Why Our Civilization Is in a Climate Crisis
Welcome, friends, to another…Extinction Summer. It’s going to be the hottest year…on record. And already, the signs are…ominous. Global temperatures have suddenly spiked. Ocean temperatures are…leaping off the charts. Meanwhile, the polar ice is melting so fast scientists are shocked. And carbon emissions just hit record highs.
Don’t take it from me.
In a widely shared tweet, Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, called rising ocean and air temperatures “totally bonkers.” He added, “people who look at this stuff routinely can’t believe their eyes. Something very weird is happening.
Uh oh.
Meanwhile:
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Thursday that countries must start phasing out oil, coal and gas — not just emissions — and demanded fossil fuel companies “cease and desist” measures that aim to “knee-cap” climate progress. “The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It’s fossil fuels — period,” Guterres told reporters. “The solution is clear: The world must phase out fossil fuels in a just and equitable way — moving to leave oil, coal and gas in the ground.
There are moments in history — and this was one. A landmark speech, by one of the world’s leaders — at precisely the moment scientists “can’t believe their eyes,” the week after the skies over Manhattan turned Extinction Orange.
He’s not mincing words. What else did he have to say?
He said limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius is still possible but will require a 45 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. However, current policies will lead to a 2.8°C temperature rise by the end of the century, which “spells catastrophe”. He called for immediate global action toward net-zero emissions, which “must start with the polluted heart of the climate crisis: the fossil fuel industry.”
Whew. And you think I go for the jugular. Guterres is lobbing truth bombs at the heart of the world’s political establishment. But is anyone listening?
Should we phase out fossil fuels? It becomes, immediately, an emotional, divisive topic. Is the world, the average person ready to…give up their air conditioning…car…creature comforts…for ten years, twenty…a generation or two? Until, at last, there’s a source of clean energy — and until then, we just don’t keep on emitting carbon — and turning the skies orange? Somehow, I doubt it. Hence, the maelstrom of emotion and controversy surrounding the question.
So in a sense, this is the wrong way to think about the question. Here’s a better way. Could we phase out fossil fuels?
The answer to that question is chilling, instructive — and paints an eerily clear picture of where our civilization’s headed. How are we to answer that question? Let’s think about the sources of carbon emissions — most people even at this juncture, the horizon of the Age of Extinction, don’t know this, and yet it’s the most basic fact of all about everything right now, from economics to politics to money and finance to society.
Electricity’s responsible for about 25% of carbon emissions. Agriculture, about 10%. Transportation, about 30%. Buildings and construction, maybe 10%. And industry, about 25%.
Now, that might sound boring — but it’s the key to the future. Because we have no current way of producing all of those goods in a fossil-fuel free way, especially not a civilizational scale. We just don’t know how to do it.
Let’s take the most obvious problem. Agriculture. We have no idea — none whatsoever — how to produce food without fossil fuels. Where do fossil fuels enter agriculture? As all kinds of inputs, fertilizer’s the big one, then there’s water, machinery, and so on. Sure, we have some attempts being made at green agriculture — there’s a funny phrase when you think about it — and nations like Holland are aiming at becoming global leaders in that field. So far, maybe — maaaybe — it could work on the scale of a town, city, barely even region. But at a civilizational scale? As in a civilization of 8 billion people plus, who trade food on global markets, and ship it back and forth on mega-ships, and store it in warehouses, after producing it industrially? We have no idea, none, zero, zilch, how to make agriculture work without fossil fuels.
Let’s take another category, building and construction. Here we run into the same problem. We have no idea — none — how to make glass, steel, cement, and nearly every other input that goes into these fields without…fossil fuels. The very first green steel plants our civilization has ever had are coming online now. They’re going to produce enough steel for…again…a city, region, maybe a small country. But for a world? A civilization? Forget it — at that scale, we have no idea, again, none, how to construct…the dwellings we live and work in…right down to roads and airports…the connective tissue of our societies…the material bases of our civilization. Think about that for a second.
Or consider industry — that just means factories, more or less. All those household goods that we eagerly consume. You buy them by the dozen at Amazon or Costco or what have you, and don’t worry, that’s not a judgment, I do too. What are they made of, mostly? Plastic. Paper, maybe. Things we don’t know how to produce without fossil fuels. Things that are fossil fuels — in plastic’s case. The first forms of green plastics are just tiny nascent ideas right now — Finland’s emerging as a global leader in that field. It can make enough, again, maybe, for a small town, city, not even a region, I’d estimate. But a civilization, a planet, of billions? We have no idea how basic industry…happens…without fossil fuels…at that scale.
