On not losing faith in climate action

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management recently filed a final impact statement (EIS) related to oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Predictably, it doesn’t foresee that drilling will have substantial environmental effects on the Alaskan wildlife and environment.  Those would come largely downstream, in the form of burning of the extracted oil and gas. However, the EIS, more or less in spite of its natural inclinations, had quite a bit to say, buried near the back of the report, on the expected long-term effects of climate change on the Arctic ecology:  "The large magnitude of climate change effects, accompanied by increases in already high climate variability in the Arctic, are likely to overshadow smaller magnitude impacts of oil development. ... many species that nest on the refuge's coastal plain already are experiencing decreasing populations, and many could suffer catastrophic consequences from the effects of global climate change in one or more of their seasonal continental or even global habitats…”.   In short, extinction of species can be expected to occur on a massive scale as global warming marches on. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is finalizing regulations that could make it harder to protect wildlife at a time when scientists say the threats against it are growing.

Habitat loss continues apace, while climate change is predicted to increase pressure against species as temperatures climb. In the administration’s new-speak, plants and animals are considered threatened when they're at risk of becoming endangered "in the foreseeable future." The administration wants to limit what counts as “foreseeable future”, and only considers factors it deems "probable," according to its proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act. I could fill this entire blog with examples of the ways that barriers are being formed to listing species as endangered, slowing up the process to the point that the species may become extinct even before being acknowledged as endangered.  

In the prologue to his book, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, E. O. Wilson writes that our human sensory system and capacity for moral reasoning are deficient for the purposes of modern humanity:  “Like it or not, we remain a biological species in a biological world, wondrously well adapted to the conditions of the planet’s former living environment, albeit tragically not this environment or the one we are creating. In body and soul we are the children of the Holocene, the epoch that created us, yet far from well adapted to its successor, the Anthropocene.”  Wilson is a wise and learned man. Given what he knows about his fellow humans, and about the deep perils that face all the species on the planet, I admire his persistent efforts to enlighten and inspire the rest of us to action. But what actions? Greta Thunberg, and George Monbiot urge us in an excellent short video to PROTECT, RESTORE, FUND.  Yes! Let’s do those things! But most of us don’t know how.  We are, most of us, trapped in our wondrous adaptations to the rapidly disappearing Holocene.  

The physicist Gilbert N.Plass first made me aware of the influence of greenhouse gases on Earth's climate when  I heard him speak at Michigan State University in 1954.  Plass was one of the early pioneers of the modern movement to rigorously compute the effects of greenhouse gases on the planet’s surface temperature.  His work drew a fair amount of attention; Time magazine did a story on him in 1958. I became fascinated by what I learned from Plass, and over the years spent time away from my major research interests as a Chemistry Professor to delve into atmospheric sciences. I wrote about global warming in a short general audience type of book, Energy and the Environment, published in 1971, which received a modest level of use in special topics courses; spent a sabbatical leave at the International Meteorological Institute in Stockholm in 1972, during which time I attended the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm;  a discussion of “water vapor, carbon dioxide and climate” was included in the first edition of Chemistry: The Central Science, a general chemistry text I coauthored with H. Eugene LeMay, which appeared in 1977. I taught myself a lot about climate change during those years, but I also came to recognize, regrettably, that global warming has been a subject of small interest. In a January 22, 2019 report, Climate Change in the American Mind, about 71% of American respondents indicated a belief that climate change is happening. That’s the same percentage reported in 2008. It went down after 2008, and has only slowly crept back up. Further, the percentage of respondents that believe that global warming has a human cause, is only 56%, the same as in 2008. There’s not much to be happy about in those numbers, though I expect that there’s more awareness globally than there is in the US.  

The novelist Jonathan Franzen made a lot of people unhappy with an opinion piece he wrote recently for The New Yorker.  One of his sins in the eyes of his critics is that he promotes what they see as a defeatist view: there’s scant evidence that humans will successfully prevent climate catastrophe. But Franzen isn’t arguing that we should do nothing, he’s cautioning against unrealistic hope. Despite widespread claims that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon a collective will, annual global emissions of carbon dioxide have continued to increase. With the major economies of the world fixated largely on GDP, with neoliberalism still a reigning economic doctrine, what other outcomes can we expect? The Business Roundtable recently issued a revised Purpose of a Corporation.  As reported in the New York Times, the statement says increasing shareholder value should no longer be the sole and exclusive focus of an incorporated business. Companies must also invest in their employees, deliver value to their customers, and deal fairly and ethically with their communities, It may look good, but isn’t it just more temporizing by Jamie Dimon and his ilk?  We have good reasons to be skeptical as to whether corporations will be motivated to mount an effective counter to the threats of global warming.

How, I wonder, will corporations, government and all of us respond to the powerful remarks of 16 year-old Greta Thunberg at the U.N. Climate Action Summit on  September 23^rd? I was in the midst of writing this blog when I heard them. Greta will not be able to persuade politicians and corporations that promote continued use of fossil fuel to work toward

rapid deployment of alternative energy sources. She will not succeed in bringing to a halt the continued destructive practices of an industrialized food industry. But this young woman moved me. I had begun this blog with the weary feeling that after all these years I might be just wasting my time. After listening to Greta, I know that I should stay active, however small my contribution may be.  My spouse Audrey and I have ten great-grandchildren. We are responsible for the fact that they exist. Don't we have an obligation to do what we can to maintain a habitable planet for them? To push, with our voices, money, and energy for a new politics in which change is possible? If like me you’re an elder, climate change is not so much a burden we will bear as a situation we’ll leave our progeny. We need to answer the call for ethics tailored to the Anthropocene.