Billionaire climate champions buckle under to Trump's climate denial

David Gelles, Under Trump, Billionaire Climate Champions Have Gone Quiet, NYTimes, Feb. 11, 2025.

Over the last decade or so, a group of America’s wealthiest individuals, largely from the tech industry, became some of the world’s biggest climate champions, pledging billions in highly public campaigns.

Jeff Bezos [...] Michael Bloomberg [...] Bill Gates [...] Laurene Powell Jobs [...] Marc Benioff, the co-founder of Salesforce, spun up an initiative to plant a trillion trees.

And big tech companies, from Google to Meta to Amazon, made ambitious pledges to reduce emissions and support clean energy.

But over the past few weeks, many of these voices have gone quiet as President Trump has slashed environmental protections, promoted planet-warming fossil fuels and taken steps to dismantle American climate policy.

On his first day in office, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, set in motion plans to open Alaskan wilderness to drilling and mining, halted federal approvals for new wind farms, told federal agencies to stop subsidizing electric vehicles, and paused approvals for renewable energy projects on public lands. Since then, his assault on climate initiatives promoted by the Biden administration has continued.

With the exception of Bloomberg, none of the leaders, including Bezos, Gates, Powell Jobs and Benioff, have made statements opposing the Trump administration’s actions. Silicon Valley’s major tech companies that have committed to reducing their emissions have also been silent.

When BIG DOG says jump, they know it's time to do their business.

There's more at the link.

Ezra Klein: Here be monsters. [The state of the world]

From The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2025, ChatGPT summarizes:

The article "The Old World Is Breaking Down. A New One Is Breaking Through" by Ezra Klein discusses the significant societal, political, and technological shifts reshaping the world in 2025. It highlights several key themes:

1. American Politics and Trump’s Return: Donald Trump’s second term in office represents a decline in democratic safeguards, with alliances between Trump and powerful oligarchs altering the political landscape. This situation echoes the erosion of democracies seen in other nations.

2. Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI): Rapid advancements in AI technology have introduced new capabilities but also pose risks due to insufficient understanding and regulation. The global race for AI dominance, particularly between the U.S. and China, underscores its importance in geopolitics and raises concerns about its implications for security and power.

3. Climate Crisis: The worsening climate crisis is evident in record-breaking heatwaves and other extreme weather events. Efforts to transition to renewable energy face challenges, exacerbated by rising energy demands from AI development.

4. Falling Global Fertility Rates: Declining birth rates worldwide threaten societal stability, economic growth, and demographics. This trend is particularly concerning in countries like South Korea and Russia, which face political and social turmoil as a result.

5. Interconnected Challenges: The article connects these issues, suggesting that they collectively mark the collapse of old structures and the uncertain emergence of new paradigms. It warns of a turbulent era, quoting Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

This thought-provoking piece explores the uncertainties and complexities of a transformative era, emphasizing the need for strategic action and global cooperation to navigate these challenges.

America's sources of energy from 1776 to 2020

Fascinating look at where America sourced energy since 1776:

via @adam_tooze pic.twitter.com/i7hXpD87Cw

— Bryan Alexander (@BryanAlexander) July 8, 2024

Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors [Contest]

Write the climate future you want to see. Submissions are open TODAY for Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors. #ClimateFiction #Imagine2200 https://t.co/EaQHYc4c4z

— grist (@grist) March 30, 2024

Who's an expert on climate change?

40% of U.S. adults think they know more about climate change than climate scientists.

Source: https://t.co/C1W5CwgeJM pic.twitter.com/Q75guIxLqw

— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) November 22, 2023

Climate change threatens Japan's cultural calendar [Haiku x-risk]

Tomoko Otake, Fall is the new summer: Warming threatens Japan’s cultural calendar, The Japan Times, Nov. 19, 2023.

On one hand is a cold beverage; in the other, a paper fan.

Clad in a yukata (summer kimono) and perched on the embankment of a river, you look up at the sky. Bright sparks spread out like big flowers on the pitch-black canvas, accompanied by bangs and crackles. A slight smell of mosquito-repellent incense drifts through the air.

Watching firework displays has long been a quintessential summer experience in Japan, with relatively cooler evenings offering a moment’s respite from the unrelenting daytime heat.

At this year’s riverside fireworks festival in Itako, Ibaraki Prefecture, however, the vibe was markedly different.

 For haiku poets, the disappearance of a season is an existential threat.

After a four-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the festival once again entertained locals and visitors alike with 3,000 fireworks. But instead of yukata, people wore sweatshirts and down jackets, with some laying out blankets on their laps. That’s because the event was held in late October for the first time.

“It’s too cold to wear a yukata in this weather,” said Yuka Ishida, 37, who was visiting Itako from a neighboring city with her friend.

