, the sense that we have time to put together a response is also implicit in the slow pace of negotiations over international agreements about emissions—not to mention the even slower pace of compliance with the cuts already specified in the Kyoto Protocol. (Very few nations that signed those accords have begun to make substantial cuts in their emissions, despite the publicity over their promise to do so.)14 The same patience is evident in the fact that these negotiators either set modest cuts in emissions (as at Kyoto) or distant dates for compliance.

The greatest virtue of this patient approach is its realism about the difficulty of finding agreement, changing our carbon-based culture, and cutting emissions deeply enough to make a difference. Anyone who reflects on how difficult it will be to transform our societies to the necessary degree must empathize with the bone-deep pragmatism of negotiators, their acceptance of the political conditions we face and the necessity of working within them to achieve anything that will matter.

But very little in the scientific research can justify such patience. For one thing, a portion of the carbon dioxide we emit remains in the atmosphere for a century or more. As a result, even if we soon curtail the amount of carbon dioxide we produce, levels of that gas will remain high throughout the rest of this century at least, forcing changes to the climate throughout that long period. In effect, our actions long ago are being felt today, and our actions today will be felt for many decades to come. The longer we continue our current habits, the greater the difficulties future generations will have to face. Unless we are fairly certain that today's emissions will do no harm later on, we should do what we can today.

Moreover, although views differ about the effects that will follow from our emissions, it would be foolish to assume that only the more optimistic projections are true. If the science is uncertain in this regard, we should listen to the full spectrum of considered judgment before opting for a slow-motion strategy. If we listen in this way, we will soon discover that things may be substantially *worse* than we might think.

The major debate among climate change scientists today is not whether climate change is real but whether it will have a more severe effect on Earth's ecosystems in the future than we previously thought. One element contributing to this debate is research into the problem of positive feedback loops of the sort I mentioned at the beginning of this book. These vicious circles emerge when the warming temperature causes the release of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which cause a further increase in temperature, and on around again. Once these vicious circles become strong enough, they constitute "tipping points" that lead to an irreversible sequence of events and an unstoppable rise in temperature. The more gases we emit and the longer we wait to change our habits, the more likely we will cross these tipping points, making it even more difficult to postpone the arrival of serious climate change with all its consequences.

In his book on the subject, *With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change*, Fred Pearce reviews a wide array of potential "positive feedback loops" that could arise in a number of regions of the world. Some of these tipping points may indeed be decades away. But we threaten to cross others in the fairly near future, if we have not done so already.15

Several key examples of tipping points are those I explored at the beginning of this book. As I mentioned there, the stunning melt of the Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2012 suggests to many observers that this process has now crossed the tipping point and become irreversible.

A second example, also related to the discussion in the introduction, is the possibility that the methane clathrates on the seabeds around the globe will begin to melt and release gas into the atmosphere.16 If this feedback loop gets going on any large scale, we are in for big trouble, for there are untold quantities of methane capable of being released in this fashion. One estimate suggests that the methane in the clathrates in all the world's oceans is around four thousand times the amount in today's atmosphere.17

Researchers typically guess that such a clathrate melt will take place only at much later stages of climate change. In 2008, Mark Lynas suggested that this potential clathrate melt might take place on an Earth that had warmed 5° Centigrade over preindustrial temperatures.18 But already, as I mentioned above, the clathrate melt is beginning on a shallow continental shelf of the Arctic Ocean. That relatively local event does not suggest that the clathrates around the world are about to melt as well. But because clathrates exist in such huge numbers, even a melt in only a small fraction of their total bulk would be enough to shift the Earth's climate severely. We are already seeing what might be the beginnings of that event, in which case it is making itself felt at temperatures far lower than we expected, and several decades earlier as well.

There is yet another worrisome instance looming not far from the arctic region. One of the most pressing instances of a possible tipping point is the melting permafrost throughout the far North—in Siberia, Alaska, and northern Canada. When it melts, it releases immense volumes of carbon dioxide and methane. Once the release of these gases hits a certain point, it will cause so much further warming—and further melting of the permafrost—that the results will be irreversible.

The tipping point for the permafrost is not far away. One study that appeared in January 2011 strikingly predicts that the feedback loop in the far North will cause the arctic permafrost to become a net source (not sink) of carbon and methane after the mid-2020s and will be strong enough to cancel between 42 and 88 percent of the planet's land-based capacity to absorb those emissions.19

These examples may imply that only the feedback loops of the far North—the Arctic ice, the clathrates, the permafrost—are of concern. But consider what is transpiring in the Amazon region. Rising temperatures and an associated decline in rainfall have led to the drying of the Amazon rainforest, causing trees there to grow less and making them more vulnerable to decay and to wildfires, as well as to the very serious droughts of 2005 and 2010.20 This process has gone so far by now that by some estimates this ecosystem now *releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it absorbs*. 21 Think about it: the Amazon, once famous for being one of the Earth's best ecosystems for soaking up immense quantities of carbon dioxide—and for pumping huge quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere—may already be helping to *drive* global warming rather than alleviate it, and if not, is likely to do so very soon. Once we cross that tipping point for good, an entire array of planetary systems that dominate not far from the Equator will be transformed as well. That example suggests that the Earth's systems *in every region* are vulnerable to severe disarray; no area of the biosphere is safe.

As realities like this suggest, if we ignore the causes that set these vicious circles into motion, we will face an impossible challenge, for in the following years, the results could wipe out any gains we might make in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. The Arctic sea melt is already irreversible. If any one of these other processes crosses the tipping point, we are in for major trouble. Yet all of these tipping points are drawing nearer every day. Our contribution to climate change right now is significant enough, but once very large ecosystems get into the game, they will dwarf what we can do.

 Climate change is real and is caused by human beings, but don't make any reckless statements about its potential effects*. *Don't get carried away; cut back on statements that go too far, that warn against all kinds of horrible and devastating consequences.* Some "skeptics" apply this advice to nearly all discussions of climate change, advocating what they regard as a "moderate" estimate of global warming's dangers; others, such as Claire Parkinson, a clear-sighted scientist well within the mainstream who otherwise has a great deal to teach us, targets more narrow claims.22

No doubt it is best for all participants in the debate to stick as closely as possible to demonstrable findings. But because this argument places far more emphasis on curbing wild talk than the danger of the crisis itself, it ultimately treats caution and politeness as more important than the future of the planet. Such a preference reveals an excessive distaste for the language of crisis. This kind of talk, some think, is *always* irresponsible, just a form of panic-mongering. Evidently, a responsible, sane person should avoid speaking of an emergency or doing anything reckless, like proposing that we consider modifying our way of life. But to focus on excessive statements rather than the underlying threat of climate change diverts attention from the most pressing concerns to relatively marginal ones. It's as if these authors live in a house that is starting to burn down, but would do anything rather than actually sound the alarm: that would be noisy and rude!

This preference for understating the severity of the threat, as it turns out, is shared not only by a handful of scientists but may characterize the general tone of climate science overall. One recent study suggests that "scientists are biased not toward alarmism but the reverse," toward "erring on the side of less rather than more alarming predictions," possibly because researchers generally adhere to the "scientific norms of restraint, objectivity, skepticism, rationality, dispassion, and moderation." The authors of this study argue that climate scientists have more often understated the potential impact of climate change than the opposite, fearful of coming across as alarmist or incautious in their findings.23

While in many contexts this bias toward caution may serve scientific research well, in the arena of controversy over climate change it may reinforce our belief that the situation is not that dire after all. In short, it can feed into our sense that things are all right and will work themselves out in some fashion. Such a viewpoint is clearly a mode of denial, even if one who espouses it is otherwise remarkably insightful. As Parkinson herself admits late in her book, she is less concerned about the future than others because she believes that "surely" inventors will create new energy alternatives that will make fossil fuels a thing of the past, and by implication will do so in time for us to avoid the ill effects of climate change.24 But it is naive to suggest that a solution will simply appear or that it even if it does it will take effect immediately. Inventions take time to manufacture and even longer to produce on a massive scale that this occasion requires. Only a supreme confidence, however unjustified—only a belief in the secular equivalent of a miracle—can explain such a distaste for talk of crisis.