And then there all the chemicals used in industry, from making everything from eyeglasses to medicines. Again — no idea.
Let’s take electricity — often touted as a bellwether example of progress. Sure, there’s been progress in solar and wind power. But again, not at anything remotely close to a civilizational scale. And when you think about it at that level, the question becomes much, much more difficult. How do we provide electricity not just for say, sunbelts and windy regions, or even those with abundant hydropower — but for a world? A planet? Without fossil fuels? The answer, again, is: we don’t know. We don’t have anything remotely close to a universal source of energy that can be easily used almost anywhere — something as liquid as fossil fuel. Which is precisely why so many poor countries still rely on it, and will, because they have to.
I could go on and on. The theme should already be very clear — painfully clear. Sure, I think most sensible can agree that we should phase out fossil fuels. I think probably most sensible people will see that most other people aren’t going to be willing to give up much in the process — certainly not, say, air conditioning and cars and snacks and medicine and nice clothes, after all, “let’s go back to the Stone Age” is hardly an attractive sales pitch, especially while there’s some crazy demagogue already telling people they can blame it all on some poor innocent.
So sure, fossil fuels should be phased out, gently, but about as fast as is tolerable — that means not generating even more calamitous falls in living standards than the mega-scale impacts of climate change are already generating. Food inflation’s soaring in large part, for example, because we’re hitting the limits of our planet’s industrial agricultural capacity — and it’s stretching people to the limit.
The question then becomes: how fast is “tolerable”? How fast could we phase out fossil fuels? If you understand the above, the problem becomes chillingly clear. Even if we agreed, as a world, sure, yes, let’s end our dependence on this poisonous stuff — we couldn’t do it. We can’t agree on that for a very simple reason — our political leaders know that ending our fossil fuel dependence would basically wreck every last shred of modern life as we know it. No fossil fuels? Where does food, water, cement, glass, steel, electricity come from?
The response from the other side, of course, goes like this: it’s going to run out the hard way, anyways. And it already is. The mega-scale impacts of climate change are going to take industrial civilization with them. And that’s true, too — we have what, two decades, three? Before our systems and institutions head towards a Final Implosion — they just don’t work anymore, from water to food to healthcare to retirement to education to finance, and you can see the tremors racing through them already. Imagine what happens when the weather’s like this, only worse, season after season, for two decades. Good luck having an economy — remember, America’s biggest insurer just pulled out of California. How long does Manhattan have? Miami? How often do Canada and Australia get incinerated? Asian nations drowned?
Bang, there goes…cotton…leather…sugar…rice…everything.
Where does that leave us, this awful catch-22? Sure, we should phase out fossil fuels — but practically, LOL, we have no idea whatsoever how to. We simply don’t know how to make a single one of the basics we depend on, at a civilizational scale, without them.
The economist in me has a very, very simple answer to that question. Investment. We need to invest, now. See what Holland’s doing for green agriculture? Finland’s doing for green plastic? Or take what Bidenomics is doing for microchips. All of that needs to be scaled up, and fast.
We need the biggest wave of investment in human history. I say that often, and maybe this sheds a little bit more light on it. We need not one Manhattan Project — but a dozen, maybe more. Take the very problems above — we need one for each one. Green agriculture? That’s a handful of Manhattan Projects alone, from fertilizer to water. How about industry? Closed-loop manufacturing and clean production of all those inputs synthesized from fossils are another two. How about clean plastic? Another one. What about clean energy — but a truly universal source of it, not just one locked to sun, water, or wind? That’s the big one, and probably another half dozen Manhattan Projects are in there.
The biggest wave of investment in human history. All those young people, depressed, anxious, afraid, because the world is falling down around them — and it’s true, it is, from downward mobility to mega-scale climate change to regressive politics? Armies of them should be employed on these projects. We should be throwing offers to do PhDs in all this at legions of young people, creating them by the thousands, on a scale never seen before. Each of them should have a research team, and the research programs should number in the hundreds, each of them a part of these dozens of Manhattan Projects.
If that sounds like sci-fi, that’s because our political reality is that far detached from it. We’re not doing the above — we’re nowhere close to it. Hence, every summer, the mega-scale impacts of climate change just get worse and worse. But now you know why. We’re a civilization that — even if we wanted to kick the poisonous fossil fuel habit — doesn’t know how.
Source: Eudaimonia and Co