More generally:

Climate change — as evidenced by the record-beating heat the world experienced this year, including unusually high temperatures in November across Japan — is disrupting the nation’s autumn and seasonal experiences, and with it the rhythm of people’s lives. [...]

The impact of autumn's fade is huge — not just environmentally but also socially and culturally. Hordes of businesses rely on seasonal demand, be it beer companies with autumn specials or operators of viewing tours to see colorful leaves. And for haiku poets, the disappearance of a season is an existential threat.

There's more at the link.

Sabine Hossenfelder on Climate Change [opportunity cost]

She's got a thread on X, aka The Site Formerly Known as Twitter. Here's her first Xcerpt:

I really feel like there are a lot of people who cannot grasp why climate change is such a big problem, people who are like "ah, cmon, we'll just all buy air conditioning". You must have seen them here on twitter before: It's the "climate's always been changing" type who thinks everyone who is even mildly concerned is an "alarmist".

If you're one of them, here's what you do not understand: There's only so much work that one human can do in one day. The more time we need to spend to fix climate related problems, the less time we will have for other things. Consequently, climate change is going to cause a huge societal and technological stagnation if not regress.

We will be forced to pour an increasingly huge fraction of our economic output into fixing climate problems. Increasingly more people will have to work on mitigation and adaption. Building higher dams, building more air conditioning, moving people out of coastal areas that'll be flooded. Building higher walls at the borders of rich countries so the migrants from now unlivable areas don't run you over...

You can even see this happening already, with all the money that's going into climate projects: This is money which is not available for cancer research. Opportunity costs, ppl, opportunity costs.

As a consequence of all the effort we need to put into coping with climate-caused problems, there'll be fewer people to do other stuff. Like scientific research. Like updating all your beloved gadgets. Like fixing your roads or rooftops or building new hospitals and kindergartens and playgrounds.

What do new hospitals have to do with climate change? As I said there's only so much work humans can do in one day. Every person who works on building a new dam is one person who does not work on building a new hospital.

What is it going to look like for you and I? It'll mean that a lot of infrastructure will deteriorate and not be fixed, and consumer products will get more expensive until they become unaffordable for all but the super-rich. Want internet at home? That'll be $500 a month.

Most of us have grown up with constant progress. Tech gets better and cheaper all the time. We're so used to it we take it for granted. Well you know what it's not a law of nature. Things can fall apart very quickly, ask anyone in Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

That's the point you "cmon we'll get an AC" guys do not understand. You can get your AC alright but it'll cost you a year's worth of income.

I don't want my children to grow up in a phase of economic regress, that's why I support action on climate change. It's not because I think it'll kill us all. It's because the next 100 years will be fucking depressing.

Darryl 🌪️Viva la Entropy🌪️ Morris asks:

Now, about that pro-capitalism video you did.... well, Climate Change is what capitalism got us, and still all that extra work fixing things will be good for GDP and all the stuff that brakes gets written off as 'consumption', also good for capitalism

Hossenfelder answers:

I made the entire video to explain that, no, capitalism is not what caused the problem, the problem is that we did not do what economists have been saying for decades: Account for externalities. The "capitalism is bad" people are the CAUSE of the problem.

The conversation keeps going. There's more at the link.

Kim Stanley Robinson Talks about The Ministry for the Future

The Ministry for the Future: Climate Change and Speculative Fiction with Kim Stanley Robinson

1,603 views Apr 3, 2021 Meaningful global action on climate change looks like it may finally be in reach in 2021 – the United States has rejoined the Paris Agreement and the Biden administration has signaled that climate change is a top priority. But what if we fail? In his new novel, 'The Ministry for the Future', legendary science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson imagines that very scenario, telling the story of a chaotic, not-so-distant future with runaway climate change, eco-terrorists, petro-billionaires, and a shadowy international organization known as the “Ministry for the Future.”

How can speculative fiction like this new novel help inform smart global policy? Are there real-life equivalents of The Ministry for the Future? And is there hope that the world can avoid the worst-case scenario of climate change?

Kim Stanley Robinson joined us [Perry World House] for this edition of Global Lens, our cultural affairs event program, to discuss his new novel, The Ministry for the Future, and how speculative fiction can inform policy debates.

Could a prolonged Ukraine war tip the world energy balance toward renewables?

Thomas L. Friedman, The Ukraine War Still Holds Surprises. The Biggest May Be for Putin. NYtimes, June 7, 2022.

On May 31, the E.U. agreed to cut off 90 percent of Russia’s crude imports by the end of 2022. This will not only hurt Russia but also cause real pain for E.U. consumers and manufacturers, already paying astronomical prices for gasoline and natural gas.

All of this is happening, though, at a time when renewable energy, such as solar and wind, have become competitive in price with fossil fuels, and when the auto industry worldwide is significantly scaling up production of electric vehicles and new batteries.