*All right*, one might say, *it's happening, we're causing it, and it may be worse than we thought. But from what I see, it may not happen* **here**. After all, most of the images we associate with climate change depict what is happening elsewhere—in the Arctic, for example, or around the distant islands that will soon be swallowed by rising waters. Seldom do we see images of the effects of climate change on us where we live. Of course, we are aware that our summers are warmer than before, our growing seasons longer, our climate more erratic and surprising. But so far very few of us have been lost on melting sea ice or swamped by the rising tides.

Most of us are so used to thinking about climate change in this manner that it is very difficult for us to get beyond it. Perhaps only a brutal restatement of our situation will get us out of the habit and help us focus on what will happen to us in our own immediate surroundings. So here it is: climate change is devastating, absolutely powerful, undismissible, *even if* in our darker, most selfish moments we might want to say "damn the ice caps" or "the hell with Tuvalu," *even if* we might wish to mutter so as no one can hear, "pfft to plankton" or "good riddance to the coral reefs." Climate change won't just harm others, forcing the Peruvians to suffer from thirst or sweeping more Bangladeshis away in flooding seas; on the contrary, we better pay serious attention, for our *own* way of life is on the line.

For one thing, as I mentioned in the introduction, the changes in the Arctic are already altering weather patterns over the northern hemisphere. Just consider the strange events in the United States in 2012: the huge thunderstorm and tornado complex—the derecho—that swept over central and eastern portions of the country starting on June 29; the vast wildfires in the West beginning as early as April; the massive drought in the Midwest, threatening food crops and on occasion closing Mississippi River traffic; and Superstorm Sandy that wreaked havoc over major parts of the Northeast in November. In that single year, the altered climate caused significant harm to nearly every region of the country. And that's just 2012: the same pattern is borne out by the bizarre episodes—too many to list—in the seasons since then. Researchers now state outright that there is a strong link between climate change and these extreme weather patterns. According to the Environment America Research & Policy Center, the frequency of extreme precipitation events has increased by 30 percent from 1948 to 2011.25 Are you confident that you will escape such events in the forthcoming years and decades?26

Climate change will be just as real where you live as anywhere else on Earth. In the United States, it will raise average temperatures; increase the amount of moisture in the air, making heavy precipitation events (of rain or snow) more likely, thus causing an increase in flooding and landslides; increase the number of blisteringly hot days in the summer; change the water cycle and increase evaporation, in most regions resulting in a drier landscape and more frequent droughts; and create the conditions for more insect and waterborne diseases. It will force the migration of local species into new habitats further north, as well as the absorption of species moving from the south, thus altering the balance between mutually dependent forms of life within each local ecosystem. The changes to the water cycle will alter the rivers, streams, and open landscapes throughout the country and the fundamental character of each region. These changes, and many more, are likely to have an adverse effect on food production, outdoor activities, seasonal rituals, the physical structures we have built, public health, and local and regional economies. We may end up living in natural systems that are not only rapidly changing, but also much weaker and in some cases dying out altogether. We'll be far less comfortable right where we live than we once were.27

At first changes of this kind may seem overstated. For example, the fact that the zones with a particular average annual temperature will be shifting northwards might not initially sound so bad. After all, one might argue, ecosystems further south hang together quite well; wouldn't they fare equally well if they moved to the north? But many species are less able to compete with or displace species that already live in regions to the north, to reproduce quickly and thus adjust to new living conditions, and to move across miles of territory in a few years, suggesting that some portions of an ecosystem will migrate successfully while others will not. Some species might be mobile enough to move on, but if they did so, would lose access to their sources of food or to the habitats (river valleys, mountains) where they previously flourished. Forms of life that flourish in mountainous terrain may have only so far up the mountainside to migrate before running out of room. Unlike animals or birds, plants rooted in the soil might find it difficult to move quickly into new terrain. Many species will adapt to new conditions, but many others will not. Studies show that in the second half of the twentieth century, species on average migrated toward the poles at the rate of four miles per decade, while the zones in which they live—those defined by specific average temperatures—have migrated far more quickly, about thirty-five miles per decade.28 Over time, as warming continues, the species that can't move very fast will find themselves within much warmer temperature belts, will be unable to flourish within a climate too hot for them, and will succumb to natural forces.

Such pressures can take many forms. Consider the changes taking place in the pine forests of western North America, especially in British Columbia. The pine beetle, a native insect in those regions, is now reproducing at a much greater rate than before; thanks to the warming winters, the warmer summers, and the reduction in summer precipitation, it is becoming a much more dominant species in those habitats than before. As a result, it is killing millions of acres of trees, converting the boreal forest of British Columbia from a carbon sink to a net emitter of carbon.29

Such vast damage in those forests, needless to say, will have profound impacts in the entire ecosystem, changing the water cycle, the growth patterns across the formerly wooded landscape, and much more. This transformation is largely due to the activities of a *single species* and perfectly illustrates how the complex interactions between species in ecosystems make them terribly vulnerable to climate change.

But changes due to the expansion of single species throughout a region are relatively subtle compared to the even broader transformations that every ecosystem will have to undergo. The effect of pine beetles in western forests pales in comparison to the even more dramatic effects of rising temperatures on the water cycle. The warming of the ecosystem increases evaporation and causes the gradual drying of the land, killing trees even where they are not vulnerable to insects. Recent research into the state of forests throughout the western United States shows that they are already experiencing a demographic shift—an increase in the number of trees dying and a decrease in the number of new trees growing per year—and that as a result they are approaching "thresholds for abrupt dieback." The drier conditions as well as the increasing activity of various species of insects is leading to rising mortality in those forests.30 Evidently, climate change often works through several effects at once, each compounding the impact of others, creating conditions that are worse than any single process could bring about.

Similar changes are taking place in every region of the United States. In the Northeast, for example, climate change will drive the maple forests further north, eventually depriving the region of the autumn colors distinctive to the region, and the rising seas and increasing intensity of storms will lead to greater storm surges, damages to wetlands, coastal flooding, and erosion (as the stunning effects of Superstorm Sandy have made abundantly clear). The Southeast will become so hot and dry that its pine forests may disappear; oxygen depletion in the region's lakes will kill off fish in lakes and streams; and more powerful tornadoes and hurricanes will damage inland regions and coastal areas alike. The Southwest faces a dramatically altered future, one in which droughts will be longer and more intense than they were in the past, causing rivers and lakes to diminish and fires to spread more easily. The reduction in the snowpack over the Sierra Nevada in eastern California will lead to severe water shortages in much of that state; in mid to late summer, people there may turn on the tap and find no water coming out. Needless to say, these and other changes will harm each region's food supply, sources of energy, distinctive landscape, and quality of life—if such a drab list of consequences can possibly capture the scale and intensity of what will take place.31

It's not difficult to extrapolate this pattern to the rest of the planet. Clearly, climate change will have severe consequences for ecosystems around the world. Forests all across the world are in serious danger.32 Moreover, the stress on ecosystems is putting a fair portion of the planet's species under terrific pressure. Although it boggles the mind to sum up the possible effects on the Earth as a whole, some scientists have attempted to do so: one often-cited study by scientists on several continents who examined 1000 species concluded that under a mid-range estimate of the severity of climate change—that is, with an increase of only around 2° Celsius above preindustrial levels, and only 1.2° over current temperatures—15 to 37 percent of Earth's land species could be "committed to extinction" by 2050, although a more recent study qualifies those findings and provides a somewhat less pessimistic assessment.33

