Wake up time! Let's get contagious!

After a painfully long time during which shortsightedness with respect to global warming ruled the public domain, changes are afoot. This is a fun topic to write about. Start with two quotes from the November 5, 2019 issue of the Policy Alert of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

“State legislators in Florida are starting to evaluate the state’s exposure to climate risks for the first time since former Gov. Rick Scott ® reportedly forbade the use of the phrase “climate change” in state publications in 2011. In a recent hearing of the Florida Legislature’s Committee on Infrastructure and Security, State Sen. Tom Lee (R) acknowledged that lengthy delays in evaluating climate risks and exposures have amounted to a “lost decade” of time within which opportunities to craft solutions had been squandered.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) has issued an order requiring the state to begin evaluating climate risks and planning for resiliency measures. The order calls for a multi-agency effort, led by the Department of Environmental Protection, to evaluate and report on climate risks to the state. An initial report to address opportunities for New Jersey to avert the consequences of rising and warming seas, as well as more frequent and intense extreme weather, is due by September 1, 2020.

Many such announcements are to be found on the web these days, but should we be cheered by them? They don’t as yet amount to more than assessing and planning for a worrisome future. The bank of Norway, which is heavily invested in fossil fuel enterprises, is worried but doesn’t have any good ideas about how to cope with the coming demise of fossil fuel enterprises. To Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist all this awakening seems pitifully slow. The time for action is now!

Many writers have commented on our human propensity for shortsightedness. It’s wired into our brains! There’s a lot of gloomy stuff in this literature, but Bina Venkataraman, an experienced and highly respected former climate change advisor in the Obama White House and currently Director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has a more balanced view. As she writes in her new book, The Optimist’s Telescope, “The future is an idea we have to conjure in our minds, not something that we perceive with our senses. What we want today, by contrast, we can often feel in our guts as a craving."

She goes on to talk about behavioral contagion, a concept born at the turn of the 19th century to account for undesirable behaviors of people in crowds. Venkataraman argues that there is a positive side to this; cases in which individual courses of action have collectively brought about substantial changes. Small actions may in themselves seem insignificant, but through the influence of behavioral contagion, they can lead to sweeping changes: My neighbor installed solar panels, and hey, so did that guy down the block. I should check it out. My friend Alice sent me a link yesterday to a new website, Protecting Florida Together, put up by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, that looks good. It could be a place where I’m reminded of what’s going on, and maybe express my concerns. I should let my friends and neighbors know of this site.

Many public expressions and actions of individuals ripple out into a community. An apparently oddball idea becomes a meme; a municipal election turns out to be a harbinger of larger-scale shifts. The governor of Maine vows that her state will work to meet the Paris Accords in spite of the perverse actions of the Trump administration in pulling out. And the Democratic sweep in Virginia promises aggressive actions to address climate change.

I’ve often written in earlier blogs about how little time we humans have to take actions that could head off climate disasters in the decades ahead. When I reread some of those entries I see that shifts in public perceptions are underway, but progress is so damned slow! Now that there seems to be some movement, and global warming has risen to be a more visible topic in public discourse, how do we go from talking about it to acting? Remember Andrew Marvel, the English poet who pleaded with his coy mistress about the fleeting nature of time?

Here are a few ideas on what each of us can do, depending on our capacities for acting for those of us who can’t get out much, but probably have cell phones, tablets or laptop computers, all of which have a search engine of some sort. If you don’t have one, sign up with Google, and you’ll be all set. If you can’t manage that, ask one of your friends to lend you one of their grandkids when they’re visiting. You’d be surprised how eager your friends are to show off their grandkids’ amazing abilities. Ask your search engine, or Alexa or Siri, whatever you have: Who are my representatives in the state legislature? When I did that, my search led me to the names of my two representatives, one each in the Florida upper and lower house. When I click on Kathleen Passidomo I find her email address and the names of her committee assignments. I notice that she represents big chunks of Hendry, Collier, and part of Lee counties. That means that her constituents cover a lot of agricultural interests in all three counties here in southwest Florida. Collier county includes the city of Naples, which by some measures has the highest per capita income in the state. She’s the majority leader and has a very safe seat in the Florida Senate, after serving for several terms in the lower house.

I can check on how Passidomo voted in recent bills. She’s a Repubican, representing a wealthy district. I need to let her know of my opposition to the excessive development occurring in her district, of my support for legislation reforming Florida agriculture in areas she represents. And when opportunities arise, I should mention my actions to my friends. And for good measure, if I call her office or write her, I can tweet on my account that I did so, with a few words on what message I was delivering. And for good measure, on my Facebook page. These actions are pretty easy to do, and they don’t take a lot of time. They could count for something, especially if I let others know what I've done. My behavior could be contagious. Isn’t it great to think of contagion as a good thing?! I keep in mind that that though I don’t have the wealth and clout of some of her constituents, I have just as many votes on a per capita basis, possibly many more if I spread my view and actions contagiously.

The same approach should apply to contacting your US House and Senate representatives. And by the way, I asked Cortana about State Senator Tom Lee of Florida, whom I quoted in the opening paragraph, got his office phone number and called to tell him that I admired his remarks about the squandered opportunities of the past decades. His staff person seemed glad to hear from me. So easy, a little nudge in the right direction.  Maybe you can help me make this blog contagious.

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.