In the short run, none of these can make up for the drop in Russian supplies. But if we have a year or two of astronomical gasoline and heating oil prices because of the Ukraine war, “you are going to see a massive shift in investment by mutual funds and industry into electric vehicles, grid enhancements, transmission lines and long-duration storage that could tip the whole market away from reliance on fossil fuels toward renewables,” said Tom Burke, director of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, the climate research group. “The Ukraine war is already forcing every country and company to dramatically advance their plans for decarbonization.” [...]

A recent article in McKinsey Quarterly noted: “The 19th century’s naval wars accelerated a shift from wind- to coal-powered vessels. World War I brought about a shift from coal to oil. World War II introduced nuclear energy as a major power source. In each of these cases, wartime innovations flowed directly to the civilian economy and ushered in a new era. The war in Ukraine is different in that it is not prompting the energy innovation itself but making the need for it clearer. Still, the potential impact could be equally transformative.”

Go figure: If this war doesn’t inadvertently blow up the planet, it might inadvertently help sustain it. And, over time, shrink Putin’s primary source of money and power.

What Sabine Hossenfelder thinks about nuclear power

Sabine Hossenfelder, Is Nuclear Power Green?, Backreaction, April 9, 2022.

Her conclusion:

What speaks in favor of nuclear energy is that it’s climate friendly, has a small land use, and creates power on demand. What speaks against it is that it’s expensive and ultimately not renewable. The disadvantages could be alleviated with new technologies, but it’s unclear whether that will work, and even if it works, it almost certainly won’t have a significant impact on climate change in the next 20 years.

It also speaks against nuclear power that people are afraid of it. Even if these fears are not rational that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If someone isn’t comfortable near a nuclear power plant, that affects their quality of life, and that can’t just be dismissed.

There are two points I didn’t discuss which you may have expected me to mention. One is nuclear proliferation and the risk posed by nuclear power plants during war times. This is certainly an important factor, but it’s more political than scientific, and that would be an entirely different discussion.

The other point I didn’t mention is nuclear waste. That’s because I think it’s a red herring which some activist groups are using in the attempt to scare people. For what I am concerned, burying the stuff in a safe place solves the problem just fine. It’s right that there aren’t any final disposal sites at the moment, but Finland is expected to open one next year and several other countries will follow. And no, provided adequate safety standards, I wouldn’t have a problem with a nuclear waste deposit in my vicinity.

So, what did I learn from this. I learned that nuclear power has become economically even more unappealing than it already was 20 years ago, and it’s not clear this will ever change. Personally I would say that this development can be left to the market. I am not in favor of regulation that makes it even more difficult for us to reduce carbon emission, to me this just seems insane. In all fairness it looks like nuclear won’t help much, but then again, every little bit helps.

Having said that, I think part of the reason the topic is so controversial is that what you think is the best strategy depends on local conditions. There is no globally “right” decision. If your country has abundant solar and wind power, it might not make sense to invest in nuclear. Though you might want to keep in mind that climate change can affect wind and precipitation patterns in the long run.

If your country is at a high risk of earthquakes, then maybe nuclear power just poses too high a risk. If on the other hand renewables are unreliable in your region of the world, you don’t have a lot of space, and basically never see earthquakes, nuclear power might make a lot of sense.

Don’t read "Don't Look Up" too narrowly [Matt Yglesias] [Media Notes 65c]

The film’s creators say it’s a satire about climate change. But what do they know? Yglesias says:

If you insist on listening to the creators and seeing it as about climate, then while you might appreciate a few moments, I think you’ll mostly be annoyed and then start saying “but it’s not even funny” blah blah blah.

But that’s not the only way to read a text.

In policy terms, there’s not some sharp tradeoff between taking steps to minimize the risks of climate catastrophe and taking steps to minimize other kinds of catastrophes, and I don’t love framings that put it that way. But the use of a story about a comet collision as a metaphor for climate change — which I actually think works really well as a direct lesson about the risk of a comet hitting the planet as depicted in the film — struck me as funny. And I really encourage people to watch it with an open mind and see it as part of the cinema of existential risk and not just quibble about climate change.

I agree. It works as a story about a collision with a comet, but it works best if we read it more broadly, much more broadly.

On climate change:

The fundamental problem of climate change is that it involves asking people to make changes now for the sake of preventing harms that occur largely in the future to people living in other countries. It’s a genuine problem from hell, and it’s not actually solved by understanding the science or believing the factual information. This is exactly why ideas like McKay’s Manhattan Project [on carbon capture] are so important. While there is a lot we can do to improve the situation with more aggressive deployment of the technology we have, we also really do need more technological breakthroughs that will make lots of tradeoffs less painful and make progress easier.

Yglesias goes on to talk about the existential risk actually posed by comets, by supervolcanos, and but future pandemics.