What about the sea? We often forget that climate change acidifies the oceans, harming organisms that rely on calcium carbonate to form shells or skeletons, including the coccolithophores, one of the most abundant types of plankton. The prospect that the further absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans could damage the plankton, the first links of the marine food chain, is especially chilling. Scientists do not understand the potential effects of further acidification well, but given what we do know already, we have little reason for optimism.34 One study states that the oceans are acidifying at a rate ten times faster than they did 55 million years ago during a period of mass extinction for marine life, and another finds roughly a 1 percent decline per year in plankton since 1950 due to warming temperatures at the ocean's surface.35 A recent study conducted by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean found far greater declines in oceanic life than expected; Alex Rogers, its scientific director, stated, "[A]lmost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."36

So far I have emphasized how climate change will put nearly all ecosystems into severe disarray and force a good portion of the Earth's species into extinction. But for human beings, these biological realities are only part of the picture. For us, such vast damage will also deplete the pleasure we take in natural beauty—in the blossoming of a tree, the cry of a bird, the subtle coloring of a fish, the scent of bark, the interweaving of forms on a tangled bank. The devastation of Earth's living forms is also a traumatic blow to the beauty of the common day, the poetry of everyday life.

*So what*, someone might respond; *we've always had extinction, and we always will; there is nothing here to be upset about*. But this time we're not talking about one species giving up its habitat to another over many decades or being pushed out under ordinary processes of natural selection. We're talking about a volatile combination of factors: wiping out the ecological niche of many species; making complex biological interrelations vulnerable to unforeseen interactions; and putting entire ecosystems under duress. In fact, extinction at *this* pace and at *these* numbers deserves a stronger term; it is not just extinction, but the death or at least decay of entire natural systems, if not of the Earth itself. Some previous events in the planet's history caused a similar devastation—the impact of meteors, for example—but do we really want to compete with meteors to see which force can mess up the Earth the most?

All this is bad enough. But at the moment we are causing much more than climate change. If you factor in everything *else* that advanced industrial civilization is doing to our local and regional ecosystems, the situation becomes even more difficult. All kinds of familiar practices on which we in the United States rely today—monoculture agriculture; the depletion of water aquifers; the release of vast quantities of nitrogen into ecosystems from fertilizer; large-scale farming of chickens, pigs, and cows, creating unprecedented quantities of manure effluent; the destruction of wetlands; the expansion of cities, suburbs, and exurbs; strip mining, mountaintop coal mining, and oil drilling in formerly protected areas; the release of untold quantities of plastics into the world's waterways and oceans; overfishing; and the inadvertent importation of exotic species, to name a few—already place our ecosystems under duress. To add climate change, with all its consequences, to this pressure simply multiplies the danger.

All these factors make it clear that the transformations to ecosystems will take place right in our own neighborhoods. If you need an image to capture the relevance of climate change for you and yours, take a look at the natural life that surrounds you wherever you live and imagine it damaged or disappearing. Then remember for a moment that if climate change decimates an ecosystem, it won't come back—at least not in the form we know, and not for millennia. It will be gone for good.

*Very well*, someone might reply, *that may be true for most regions, but some areas will no doubt benefit from climate change: their growing seasons will expand, more life will flourish there, and the winters will be more temperate. Isn't climate change good news for* **some** *people?*

It's true that climate change models have suggested that some areas may experience warming that will improve the growing season, for example, or reduce the discomforts of winter. But it's naive to imagine that these changes are truly beneficial. As we've already seen, the warming climate has *devastated* the boreal forest of British Columbia; the loss of those cold winter nights, and of the shorter growing season, has *not* been a benefit there. Any so-called benefit to other regions is likely to have similar effects.

Nevertheless, it's worth taking this objection seriously and thinking it through with another thought experiment. If we imagine that some region would actually benefit, then what might follow? For one thing, can we suppose that the people who live in the lucky region rely exclusively for their well-being on what happens there? Or do they live in houses built of imported materials, drive cars manufactured in other regions, eat food grown elsewhere? Conversely, do they sell their own wares to people who live elsewhere? What supports the economy of their region? If ecosystems in other regions are suffering, so also will the economic base in those regions, and the trading relationships will suffer as well. No region can imagine that it would survive easily on its own.

But for a moment, let's take this experiment to a second level and imagine that it could thrive all by itself. Perhaps people in a particular region would be very good at creating a self-sustaining economy. Very well. But if residents of other regions are suffering, doesn't it seem likely they would migrate to the areas that lucked out? As a result, wouldn't those better-off areas be overwhelmed with people seeking a better life? What's more, does it seem likely these migrants would have been able to sell their homes at a good price? Would they always have secured jobs that paid them as well? The people in the lucky zone might find themselves trying to accommodate an inflow of stressed-out, disadvantaged people hoping to find a good place to live. If nonhuman species will have to migrate, people will too. What's more, they will often have to migrate across national borders, leading to a whole range of crucial political questions. Once you factor in human mobility, you change the entire dynamic: a region whose *climate* might not be bad will have to face a massive *social* transformation, one that may stress out the region's ecosystem in turn.

So it simply isn't credible to suggest that climate change would benefit anyone in the long term. Because of the intricate web of our economies and the inevitability of migration, there are no guarantees. Perhaps if those who lived in this hypothetical lucky region put together a self-sustaining economy—*and* declared political independence, surrounded the entire zone with a thirty-foot fence to keep everyone else out, and taxed themselves silly to create a state-of-the-art military that could defeat any invaders—*then* they could live in relative abundance (if also in a state of perpetual selfishness and paranoia). Does *that* sound like a good future?

*All right*, says one last voice, *even if everything you say is true*—*even if climate change will alter the ecosystems where I live or cause a massive social transformation in my region, what difference does it really make to* **me**? *I don't care about nature; if a lot of species go extinct, it's not going to affect* **me***. Ecosystems may come and go, but in the modern world, what does it matter? I don't really object to social change in my neighborhood, either; by now we're all used to new developments of that kind. As long as I have a job and can live in my urban environment, with a car, a cell phone, a nice Internet connection, good heating, a working air conditioner, and plenty of food at my local supermarket, everything's going to be fine*.

The voice that speaks here is at last the distinctive, perhaps mostly unconscious, voice of our own innate, indestructible narcissism. That profound cluelessness arises in all of us at the prospect of our own mortality: though we acknowledge the reality of our eventual deaths on some level, we don't often live in accordance with that insight. The same applies even more to the thought of what may happen to the Earth. Perhaps the greatest help to our narcissism in the face of global warming is the air conditioner: evidently, as long as we are assured we'll be able to live in a relatively comfortable indoor temperature in perpetuity, we sense that there is nothing much to worry about.

This version of the near future may seem surprisingly plausible. Perhaps even if the seas rise, the planet warms, and vast portions of the Earth are devastated by climate change, wealthy people living in some places will live in circumstances not entirely different from what they are used to. If they wish, they might well ignore the bad news arriving from around the country and the world—at least for a while. They might even dismiss the changes to the climate of their region, the dying forests on nearby mountains, the shrinking local rivers, and the new vulnerability of many plants, birds, and animals that live in their vicinity. But eventually they will find it difficult to ignore the dust storms that may result from the drying of vast regions; the dwindling water supply; the much harsher snowstorms, rainstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, or windstorms; the occasional severe floods (surprising, no doubt, given the general drying of the landscape); or the landslides and avalanches in nearby terrain.

