You
say you got a real solution —The Beatles, “Revolution“ In a talk at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute on February 14, conservative columnist David Brooks laid out a theory of change.
I don’t identify as a political conservative the way Brooks does, but I resonate strongly with his point about the danger of abrupt change. In a brief to the United States Supreme Court in 1982, I also quoted Burke, who argued that:
Speaking of the society into which each of us is born, Burke argued that it is always wrong to “hack that aged parent in pieces.”
Our dilemma, however, is that our multigenerational contract has been breached. The pace of the climate legacy we have bequeathed to future children is neither slow nor gradual. Its speed is not even remotely in their favor. It might have been different. When Svante Arrhenius issued the first warning, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,“ in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science in 1896, politicians, listening to scientists, could have taken note and acted to create a carbon budget aligned with nature’s absorptive capacity. We might have averted the dilemma a century ago. We did not. Now, the next generations of children being born could well be among the last. Although the industrial revolution, made possible by the embodied energy of fossil fuels, began a century before 1850, its planetary pollution was concealed by smoke. Those clouds reflected sunlight back to space, even as they kept the planet’s surface warm. Global temperature only rose 1/10 of a degree from 1750 to 1850, and only a few tenths more by 1950. It was not until the Clean Air Act and its foreign counterparts began to take effect in the 1970s that the cumulative legacy of emissions began to assert itself. This year the world will heat four times faster than in the century between 1750 and 1850. By the end of this decade, it may be heating five times faster. The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Of course, the way people notice that is less through outdoor summer temperatures or early thaws in the Spring, and more through experiences of extreme weather. The different rates of warming between the equator and the poles, and over land versus over ocean, affect the air and ocean currents that once made weather predictable and now give us alternating hot and cold flashes in winter and summer alike. Warmer air holds more moisture, generating more “bomb cyclones,“ “car soups,“ and flash floods. Hotter summer waves and drier winters lead to more frequent fire conditions in forested areas. The extreme fires, floods, “snownadoes“ and “firenadoes“ draw our attention, but yo ain’t seen nuttin yet. At 1.5°C, a marker we passed in 2024, we’ve triggered tipping elements—self-reinforcing feedback from destabilized natural balances. Polar ice melts, darkening the reflective surface, absorbing more sunlight. Dissolving permafrost and shallow clathrates releasing methane that is 20 to 80 times more effective at warming the planet than carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. Coral reefs. The Amazon rainforest. The Indian Monsoon. Australia burning. Siberia burning. Each tipping element feeds upon others, adding more to the mix, sustaining the acceleration. A decade ago, Frank Michael and I published a detailed analysis of atmospheric and oceanic carbon drawdown using safe, reliable, natural methods of greenhouse gas removal. On land, our plan involved massive reforestation of continents—several areas the size of Spain reforested each year—with rotational harvesting and the conversion of biomass to biochar for food, fuel, energy, and a panopoly of other necessities. We imagined Ecosystem Regeneration Camps, filled with adventurous youth, planting these new forests as they sang and danced. In the ocean, the reforestation was accomplished with kelp and sargassum, again with an annual harvest devoted to more permanent withdrawal as biochar. Still, we acknowledged, all would be for naught if we did not also solve for Jevons Paradox. Increased efficiency should not become an excuse to expand polluting activity. There needed to be simultaneous systemic degrowth. That became the subject of my most recent book, Retropopulationism. In that book, I described one model, taken from history, that may be instructive when we set about to unsustain the unsustainable. My model was the Fox village of Saukenuk that housed around 6,000 people prior to 1830. Today, it lies under the pavement of 11th Street in the Quad Cities, Illinois, a metro area of 380,000 people. I would have us depave 11th Street and restore Black Hawk’s village... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
From: Bulat Yessekin
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