Back to the film:

... in this case the message is much bigger than climate change. There is a range of often goofy-sounding threats to humanity that don’t track well onto our partisan cleavages or culture war battles other than that addressing them invariably involves some form of concerted action of the sort that conservatives tend to disparage. And this isn’t a coincidence. If existential threats were materializing all the time, we’d be dead and not streaming satirical films on Netflix. So the threats tend to sound “weird,” and if you talk a lot about them you’ll be “weird.” They don’t fit well into the grooves of ordinary political conflict because ordinary political conflict is about stuff that happens all the time.

So read Ord’s book “The Precipice” and find out all about it. Did you know that the Biological Weapons Convention has just four employees? I do because it’s in the book. Let’s maybe give them six?

For all that, though, I am genuinely shocked that the actual real-world emergence of SARS-Cov-2 has not caused more people to care about pandemic risk. The havoc that this pandemic has wreaked just in terms of economic harm and annoyance has been devastating.

There’s more.

Possible socio-cultural cost of climate change

It might cause a huge loss of social cohesion and cultural capital without actually ending civilization altogether. It's not clear how stable some of our political systems would be under the kind of pressure climate change could put them under.

— Timothy Gowers (@wtgowers) August 9, 2021

Žižek on environmental catastrophe

Slavoj Žižek, Last Exit to Socialism, Jacobin, 7.21.2021:

So what should we do in such a predicament? We should above all avoid the common wisdom according to which the lesson of the ecological crises is that we are part of nature, not its center, so we have to change our way of life — limit our individualism, develop new solidarity, and accept our modest place among life on our planet. Or, as Judith Butler put it, “An inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins not only so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own.”

But is it not that global warming and other ecological threats demand of us collective interventions into our environment which will be incredibly powerful, direct interventions into the fragile balance of forms of life? When we say that the rise of average temperature has to be kept below 2°C (35.6°F), we talk (and try to act) as general managers of life on Earth, not as a modest species. The regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend upon “our smaller and more mindful role” — it depends on our gigantic role, which is the truth beneath all the talk about our finitude and mortality.

If we have to care also about the life of water and air, it means precisely that we are what Marx called “universal beings,” as it were, able to step outside ourselves, stand on our own shoulders, and perceive ourselves as a minor moment of the natural totality. To escape into the comfortable modesty of our finitude and mortality is not an option; it is a false exit to a catastrophe. As universal beings, we should learn to accept our environment in all its complex mixture, which includes what we perceive as trash or pollution, as well as what we cannot directly perceive since it is too large or too minuscule (Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects”).

What to do:

The answer to the heat dome in the United States and Canada is not just to help the affected areas but to attack its global causes. And, as the ongoing catastrophe in southern Iraq makes clear, a state apparatus capable of maintaining a minimal welfare of the people in catastrophic conditions will be needed to prevent social explosions.

All these things can — hopefully — be achieved only through strong and obligatory international cooperation, social control and regulation of agriculture and industry, changes in our basic eating habits (less beef), global health care, etc. Upon a closer look, it is clear that representative political democracy alone will not be sufficient for this task. A much stronger executive power capable of enforcing long-term commitments will have to be combined with local self-organizations of people, as well as with a strong international body capable of overriding the will of dissenting nations.

I am not talking here about a new world government — such an entity would give opportunity to immense corruption. And I am not talking about communism in the sense of abolishing markets — market competition should play a role, although a role regulated and controlled by state and society. Why, then, use the term “communism”? Because what we will have to do contains four aspects of every truly radical regime.

First, there is voluntarism: changes that will be needed are not grounded in any historical necessity; they will be done against the spontaneous tendency of history — as Walter Benjamin put it, we have to pull the emergency brake on the train of history. Then, there is egalitarianism: global solidarity, health care, and a minimum of decent life for all. Then, there are elements of what cannot but appear to die-hard liberals as “terror,” a taste of which we got with measures to cope with the ongoing pandemic: limitation of many personal freedoms and new modes of control and regulation. Finally, there is trust in the people: everything will be lost without the active participation of ordinary people.

The Way Forward

All this is not a morbid dystopian vision but the result of the simple realistic assessment of our predicament. If we don’t take this path, what will happen is the totally crazy situation which is already taking place in the United States and Russia: the power elite is preparing for its survival in gigantic underground bunkers in which thousands can survive for months, with the excuse that the government should function even in such conditions. In short, government should continue to work even when there are no people alive on the earth over whom it should exert its authority.

H/t 3QD.

UK rainfall data digitized by volunteers [Citizen science]

Thanks to @metoffice archives, these sheets were scanned & made openly available, but how could the observations be extracted?

The answer? Ask for help: https://t.co/1Z0LcM7oBN

16,000 volunteers stepped forward during the first UK COVID lockdown to transcribe every observation.

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) May 13, 2021

This data will be used by @markpmcc & @metoffice to improve UK rainfall reconstruction (called HadUK-Grid).