But natural disasters will only be part of the story. The slow devastation of ecosystems around the world will eventually take its toll. We are not likely to welcome the consequences of stress to agricultural regions, leading to rising food prices; nor of stress to the local water cycle, resulting in a lower water supply and perhaps water rationing; nor of global warming itself, causing occasional summer days with brutally high temperatures. We will not be happy that climate change will cause long-term difficulty for many industries, including fishing, forestry, tourism, and outdoor recreation, and will impose immense costs on regions recovering from natural disasters. Nor will we be pleased when climate change begins to eat away at the nation's economic growth rate—or more likely, cause a perpetual *negative* growth rate, forcing us into a permanent and devastating Climate Change Depression. It will be especially challenging to deal with these and other difficulties while also helping an increasing number of retirees meet their monthly expenses and pay for their medical care. Moreover, the consequences of international chaos on ordinary lives might be painful as well. When nations begin to enter severe domestic crises, endure new rounds of terrorist activity, or wage war against each other over basic natural resources, food supplies, population pressures, or rights of migration, one may find one's own nation at war as well—or suffering the economic or political consequences of that unrest in other ways, even potentially within its own borders.

To imagine that we can shield ourselves from all these trends by retreating to living spaces, turning on the air conditioner, and entertaining ourselves in some fashion simply ignores reality. In one way or another, the transformation of the planet will seep through those walls. We may find ourselves incensed at the result and might even mutter: *why didn't they* **tell** *me it would be like this?*

There really is no evading it: climate change is well under way, caused by human beings, *and it will happen to you*.

#### *Notes*

volume 110, number 2 (published online before print December 24, 2012), 565–570, doi:10.1073/pnas.1204651110.

#### *Chapter 2*

### **What We Could Do**

So if climate change is taking place, will intensify further in the coming years, and will hit us where we live, what can we do? If we accept the findings of scientists about climate change, the path before us is clear: since we human beings are contributing to the problem, we should do as much as we can, as soon as we can, to reduce our contributions to climate change. We should do so on every level: as individuals, families, businesses, industries, states, nations, and the international community. We should use every technology already known to us to reduce our emissions; be inventive in finding, testing, and implementing new technologies; create smart and workable public policies and real-world arrangements to help smooth the transition to new practices; and handle the many historical, cultural, social, economic, and political obstacles to this transition with grace and sensitivity—while moving ahead as quickly as is feasible.

The trouble is that we have not taken these steps with the clarity and dispatch we need. In fact, we have done the opposite. Most nations have continued with business as usual, delayed real action, perhaps taken partial steps at most, and waited for others to sign on before starting up a serious effort. But the climate continues to change, and time is waning. Even as scientists warn us that waiting further could be disastrous, we persist in a resolute inertia.

At this late hour, then, we need to take a double approach to the challenge before us. On one level, we must examine carefully the entire range of measures we could take for reducing the harm we do. To this end, we could rely on those expert guides who explain how to use existing sources of energy more efficiently; how to create, distribute, and use new, sustainable sources of energy; and how to reduce or end other practices (outside of energy use) that contribute to climate change.37

But doing so is not enough. If we are to be honest about what we must do, we need to take into account the obstacles that prevent us from taking action. Even if we have a set of potential strategies in hand, they will not do much good if they are too expensive, take too long to implement, or harm the environment. Furthermore, what will it take to overcome political opposition, to change actual attitudes and behavior, and to inspire action on the vast scale that is required? This aspect of the question is the most crucial, because so far it has proved the toughest to solve.

Accordingly, we have little choice but to examine our potential course of action taking *all* of the relevant factors into account. A thorough, comprehensive look at energy efficiency and technology, however necessary, cannot take us far without an honest appraisal of our collective willingness to act and to change.

Let's start with a basic principle: we simply must shift from our current heavy reliance on oil, coal, and gas to less destructive fuels. Some might argue that the recent shift from oil or coal to the relatively less harmful natural gas is at least a step in the right direction, but it turns out that enough natural gas (or methane) escapes into the atmosphere during the drilling process to cancel out any such benefit.38 We can't fix anything by shifting from one fossil fuel to another; our only real option is to rely on renewable energy, if we must use energy at all. But at this point we cannot rely very much on alternative sources of energy; a key task is to figure out what technologies might work best and how soon we can implement them.

Several sources of energy are very promising but may simply create more problems than they might solve. Many experts suggest that nuclear power is an excellent long-term option for providing energy at a comparatively small cost in injury to people, footprint on the landscape, and the storage of waste, especially when compared to fossil fuels. But it's clear that creating a new generation of nuclear power plants would be extremely expensive and time-consuming; since few plants are currently in the process of being built and each plant takes roughly a decade to come on line, nuclear power cannot help us right when we must take huge strides toward cutting our emissions. Furthermore, because of the events at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, we all have serious questions about the safety and reliability of nuclear power. Even if the engineering details make nuclear power intriguing, as a real-world matter, implementing it raises too many questions and—even if it should win public approval—would take far too long. It's not a viable option.

Geothermal energy has the great advantages of being inexhaustible, creating no byproducts, remaining constant through time (unlike solar or wind energy), interfering in no natural motion of the winds or tides, and requiring no extraction from the Earth (a claim that not even nuclear power can make, reliant as it is on the mining of uranium). But it, too, requires us to intervene into the Earth's systems, for when we drill some distance beneath the surface, we may risk triggering seismic disruptions, even small earthquakes. A greater problem is that over much of the Earth, bedrock of a sufficiently high temperature (300°) is found very far below the surface; in most of the western half of the United States, for example, geothermal engineers would have to drill down four miles or more, and in most of the eastern half, over six miles.39 Drilling that deep on a large scale is technically and financially difficult and will be feasible only after a lot more research and testing.

This sort of problem applies not only to alternative forms of energy, but to the possible transformation of our use of fossil fuel as well. Many observers suggest that we cannot rely on renewable sources alone; we will also have to burn coal and natural gas—not as we have done in the past, releasing ruinous quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but by capturing and storing it deep in the ground. Although the process of capture and storage will take up part of the energy the plants generate and will thus raise energy costs, at least it will not harm the atmosphere. The real problem in this case—and it's a big one—is that this technology is largely untested; so far not a single coal plant has actually tested carbon capture technology in any serious way. Moreover, just as the Environmental Protection Agency is pondering whether to ban the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from future coal-burning plants in an effort to force them to capture carbon, the low price of increasingly available natural gas is removing incentives for utilities to build such expensive plants at all.40 Nevertheless, Carbon Engineering has created prototype carbon cleanup systems in Calgary, Alberta, and now hopes to market its techniques to oil companies and others. Experimentation with this technique is still in its early stages; according to one report, David Keith, the president of this company, "says he thinks it may be possible to lower the cost of capture toward \$100 a ton as the company grows."41 Because the study of this technology is at such an early stage and its potential use so expensive, we cannot presume to rely on it in a large scale in the near future. Yet in his mission to find out how to create an energy system that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions 90 percent in the United Kingdom by 2030, George Monbiot suggests that that nation get half of its power for electricity from plants that burn natural gas (not coal) while using capture and storage technology. Think about it: he's suggesting that *half of the electricity* come from a technology that he admits is *largely untested*. Does that sound like a solid plan to you? But what other choice does he have? Renewable energy of other kinds won't supply enough power to keep Britain going. His dilemma is typical of this entire discussion. We need technologies we do not have, and we need them yesterday.42

Luckily, bad news of this sort is not the whole story. Other technologies at first do not seem promising but on a second look turn out to be potentially helpful. Biofuels—fuels created from trees or plants—are technologically viable, but creating an incentive for people to tear out native ecosystems and grow crops to be sold for this purpose—especially in Brazil, where their planting has helped destroy vital ecosystems undermines the whole purpose of this transition, which is to sustain and enhance the ecosystems we still have.43 Removing crops for food and replacing them with plants for biofuel can also lower the food supply and raise food prices around the world.44 A more responsible and sustainable practice of using only waste products or byproducts of farming or forest management might work, if conducted very carefully, but would produce only a fraction of the energy we need.