Currently the all-UK gridded reconstructions extend back to 1862. With the #rainfallrescue dataset it should be possible to go back to 1836, and earlier for some regions. pic.twitter.com/SXoqUFpYeo

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) May 13, 2021

None of this would have been possible without the 16,000+ volunteers, and especially those who have stayed with the project the whole way (Gill, Ian, Jacqui, John B, John O, Mike, Richard, Tim). We also relied on the amazing @the_zooniverse as the citizen science web platform.

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) May 13, 2021

We can now map out rainfall for historical extreme months that has never been possible before. For example, the Decembers in 1852 and 1853 were one of the wettest and driest on record for Scotland respectively. pic.twitter.com/LIUwcZNZNc

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) May 13, 2021

New England arborists are replanting with climate change in mind

Marguerite Holloway, New England’s Forests Are Sick. They Need More Tree Doctors. NYTimes, October 7, 2020. There's more in the article, which is about the various circumstances driving the need for arborists in new England, but this struck me:

More arborists are incorporating climate change into their decisions. “We are seeing things on the horizon that are very disconcerting, very unnerving,” Mr. Yaple said. “So when people ask us to recommend tree plantings, we suggest that people plant trees that are very happy in the Mid-Atlantic states.” The range of some tree species is expected to shift north, following warming temperatures. So Mr. Yaple has been eying redbuds and scarlet oaks.

Alexander R. Sherman, city forester for Springfield, Mass., is doing the same: growing more southern trees in a nursery and seeing how they fare on the streets. At the moment, he is experimenting with a type of tulip tree, a Kentucky coffeetree, and a sawtooth oak.

This spring, Ms. Bezanson planted over 300 trees in the mostly hemlock-and-white-oak woods around her home. “Some people baked bread. Other people planted trees. I did both,” she said. “What I have tried to do is brace for climate change and plant trees that are going to be more resilient for the future.” Ms. Bezanson planted species that do well in warmer, drier climates, such as black gum, pawpaw, and persimmon. And she planted balsam fir because hemlocks are being wiped out by an aphid-like pest, the hemlock woolly adelgid.

There are chemical treatments for some diseases and pests like the woolly adelgid. And this summer, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation continued releasing wasps whose larvae feed on the emerald ash borer — an approach called biocontrol. But biocontrol and pesticides can be expensive and virtually impossible to deliver at the scale of millions upon millions of trees.

Which is why many experts, from arborists working with individual trees to foresters working with vast woodlands, are increasingly managing for diversity. “If you have 12 species of trees in one forest and now the ash is dying, that is terrible, but at least you have 11 other species,” said Michael Mauri, a consulting forester based in South Deerfield, Mass. “Protecting and maintaining diverse species is kind of our best defense against all the stuff, known and unknown, that is going to be visited upon us.”

The ancient roots of the anthropocene

Lucas Stephens, Erle Ellis, Dorian fuller, The Deep Anthropocene, Aeon.

ArchaeoGLOBE reveals that human societies transformed most of Earth’s biosphere much earlier and more profoundly than we thought – an insight that has serious implications for how we understand humanity’s relationship to nature and the planet as a whole.

Just as recent archaeological research has challenged old definitions of agriculture and blurred the lines between farmers and hunter-gatherers, it’s also leading us to rethink what nature means and where it is. The deep roots of how humanity transformed the globe pose a challenge to the emerging Anthropocene paradigm, in which human-caused environmental change is typically seen as a 20th-century or industrial-era phenomenon. Instead, it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles. As a consequence, trying to disentangle ‘natural’ ecosystems from those that people have managed for millennia is becoming less and less realistic, let alone desirable.

Somewhat later, after discussions of various kinds of evidence and techniques:

These transitions were not linear or absolute. It’s now clear that there was usually a long continuum of exploitation, translocation and management of plants, animals, landforms and ecosystems well before (and often after) domestication occurred. This makes it harder to draw solid lines between hunter-gatherer and farmer societies, or between societies who practised different subsistence strategies. Over archaeological timescales spanning hundreds to thousands of years, land use can be thought of instead as a tapestry of ever-evolving anthroecosystems with higher or lower degrees of transformation – more or less human-shaped, or ‘domesticated’ environments.

In 2003, the climatologist William Ruddiman introduced the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’: the idea that agricultural land use began warming Earth’s climate thousands of years ago. While some aspects of this early global climate change remain unsettled among scientists, there’s strong consensus that land-use change was the greatest driver of global climate change until the 1950s, and remains a major driver of climate change today. As a result, global maps of historical changes in land use, and their effects on vegetation cover, soils and greenhouse gas emissions, are a critical component of all contemporary models for forecasting Earth’s future climate.

Deforestation, tilling the land and other agricultural practices alter regional and global climate because they release greenhouse gases from vegetation and soils, as well as altering the exchange of heat and moisture across Earth. These effects reverse when land is abandoned and vegetation recovers or is restored. Early changes in agricultural land use therefore have major implications in understanding climate changes of the past, present and future.