But a related alternative to biofuels has great promise. Burning the methane emissions from public landfills, sewage plants, and farms addresses two problems at once: it reduces those emissions and transforms them into a locally sustaining form of energy. The technology is readily available; cattle and pig farmers use this technology to burn manure to generate electricity for their own use or for sale back into the grid.45 Moreover, it is being used very effectively in Kristianstad, Sweden, which burns biogas from a landfill, sewage ponds, wood waste, and tree prunings, heating homes and businesses without relying on other renewable energies.46 This technology burns a bit of biofuel along with the gas arising from garbage and waste and may thus provide a good alternative to the more familiar version of biofuel. A municipal biogas plant has the advantage of potentially being under local control: presumably you wouldn't have to move heaven and earth to get a local biogas plant up and running; you'd just have to create the necessary will in your own community. With enough initiative in cities and towns throughout the world, this technology could be implemented widely.

An alternative to geothermal energy also has real merit. Without drilling deep into the Earth, we can still use its warmth as a source of energy. Below five feet or so, the ground has a constant temperature; if you lay a network of pipes in the ground below that depth and run water through those pipes, you can draw the heat from the Earth, concentrate it, put it through a heat exchanger, and use it to warm or cool your house.47 While the initial cost is high, this source of energy pays for itself in a few years. The largest obstacles to its widespread adoption are public ignorance, the large initial cost, and the lack of trained technicians in many locations throughout the nation.48 Governments and utilities, however, provide incentives for homeowners to install these systems, and with greater demand, more publicity, and a concerted public effort, people might be able to use this technology throughout the country effectively.

What about solar and wind energy? These have the merit of being familiar to us, but it will take a major effort to supply them in the abundance we require. Our use of these energies is rapidly increasing, their cost continues to fall, and their advantages are becoming clearer to the public as time goes by. But at current rates of implementation, they will contribute only a fraction of energy needs even in a decade or two. Furthermore, since the sun does not shine forever, nor does the wind blow at all times, we can fully use their energies only when we've learned how to store and release the power they provide on demand. A large shift from gasoline-powered to electrical cars would help out in this regard, since the car batteries would serve as an effective form of electrical storage. But for an effective system, we need to create stations to store the energy these sources provide and relay that energy to consumers on demand. One solution is to pump water into a reservoir when the electricity supply is available, then release the water to flow downhill and generate power when it is needed.49 These pumped storage facilities—or better alternatives, when they become available—will be necessary components of the overall system. Moreover, to bring these energy sources into a system of sustaining power, we need a smart grid, an updated, hightech electricity distribution network that can withstand the sudden variations in power provided by the sun or wind, connect all the points in the system, and use the energy contributed by households (from small solar units). In short, we need a lot more than solar panels or wind turbines: we need a new, sophisticated, national grid.

But that is not all. Installing large solar plants will take up huge amounts of open land in the nation's sunny places—land now used by plants, animals, and human beings. Putting in industrial-sized wind turbines on mountaintops, for example, or in promising offshore locations will directly intrude on relatively unharmed ecosystems or pristine vistas. Furthermore, as it turns out, large wind turbines are noisy: they cause a low-level vibration to be heard for a mile or more in the surrounding vicinity. Despite their ability to harness sun and wind for human purposes, these technologies come at a real cost: if we really want to reduce our carbon footprint, we will end up greatly expanding our physical footprint on the land and sea. The reality is that many people will resist these intrusions: the opposition to wind farms around the nation, even from local environmentalists, is substantial. The same will be true once we begin to install industrial-sized solar power plants.

We could, however, decrease the footprint of immense solar power plants by making the generation and use of solar energy an ordinary feature in millions of ordinary households. David Crane and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., point out that the cost of solar panels has fallen by 80 percent over the past five years and now competes with the cost of the normal electricity supply in twenty states. But few people are choosing it over electricity from the grid because of permitting requirements imposed by state and local governments; complying with those requirements now costs more than the solar equipment itself. If our governments changed the rules, as the federal government in Germany has done, it would be much easier for people to shift their homes to solar energy.50

So how feasible is a large reliance on solar and wind energy? Clearly, we have a lot of work to do. Just building a national smart grid is already a massive infrastructure project; to get it done, we'll need a lot of money, greater technical expertise, and several years of concerted effort. Building a sufficient number of wind and solar farms will also require a lot of advance research, time to put them in place, and a lengthy effort to win public approval. We need key technological breakthroughs to make energy storage cheap and viable. We also need to think carefully about exactly how much of a physical footprint we want to impose on the land and sea for these purposes. But the declining cost of solar energy and the possibility of producing it on the household level may make aspects of this transition easier. Ultimately, these forms of energy could be part of the solution, but they may not be available on a sufficiently large scale and with a truly workable infrastructure for many years.

Let's turn for a moment to another key aspect of the question, the reduction in energy use. As it turns out, industrial electric motors use more energy than highway vehicles. As one energy efficiency expert argues, a wholesale turnover to new, much more efficient motors would cut the energy these machines use in half and pay for the new machines fairly quickly (between a few weeks and sixteen months).51 New methods of casting metal, new technology for industrial pumps, recycling, and combined heat and power systems (CHP) can each have a major impact: according to the Department of Energy, the widespread use of CHP systems, for example, which recovers otherwise wasted heat, would save the "equivalent to the output of 40 percent of the coal-fired generating plants now producing electricity in the United States."52 Increasing energy efficiency in homes and buildings, in lighting and appliances, would also save a large share of the energy we now consume.53 All these transitions use existing technology, would pay for themselves soon, would decrease costs, and are already being implemented by smart businessmen and citizens. In short, this is a no-brainer: reducing energy use in these ways alone would make a serious difference.

But reducing our greenhouse gas emissions involves much more than changing our extraction and use of energy. According to the IPCC, forestry practices—primarily deforestation—causes just over 17 percent of all our greenhouse gas emissions.54 Deforestation damages the Earth twice over: it directly releases carbon dioxide *and* damages a forest's long-term role as a carbon sink. Since forests around the world are *already* under severe stress from climate change, as I discussed in chapter one, slashing and burning forests, clear-cutting them, or replacing them with farms or ranches only contributes to an already acute problem. Deforestation will have to end if we are to have the slightest chance of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. But it is much easier to envision this change than to carry it out. Even if we added the ending of deforestation to the proposed international climate treaties, there is no guarantee that the signatories would actually carry out their obligations. This is a tough one: somehow, we need to create new strategies that will truly stop deforestation.

Most of us intuitively know how we could meet this challenge. We in the developed nations should protect our own forests, of course, but should also pay less wealthy nations for protecting theirs, help them create effective environmental agencies to monitor those ecosystems, and start buying out local farmers and ranchers on the periphery of forests to return recently cleared land to its prior use. In short, we need serious international initiative, political and financial, to make this happen in a way that will matter. The problem, of course, is that funding these measures will require the adoption of an international treaty on climate change, a goal that continues to be elusive, as well as the consent of a majority of voters in developed countries. In some nations, especially the United States, there may not yet be a majority in favor of sending real money overseas to address climate change. It will take many years of hard work to put the necessary agreements in place and to pass the key legislation.

Our use of soils, while the focus of much less public attention, is also crucial. Since the soil contains three or four times as much carbon as plants and trees, tilling the soil—all by itself—can contribute substantially to global warming, for it releases that carbon through erosion and dust. Over most of human history, plowing the land has contributed more carbon to the atmosphere than the burning of fossil fuels; by one estimate, the latter surpassed plowing as a source only in the 1970s.55 The mechanization of agriculture, of course, alters the picture; by now, the manufacture of fertilizer and herbicides, the use of fossil fuels to power farm machines, and the release of methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, especially from the application of nitrogen-based fertilizers, makes the situation even worse. The 2007 IPCC assessment estimates that today agriculture contributes around 13.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Luckily, we already know the basics of how to reverse these practices; according to one study, with smart soil management, the greater use of cover crops, no-till agriculture, manuring, and agro-forestry, we could sequester between 5 and 15 percent of the world's annual fossil-fuel emissions in the soil, transforming a contributor of carbon into a major carbon sink.56

But making this shift will require a wholesale transformation in agriculture. In the United States, that's not an industry that yields easily to public pressure, nor is it a political constituency that accepts the urgency of action to save the climate. How exactly are we to bring about the necessary change of attitudes and practices to make a difference? Certainly the federal government could impose new regulations on farm practices or new taxes on certain goods. But farmers could block new rules by litigation or delay new legislation through political pressure. Finding a solution on this one is difficult.

Several patterns emerge from this brief discussion of these questions. For one thing, there are only a few technologies that are ready to go, that can be implemented without difficulty, and that we can build on a sufficient scale to make a real difference. For the most part, new techniques require skills we don't yet have, infrastructure that isn't built, or public approval that will be difficult to gain. As Fred Krupp, President of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Miriam Horn argue, entrepreneurs and inventors are busy creating next-generation technologies that may soon provide solutions to many of our energy needs, but only political intervention to increase the cost of generating greenhouse gases (through the mechanism, for example, of a cap-and-trade system, possibly of the sort that California is now launching) would make it possible for these innovators to generate energy on the scale we require.57 In a similar vein, Thomas L. Friedman urges the United States to forge into the lead on creating new energy technologies, demanding that our government produce an "ecosystem for energy innovation" by developing "an intelligently designed *system* of policies, tax incentives and disincentives, and regulations …"58 But so far, no such system is in place, and as a result the new energy economy has not yet taken off. Some new technologies are available, and in those cases, we should move without delay—to build biogas plants, for example, to shift to a new generation of industrial engines, and to improve efficiencies in our households. But to surmount the difficulty on a vast scale will require enormous political will. Even that is an understatement, since that political will can come from only one place, a huge upwelling of popular support for these changes.

Everything in this discussion thus comes down to the political situation in nations around the world, but especially in America, still the world's dominant economy and one of the leading contributors to climate change, where taking action has proved especially difficult. Yes, the American public believes that human beings are causing climate change by huge margins. But it clearly *hates* any increase in taxes, *even if* a tax is meant to forestall climate change. According to Jon Krosnick, in a poll conducted in early 2009 which found that around 74 percent of the American public thought that global warming was taking place and that it was caused by human activity, majorities of 78 percent and 72 percent, respectively, opposed federal taxes on electricity and gasoline to reduce consumption. But majorities of 80 to 84 percent favored tax breaks of various kinds to encourage renewable energy and energy efficiency.59 The poll unsurprisingly reflects the public distaste for taxes and love of tax breaks that has been familiar in American politics since the late 1970s. But by sticking with that preference in this case, most citizens choose incremental, piecemeal changes over anything more systematic. They seem to believe that if we improve technology, encourage industries to increase efficiency, and invite people to insulate their homes, we'll be doing fine. Unfortunately, that belief is simply untrue.

We have failed to make progress in shifting to a new energy economy over the last decade because most of us make our decisions according to the laws of the marketplace. We want cheap energy: oil, coal, and gas. The only effective way to change our practice *across the board* is to tax all the sources of greenhouse gas, impose a cap-and-trade system on those sources (as Congress debated in 2009–2010), or create a rationing system that would supply each citizen with a tradeable set of credits to be used in purchasing fuel in a given year (as proposed by Monbiot).60

These ideas are a tough sell to a public that hates taxes. We need an alternative. And luckily, there is one. Several observers have proposed what Steven Stoft calls the carbon "untax"—a tax whose proceeds would be refunded *in full and equally* to every citizen of the United States. This idea has the support of people across the political spectrum, from James Hansen, the leading climate scientist, to N. Gregory Mankiw, who served as George W. Bush's chief economist. It resembles the system in Alaska, whose government returns the state's portion of the proceeds from the sale of oil to every citizen.61 Other advocates tweak this proposal a bit by suggesting that a portion (perhaps a fourth) of the money raised through the tax be spent funding research and development of renewable technologies. Bill McKibben, a leading environmental writer, likes this proposal; it also served as the basis for the bill sponsored by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) in the 2009– 2010 session.

Each of these proposals has strengths and weaknesses. But it is not necessary to consider them at length here. Even with the large majority of Democrats in the first two years of Obama's presidency, the Senate could not act on climate change. Republicans were virtually unanimous in opposition to the cap-and-trade bill, and enough Democrats resisted it in the name of protecting the interests of constituents (such as those in West Virginia, a true coal state) that the bill may never even have had majority support, much less the sixty votes required for passage. That bill was already so riddled with exceptions and special favors, so obviously a series of compromises with the demands of resistant industries, that it may not have been worth passing. But all that is ancient history by now. The "tea party" revolt, the shift in power toward "skeptical" or hesitant Republicans in the 2010 elections, and the enduring resistance of many Democrats make it clear that the necessary political action will not emerge from the U.S. Congress any time soon. In fact, the political realities are and will remain dire. Because the substantial bloc of the public that still repudiates the science of climate change constitutes the base of the Republican party, that party will for many years be held captive by a dogmatic "skepticism," as the 2012 Republican presidential primaries demonstrated at length. Barring a stunning change in Senate rules, that body will continue to require a supermajority of sixty votes to pass legislation, giving Republicans and resistant Democrats an effective veto on any serious action. There is little cause to hope that the American Congress will ever approve of workable solutions in the absence of a fundamental political realignment of the sort that is highly unlikely to take place anytime soon.62 The Obama administration, assessing the situation in Congress well, has scaled back its attempts to address climate change in any forceful way and has made clear its preference for fairly modest measures, even after Superstorm Sandy brought renewed attention to climate concerns in the waning days of the 2012 election campaign. Its plans to take action within existing law, through the President's executive authority or the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency, while welcome, can only chip away at the problem rather than bring about the necessary widespread transformation.63

 That's just the domestic political situation. Things aren't much better internationally. As everyone knows, developing nations refuse to sign on to a climate change treaty without a much more sophisticated understanding of their dilemma, especially of their desire to continue on the path of economic growth and industrial development and their longing to join in the abundance on full display among the wealthy nations.64 Their hope, in short, is somehow to combine development and greenhouse-gas austerity. Doing so will happen *only* if wealthy nations help them leapfrog over outdated technologies and adopt the most recent, least damaging alternatives—and to preserve their ecosystems as well.

This demand for subsidies, of course, does not go down easy in the developed West. But that is only part of the problem. Most commentators point out that we cannot blame China for its intransigence on climate change, because historically the developed nations have put far more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than China and because the per capita carbon footprint in China remains far below that in the West. All these points are true. But it does not follow that China's resistance deserves sympathy. For one thing, emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in total ignorance of the consequences, as developed nations have done for a century or two, is quite different from emitting them *now*, when we *know* what those consequences are. We would not countenance any nation accepting the enslavement of its citizens and justifying the practice by arguing that America once accepted slavery. It is simply unacceptable to use past ignorance to justify present stupidity. Moreover, we should not use the fact that China's per capita carbon footprint remains small to explain why it might be resistant to action: if we do so, we endorse the idea that in all fairness, this footprint *should become larger* as if developing nations somehow *have the right* to spew huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, simply because *we* have been stupid enough to do so for generations. We can sympathize with their longing for economic growth, but we should *not* submit to liberal guilt. If the rest of the world demands the opportunity to live through the history we have enjoyed, the planet will be toast in short order.