3,000 to 10,000 years ago...

By 3,000 years ago, Earth’s terrestrial ecology was already largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists – with more than half of regions assessed engaged in significant levels of agriculture or pastoralism. For example, the Kopaic Basin in the Greek region of Boeotia was drained and converted from wetland to agricultural land in the 13th century BCE. This plain – roughly 1,500 hectares (15 sq km) in size – surrounded by steep limestone hills, had been a large, shallow lake since the end of the last Ice Age. Late Bronze Age residents of the area, members of what we call the Mycenaean culture, constructed a hydraulic infrastructural system on a massive scale to drain the wetland and claim it for agriculture. They channelised rivers, dug drainage canals, built long dikes and expanded natural sinkholes to direct the water off what would have been nutrient-rich soil. Eventually, when the Mycenaean civilisation collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, the basin flooded again and returned to its previous wetland state. Legend has it that Heracles filled in the sinkholes as revenge against a local king. The area was not successfully drained again until the 20th century.

These examples highlight a general trend we found that agriculture and pastoralism gradually replaced foraging-hunting-gathering around the world. But the data also show that there were reversals and different subsistence economies, from foraging to farming, operating in parallel in some places. Moreover, agriculture and pastoralism are not the only practices that transform environments. Hunter-gatherer land use was already widespread across the globe (82 per cent of regions) by 10,000 years ago. Through the selective harvest and translocation of favoured species, hunting (sometimes to extinction) and the use of fire to dramatically alter landscapes, most of the terrestrial biosphere was already significantly influenced by human activities, even before the domestication of plants and animals.

The pristine myth is wrong:

In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm from the natural sciences, as the geographer William Denevan called it, human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least disturbers, of a mostly pristine natural world. Denevan was reacting against the portrayal of pre-1492 America as an untouched paradise, and he used the substantial evidence of indigenous landscape modification to argue that the human presence was perhaps more visible in 1492 than 1750. Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster. Human changes to the environment are cumulative and were substantial at different scales throughout our history. The deep trajectory of land use revealed by ArchaeoGLOBE runs counter to the idea of pinpointing a single catalytic moment that fundamentally changed the relationship between humanity and the Earth system.

The pristine myth also accounts for why places without contemporary intensive land use are often dubbed ‘wilderness’ – such as areas of the Americas depopulated by the great post-Columbian die-off. Such interpretations, perpetuated by scientists, have long supported colonial narratives in which indigenous hunter-gatherer and even agricultural lands are portrayed as unused and ripe for productive use by colonial settlers.

The notion of a pristine Earth also pervaded the thinking of early conservationists in the United States such as John Muir. They were intent on preserving what they saw as the nobility of nature from a mob of lesser natural life, and also those eager to manage wilderness areas to maintain the trophy animals they enjoyed hunting. [...]

Humans have continually altered biodiversity on many scales. We have changed the local mix of species, their ranges, habitats and niches for thousands of years. Long before agriculture, selective human predation of many non-domesticated species shaped their evolutionary course. Even the relatively small hunter-gatherer populations of the late Pleistocene were capable of negatively affecting animal populations – driving many megafauna and island species extinct or to the point of extinction. But there have also been widespread social and ecological adaptations to these changes: human management can even increase biodiversity of landscapes and can sustain these increases for thousands of years. For example, pastoralism might have helped defer climate-driven aridification of the Sahara, maintaining mixed forests and grassland ecosystems in the region for centuries.

This recognition should cause us to rethink what ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ really are. If by ‘nature’ we mean something divorced from or untouched by humans, there’s almost nowhere on Earth where such conditions exist, or have existed for thousands of years.

See earlier posts: Sedentary hunter-gatherers built complex societies – "Recognizing this... has big implications for how we narrate history", and Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap.

American spends more on fossil fuels than on defense

Tim Dickinson, Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending, Rolling Stone, May 8, 2019.

The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion.

The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution.

These subsidies are largely invisible to the public, and don’t appear in national budgets. But according the the IMF, the world spent $4.7 trillion — or 6.3 percent of global GDP — in 2015 to subsidize fossil fuel use, a figure it estimated rose to $5.2 trillion in 2017. China, which is heavily reliant on coal and has major air-pollution problems, was the largest subsidizer by far, at $1.4 trillion in 2015. But the U.S. ranked second in the world.

The human, environmental and economic toll of these subsidies is shocking to the conscience. The authors found that if fossil fuels had been fairly priced in 2015, global carbon emissions would have been slashed by 28 percent. Deaths from fossil fuel-linked air pollution would have dropped by nearly half.