We have to translate China's demands into terms that are just both across nations and to the planet. And justice demands something we may not be able to tolerate: a radical and instant renunciation of what we can now see as extravagant, monstrous stupidity, our willingness to eat the Earth for our own benefit. The point is not to invite the Earth's nations into our greenhouse gas insanity, but to stop *our* insanity and to discover a way of living that is truly sustainable. We should not only make this shift ourselves but also enable developing nations to enter an alternative, more viable modernity as well.

This discussion of the international political scene, of course, takes us right back to the domestic context. Needless to say, the American public has little inkling that such a renunciation is necessary or should even be discussed. The politics of climate change in the United States typically revolves around what we must do domestically to change our practices and whether or how to secure international agreement. But since a workable solution will have to provide substantial subsidies to developing nations, it will also require at least a minimal generosity from American taxpayers *on top* of whatever costs we must pay to transform our *own* energy practices.

It might be plausible to imagine that in a period of robust abundance, Americans could accept both domestic transformation and international generosity at once. But it's hard to imagine that sort of acceptance today. The lingering effects of the Great Recession make aggressive action politically impossible. With high federal debt, state governments recovering from crisis, and elevated unemployment, the public appetite for renouncing our dependence on fossil fuels is virtually nonexistent. The focus on recession or debt will drown out other priorities for many years—at least until the recovery has brought the country well out of the housing crisis and greatly reduced the unemployment rate. Never mind that the actual costs of the transition for an average citizen would not be very large; with the carbon untax, for example, such a citizen would probably come out *ahead*. Never mind that a substantial subsidy to the developing world wouldn't impose a large burden on the ordinary taxpayer. The problem here is not practical, but psychological; it arises from the difficulty of thinking about distant nations, and a presumably distant future, while in the midst of hard times. In a highly polarized political context, actions that are rather inexpensive can take on huge symbolic significance, for taking those actions requires that we accept a new and perhaps unpalatable view of the world and of our place in it.

For some observers, it may be quite easy to denounce the widespread denial of climate change as well as the overwhelming reluctance to act. But it just won't do to blame others. Those who are often the most passionate about climate change—relatively well-off, educated, and literate citizens—are part of the problem, too. Take the question of airplane travel. Let's say an exemplary citizen recycles scrupulously, drives a fuelefficient car, eats organic food, and votes for enlightened politicians but takes three plane trips a year (to see parents in California, to vacation in the Caribbean, or to see friends in New York). It's quite possible that just *one* of those plane trips will have as great a carbon footprint as driving that fuel-efficient car for an entire year. Everybody knows, or should know, that plane travel is a serious indulgence, that it cancels out any environmental responsibility that citizens might otherwise display.65 But everybody in the middle class or above indulges in it anyway. David MacKay brilliantly juxtaposes two quotations from Tony Blair. In the first, Blair says, "Unless we act now, not some time distant but now, these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible. So there is nothing more serious, more urgent or more demanding of leadership." Two months later, "responding to the suggestion that he should *show* leadership by not flying to Barbados for holidays," Blair says that this idea is "a bit impractical actually …"66

I think most people in the relevant classes can sympathize: nearly everyone who understands what is at stake and can afford to travel really can't *imagine* renouncing the convenience of flying. Let's not point fingers at those other idiots; with few exceptions, we're idiots, too. Blair's reluctance to give up his vacation in Barbados demonstrates quite clearly that political inaction only expresses a reluctance that *all* of us feel to transform our lives fundamentally. However much our minds may be persuaded of the need to act, on a gut level we just can't do it—or can't do it nearly as quickly and thoroughly as the occasion demands. Our experts have long since outlined what we could do to face the present challenge. Slowly and with infinite reluctance, we may be starting to take up the task. But do we have time to spare?

#### *Notes*

#### *Chapter 3*

### **Time's Up**

Many observers, long used to the slow pace of political transformation, might agree with everything I've said so far but insist that we need not worry too much: given time, our economy will recover, the supermajority of Americans will prevail, our political system will work, and we will see real action on climate change. With enough persistence, over the next decade or so we will help forge a genuinely effective international agreement. The research into new technologies will begin to see fruitful results, we'll create the new energy economy, and we'll be on a secure footing at last.

But in the case of this particular transformation, unlike most others, we just don't have the time to let things play out. While we proceed at our usual deliberative pace, climate change speeds ahead. The mismatch is stark and growing. If we're going to get anything done, we should do it now, and preferably yesterday. As Rajendra Pachauri, the scientist who headed the IPCC in 2007, remarked in that year, "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late… . What we do in the next two or three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."67

We're not used to thinking about acting so quickly in part because we tend to accept the pace of political change. The international negotiations for a climate change treaty, building on that premise, takes for granted that we have some time: the proposed agreement sets the target of an 80 percent reduction in the emission of carbon dioxide by 2050. *That* year is indeed some distance away. But if we take a good look at the most recent information, it's clear that we will have to make the cuts much deeper and sooner than we thought.

*But wait a minute*, many voices say; *why do you keep insisting that everything has to happen* **now**? *Why not let the country recover economically*  *before asking for change? Why not bring everybody on board before rushing into action?*

There are **eight** good reasons why time is up.

First of all, the target—cutting emissions 80 percent by 2050—was chosen for political reasons, not on the basis of the science. 2050 is far enough away to make deep cuts politically palatable. Whenever people suggest that we have to make these cuts earlier, others resist—not because of the science, but because they fear the political consequences. Unfortunately, the change in Earth's climate doesn't particularly care about what is palatable to us. The goals we once set are too far away; if we are honest, we must acknowledge that we must act much sooner.

Second, the science itself has changed since the international negotiations began. Over the past twenty years or so, scientists have been asking what would happen if we doubled the preindustrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide—around 275 parts per million—to around 550 ppm. This number, chosen in part as a convenient signpost, has determined the shape of countless investigations of climate change as well as much of the discussion of potential future scenarios in the IPCC assessments. As a result, for many years we did not have a sure sense of how much change might take place at lower levels. In a rather different vein, those seeking international agreements initially chose 450 ppm as a target in part because it once seemed that with concerted effort the international community might be able to meet it.

But in the last four or five years, further research suggests that these numbers are too high. One paper (authored by James Hansen and many others) published in September 2009 argues that previous models failed to take into account the effect of positive feedback loops. Models once predicted that a doubling in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere would lead to a temperature increase of around 3° Centigrade (with a range of from 2 to 4.5°). But current models that include the effects of positive feedback loops estimate that the same carbon dioxide concentration will lead to an increase of around 6° Centigrade (with a range of from 4 to 8°). The implication of this argument is that the widely known and cited estimates of the IPCC are too optimistic—and that in fact we have *already* gone beyond what the planet can tolerate. If Rajendra Pachauri thought we have until 2012, these researchers imply that we should have acted long before even *that* year. They estimate that the boundary for carbon dioxide concentration is 350 ppm; at the time of that article's publication, the concentration was 387 ppm and rising and was forcing an exit from the Holocene, the stable environment we have enjoyed over the past 10,000 years.68 Persuaded by this argument, Bill McKibben and many others have formed the group 350.org, which advocates for concerted action to meet that lower target.

Third, although the international community set 450 ppm as its target many years ago, the continuing rise in emissions from most developed nations in the intervening years, together with the huge increase from developing countries like China, has made that target totally unrealistic. In the Kyoto Protocol, most of the world's nations promised to reduce greenhouse emissions by about 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. But instead, global carbon dioxide emissions *increased* by 38 percent from 1990 to 2009.69 Very few observers now believe that we will be able to stabilize carbon dioxide levels at that threshold. In August 2004, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow introduced the idea of "stabilization wedges." In their definition, a wedge is the shape on a graph whose top (ascending) line depicts a gradual increase in carbon dioxide emissions and whose bottom (straight or descending) line depicts a potential decrease in those emissions if we adopt new practices. In short, a wedge is a chunk of unemitted carbon dioxide. Pacala and Socolow proposed fifteen possible wedges drawing on existing or nearly existing technologies and suggested that achieving seven of these wedges over the next fifty years would be enough to stabilize those concentrations at 500 ppm, a target they thought plausible.70 But in September 2010, Martin Hoffert pointed out that because our emissions have been rising much more quickly than Pacala and Socolow envisioned, we would now need to achieve eighteen of these wedges just to reach stabilization and twenty-five to phase out fossil fuels altogether.71

Think about it: in six years, the world went from needing to achieve seven wedges to eighteen. We're going in the wrong direction, and going fast: we're *adding* to our challenge by nearly two wedges per year, making the task of reversing the effects of these emissions even more difficult.

It's true that during the recession, the usage of electricity and gas fell, slowing down the increase in our greenhouse gas emissions. But usage fell because of hardship, not from any shift in our fundamental habits. In the midst of the downturn, it was easy to predict that once the recovery began, people would rush back to the behavior they know best. In fact, that is exactly what happened. Researchers found that global emissions of carbon dioxide increased by 5.9 percent in 2010, more than making up for a slight decrease in 2009, the year in which the recession had the most impact.72 Clearly, the recession did not slow down the steady increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Fourth, even *this* discussion does not face the full measure of the challenge, for the simple reason that carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. George Monbiot points out that according to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, we should aim to stabilize "greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at or below the *equivalent* of 440 parts of carbon dioxide per million." When the carbon dioxide concentration was around 380 ppm, "the other greenhouse gases raise[d] this to an equivalent of 440 or 450."73 But in late 2013, the global monthly mean of carbon dioxide approached 400 ppm, so that the overall concentration of greenhouse gases is now well above the equivalent of 450 ppm.74 *We have already exceeded the upper limit* for our contribution to the greenhouse effect we set some years ago.

Fifth, we must take another factor into account as well. As time goes by and we emit more carbon dioxide, the less the biosphere can absorb; by one estimate, it will absorb fully one-third less as much by 2030.75 As a result, emitting a certain quantity of carbon dioxide a decade from now will impose a greater burden on the biosphere than emitting it today and what is more, reducing our output will only keep up with the Earth's capacity to absorb less. In effect, we will have to cut back our footprint *an extra portion* just to take that fact into account.

Sixth, much as these estimates for how *deep* we must cut have to be revised, the guess as to how *soon* we should achieve our target must change as well. Monbiot's already severe estimate—that the United Kingdom would have to cut its emissions 80 percent by 2030—was based on a guess as to when our emissions would be so great that they would trigger positive feedback loops and thus irreversible climate change. But Monbiot relies on an estimate in a paper published back in 2003.76 It's already clear that in the intervening years we've emitted far more than scientists in 2003 would have guessed. If they thought that business as usual might trigger irreversible global warming around 2030, twentyseven years later, the reckless emission of greenhouse gases over the last ten years has undoubtedly moved up the date much closer to the present.

These physical facts alone are dire. We have over twice the reductions to achieve as we did only a few years ago and far less time in which to achieve them. Very soon, the present in which we live and the future in which we would cross the tipping point will coincide—and we'll discover we've already passed the point at which those positive feedback loops kick in.

Doing some arithmetic based on these facts may help clarify our situation. In 2003 it once seemed we'd meet our goals by 2030, but we've managed to waste ten years or so. If we once needed to achieve seven wedges, we now need to achieve eighteen—*plus* a further increment to hit a target not of 500 ppm, but of 350. Since we are already above the equivalent of 450 ppm, if we wish not to go too far beyond that level we will have to try to eliminate fossil-fuel use entirely, and thus to achieve twenty-five wedges, as Hoffert suggests. But to do so now, after several years since his study have gone by, we'd most likely need to hit around thirty wedges. Yet we'd need to add a *further* increment to take into account the fact that the biosphere will absorb less of what we emit in the coming years. A backof-the envelope calculation suggests that *if we acted today* we would need to reduce our emissions by at least thirty-two wedges. Moreover, thanks to our profligacy in recent years, as well as our sense that we must hit a lower target, it's also likely we would need to achieve these cuts many years earlier.

Other ways of estimating the challenge confirm these figures. At the Copenhagen summit on climate change in 2010, a majority of nations endorsed a target of raising the Earth's temperatures no more than 1.5° Centigrade above preindustrial levels. But since we've already raised the average temperature by 0.8°, and the temperature will rise another 0.6° due to the inertia of the world's climate, 1.4 of those 1.5° are already inevitable, leaving us virtually without hope of reaching the target.77 Even if we acted *today* to eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions *entirely*, we'd still barely meet our goal. And there is simply *no* chance we can eliminate all those emissions so quickly.

Let's take more than the purely physical facts into account here as well. It will take us a few years to pass the necessary legislation and sign the key international agreements, as I suggested above, and a few years after *that* to research and implement an array of new technologies, build the solar and wind plants, create a new energy infrastructure, convert our transportation system, and fund the protection of forests. If we're lucky, perhaps we will begin to see steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in about a decade. By then, however, we will have emitted so much more carbon dioxide that we'll have much further to go to meet our targets. How far is impossible to say—but clearly we'd need to achieve many more than the thirty-two wedges I mentioned a moment ago.

From these estimates it seems that if we acted *now*, our change in policy would finally *begin* to take effect roughly ten years from now, somewhere in the early 2020s. But the severity of our situation is clear if we take into account the seventh reason—the fact that, as I've said above, 2020 is the new 2100. As recent research indicates, we've already crossed one tipping point with the melting of the Arctic sea ice and may cross one or two more by the mid 2020s. Nearly all the above estimates take as their fundamental principle the overriding task of *not* crossing through those tipping points; once we reach them, we need not work our way through all those calculations but can sense our situation immediately from the state of those tipping points. We're now witnessing the very events we were trying to avoid, and all this talk of targets, all this arithmetic, however useful it may have once seemed, ultimately distracts us from what is right in front of us. And from the evidence of the melting sea ice, the exploding methane clathrates, the morphing permafrost, and the crackling Amazon rainforest, the essential story is becoming increasingly clear.

So it seems that even under the *best case scenario*, *even if we acted today* our efforts might take effect in the mid 2020s—just as we may be triggering severe and irreversible climate change. Fortune may smile upon us and allow us a few years of grace to hit our target, but if so, we really must achieve everything in a ridiculously tiny span of time. It is far more likely that we will be in the position of taking action after the feedback loops have already begun—making ourselves poster children for defiant foolishness. We are more than flirting with disaster; we're *inviting* it. It's almost impossible not to think that all is lost, that even if we act, it will be too late.78

These realities undermine the premise of a major activist enterprise of our moment—Bill McKibben's drive to encourage many public institutions to disinvest in fossil-fuel companies and thus help prevent the United States from pushing the biosphere beyond the limits of its tolerance. In the *Rolling Stone* article in which he lays out his case, McKibben first explains that the 2° threshold on which international negotiators rely is too high, but then invokes on a specific "carbon budget" derived from that threshold to argue we have time to make a difference through the strategy of divestment.79 His effort, praiseworthy as it is, relies on a contradiction between his knowledge that we've already virtually met the limit of what the Earth can tolerate and his description of what a certain kind of activism can still accomplish.

Given all these factors, we can no longer assume that our efforts will bear fruit, that the civilizations of the Holocene will survive in anything like their present form. An honest look at the task ahead and the time remaining should disabuse us of our unspoken confidence that the world we know will endure in something of its current form for the rest of our lives.