How about a carbon sink tower on Roosevelt Island in New York?

rescubika proposes the world’s tallest carbon sink tower in new york: the mandragorehttps://t.co/9Eu9ehUx46 pic.twitter.com/YYjck7j9Pg

— designboom (@designboom) September 15, 2020

America's central states will become a dust bowl by 2050 [global warming]

Abrahm Lustgarten, photographs by Meridith Kohut, How Climate Migration Will Reshape America, NYTimes, Sept. 15, 2020. From the article:

Americans have dealt with climate disaster before. The Dust Bowl started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the Great Plains. Millions took up the invitation, replacing hardy prairie grass with thirsty crops like corn, wheat and cotton. Then, entirely predictably, came the drought. From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60 percent, leaving farmers destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington. The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to the West, where newcomers — “Okies” not just from Oklahoma but also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri — unsettled communities and competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns. Only after the migrants settled and had years to claw back a decent life did some towns bounce back stronger.

The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.

A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again. The Great Plains states today provide nearly half of the nation’s wheat, sorghum and cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming. By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20 percent. Another extreme drought would drive near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the broader economy. At that point, the authors write, “abandonment is one option.”

Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to America’s cropland — plus the steady baking and burning and flooding — suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the United States — mostly across the South and the Southwest — will in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic products. The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10 percent.

That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and researchers expect that trend to continue after the Covid-19 pandemic ends. In 1950, less than 65 percent of Americans lived in cities. By 2050, only 10 percent will live outside them, in part because of climatic change. By 2100, Hauer estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Austin could each receive more than a quarter million new residents as a result of sea-level displacement alone, meaning it may be those cities — not the places that empty out — that wind up bearing the brunt of America’s reshuffling. The World Bank warns that fast-moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment, competition for services and deepening poverty.

So what will happen to Atlanta — a metro area of 5.8 million people that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows will face an increase in heat-driven wildfires? Hauer estimates that hundreds of thousands of climate refugees will move into the city by 2100, swelling its population and stressing its infrastructure. Atlanta — where poor transportation and water systems contributed to the state’s C+ infrastructure grade last year — already suffers greater income inequality than any other large American city, making it a virtual tinderbox for social conflict. One in 10 households earns less than $10,000 a year, and rings of extreme poverty are growing on its outskirts even as the city center grows wealthier.

Atlanta has started bolstering its defenses against climate change, but in some cases this has only exacerbated divisions. When the city converted an old Westside rock quarry into a reservoir, part of a larger greenbelt to expand parkland, clean the air and protect against drought, the project also fueled rapid upscale growth, driving the poorest Black communities further into impoverished suburbs. That Atlanta hasn’t “fully grappled with” such challenges now, says Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, chair of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, means that with more people and higher temperatures, “the city might be pushed to what’s manageable.”

So might Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and other cities with long-neglected systems suddenly pressed to expand under increasingly adverse conditions.

Can we adapt to climate change?

Ashutosh Jogalekar reviews Bjorn Lomborg, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet, in 3 Quarks Daily. From the review:

The benefits of climate adaptation become clear in the case of large-scale flooding due to sea level rise, one of the biggest concerns of climate change proponents. The book talks about a report based on two papers that estimate the damage as a percentage of GDP caused by sea level rise. With no adaptation, the damage is worth 5.3% of GDP and will lead to 187 million people displaced by the year 2100 even after spending 24 billion dollars on dikes. But strikingly, by just doubling the spending on dikes to 48 billion dollars, the models predict that the cost of flooding will now drop to only 0.008% of GDP. Even the authors of the studies from which these dire estimates are drawn say, “Damages of this magnitude are very unlikely to be tolerated by society and adaptation will be widespread.” Even the earlier study reported in the New York Times said in its abstract that “coastal defenses aren’t considered.”

The example of dikes shows that not only will adaptation be inevitable but that it would be relatively cheap and lead to disproportionate benefits. Constructing dikes to minimize water damage is cheap. Putting better building and fire codes in place and discouraging people from living in dry forested areas is cheap for minimizing the impact of forest fires. If malaria caused by mosquitoes breeding in warmer areas because of climate change is a concern, making nets and spraying insecticide is cheap. Smog and air pollution have already been drastically reduced in major cities by local and national government action. All these things are vastly cheaper than large-scale cuts to carbon emissions which would be like trying to drive a nail in a wall using a bulldozer; the nail may possibly be driven in, but the entire house would likely collapse. If flooding is threatening your town or state, in general in seems foolhardy to try to address it by asking China or the United States to expensively reduce CO2 emissions over the next fifty years and much more sensible to cheaply build dikes.

The point that Lomborg makes is that even if we assume that extreme events are caused by warmer weather, it does not mean directly tackling carbon emissions is the best way to address these problems. An elephant in the room is the so-called “bullseye effect”. The bullseye effect simply says that as you expand a bullseye, the chances of hitting the target increase. In case of flooding, forest fires or hurricanes, a big reason why they are causing more damage every year is simply because more people are living in and building expensive assets in the areas in which they strike. So while adaption certainly will be valuable, the simple but perhaps challenging policy of discouraging more people to live in disaster-prone areas will also minimize the damage because of global warming.

A word of caution:

One of the things that Lomborg does not focus on is that all these models – both ones predicting severe effects and one predicting mild ones – are ultimately models. They contain many assumptions that don’t always hold, they are simplified representations of reality and and they often don’t account for non-linear network effects. One of my concerns is that while Lomborg is rightly skeptical of models that portend catastrophe, he is less skeptical about models that forecast the low economic costs and relative benefits of climate change. However it is fair to say that it is precisely because of uncertainties like these that models of the kind Nordhaus uses have a 25% margin of error baked in. Lomborg’s argument is that even with these error margins, the impact is not half as bad as we are made to believe. Nonetheless, keeping that these are models in mind all the time can greatly finesse discussions on climate change and set the right expectations on both sides.

About fossil fuels:

Unfortunately the advantages of fossil fuels lie in basic laws of physics which are almost impossible to circumvent. Because there’s so much oil and natural gas around, fossil fuels are cheap. Because they consist of the most reduced source of carbon (hydrocarbons), they are energy-dense. Mirroring what Gore said, depriving the average citizen of a developing country of fossil fuels would indeed be not just impractical but immoral. In fact this is one of the central problems rich countries like the US have faced in climate change negotiations in which they ask China and India to cut down on fossil fuels and growth while having enjoyed unprecedented growth from fossil fuel burning for decades themselves.

Sadly, most of the climate change negotiations until now have pushed this central fact about the basic energetics and economics of fossil fuels under the rug. The Paris Agreement is sadly the latest culprit in this parade of failed policy prescriptions. The Paris Agreement basically asks every country to voluntarily cut greenhouse gas emissions until 2050. Quite aside from the fact that shifting political and economic realities will make it impossible for most countries to keep these promises, many countries like Mexico are consigning their citizens to an impoverished existence by promising deep cuts. The costs of the agreement are huge – about a trillion dollars per year. However, this vast expenditure of money would result in a minuscule temperature drop of 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit. [...] It goes without saying that a trillion dollars a year would allow any country in Africa or a country like India to improve its citizens’ welfare significantly. In other words, the Paris Agreement calls for very expensive and unrealistic actions resulting in a very small benefit. [...]

The problem with cutting the kinds of emissions as stated in the Paris Agreement is that while their benefits will be minuscule, their costs in terms of stalling national and personal progress will be enormous. Rich people will not be impacted much because their losses will be small, but there will be more people left in poverty and less money for them to climb out of it through investments in education, healthcare and simple technological adaptation. It’s a good example of why climate change policy will hurt the poor the most.

The fallacy of keeping people poor by tying all their problems to climate change is a significant part of the issue. Poverty, air pollution, disease and a lack of educational opportunities are all critical challenges faced by a majority of the world’s population. These problems may partly be tied to climate change, but most of them are separate from it.

Alternative energy sources:

When governments say they are funding “alternative energy”, it almost always means solar and wind energy. But the problems with both of these sources are well known and yet strangely persistent. Neither of these sources work when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, and baseline energy still has to come from fossil fuels. Wind farms take up land and both wind turbines and solar panels use significant energy from fossil fuels in their production. Efficient energy storage may provide a partial solution, but we aren’t there yet. The harm of pivoting significantly to solar and wind energy becomes clear when we look at Germany. Under a sweeping energy policy, Germany moved away from nuclear power to solar and wind energy. As a result, they pay the highest electricity prices of anybody in Europe. This might still be feasible for a German, but it’s not so for an average rural African or Indian.

Technology:

We came up with technological solutions like GMOs for fighting hunger, technological solutions like vaccines for fighting disease and technological solutions like catalytic converters for fighting air pollution; we did not think that implementing these solutions reflected resignation in any way. It shouldn’t be any different for global warming. We have already implemented cheap technological adaptations for fighting floods, hurricanes and forest fires and should undoubtedly implement more of these. Most importantly, we need to have a more optimistic view of technology as an important part of the solution. One of the most spectacular stories of using technology to address climate change is fracking, and it was technology that was discovered serendipitously and deployed quickly. [...]

Unfortunately as Lomborg points out, funding for renewables and green energy R&D had actually reduced in the last ten years. What is even worse is that both the government and the private sector pick winners and losers like solar and wind energy. As with most R&D, the best solution to combat climate change will be one which we cannot predict, so the best policy is to fund a wide range of options. Lomborg lists a few including algae that can produce biofuels by consuming CO2, better storage technology for wind and solar power, salt spray that can create whiter clouds that reflect sunlight and new kinds of nuclear fission and fusion reactors that can provide clean energy. I think one of the most promising avenues might be genetically engineering trees so that they can bury more carbon in their roots and in topsoil and less in their shoots.