Looming Void: November 11, 2024
Trump!
10,000 minutes
On the morning Trump’s U.S. election landslide was announced, I was two weeks into a bout of work that had been frustrating me to my limits. As part of writing a book about nuclear power reactors (those generating electricity) I had developed a nifty but amateurish spreadsheet (I call it a database but the fancy name would fool no one) tracking all of the world’s 1,755 non-military reactors over the past eighty years. I used to keep the spreadsheet current annually but a few years ago, I grew tired of that housekeeping, so now I was doing catch-up. The catch-up maddened me. The underlying data is fragmented and ever-changing, reliant as it is on input from the seventy-eight nations involved. I expected the job to take three days, now I was thirteen days into it.
Overnight I’d risen twice, wracked by insomnia and Trumpish anxiety, to bang my head against this job. When I sat down to my oats and berries, when I glanced (no more than that, I could bear no more) at the election results, my mood was sour.
But then a certain clarity came upon me. Did I want to read about this global political tragedy or did I need to nail down this damned spreadsheet? I skipped an urge to jog, plonked down into my study seat, and focused.
Amazingly, the work suddenly found a clear path. All the effort I’d put in had dramatically improved my efficiency at spreadsheet manipulation and online data checking. Reconciliations panned out. Suddenly, after two hours, I was done.
I’d like to say I used that session as a springboard for getting back to the editing of chapter words but no, I then headed to a cafe and furiously burrowed into post-election analysis, suddenly desperate to stop myself entering a period of mourning, to pry out of my mind the existential resilience to keep going. But that morning spreadsheeting fugue … it was magnificent.
Monsters
We can dimly perceive a mitigation road that jolts the world into net zero and halts the inexorable rise heating: cheap wind and solar; EVs; electrifying homes and then businesses; closing down the fossil fuel mines; the many tens of thousands of people worldwide striving to get this shit done before our grandchildren’s futures are roasted. We can see a way forward and on most days I can breathe in the air of optimism.
Not today. Some feelgood news has popped up over the past few weeks but also this:
A new UN Emissions Gap report tells us (paraphrasing Matthew Zeilin’s reporting) that only dramatic improvements in countries’ mitigation commitments can stop the current heating status of +1¼°C (and witness what this new world is revealing at the moment!) zooming past the Paris agreement’s ardent recommendation of a maximum of +1½°C. Current national commitments (and they’re not going to be met, folks) mean +2½°C. Current national policies mean +3°C.
Oh and here is Nick O’Malley reporting on what +1¼°C is already delivering to us: “Spanish floods yet another reminder of the climate battle we’re losing.”
As backdrop, emissions rose by 1.2% in 2023, faster than they did over the 2010s (the World Meteorological Organization: “Greenhouse gas concentrations surge again to new record in 2023”). Get your head around that! Surely if we’re gallivanting toward net zero, emissions would have peaked by now, but no, oh no…
That UN Emissions Gap report has itself been partly suborned by nefarious forces. Somewhere between 22% and 33% of global emissions arise from the food sector (including land clearing) (see the full details). However, food lobbyists have ensured that recent report only attributes (thanks, Arielle Samuelson) 6% to the human race’s apocalyptic preoccupation with meat.
The recent COP16 biodiversity summit in Columbia spat out (thanks, Jessica Hullinger) a few minor initiatives but was essentially a bust. There is simply no global appetite for doing anything serious to carve out more wilderness for the 4% of global animals that aren’t our pets or food, or indeed to act at all to arrest the hidden slide toward mass extinctions.
And then there’s Trump in the White House again. After reading a number of initial assessments (Bill McKibben, Jessica Hullinger, Arielle Samuelson, and others), there is no silver lining. America will exit the Paris agreements yet again, just after the next COP. New oil and gas fields … a gutting of federal agencies … winding back of Biden’s historic legislative efforts to drive electrification … doom shadows our countenance.
I can say no more and am struggling to cope.
Mortality
At my cafe editing session today, I ordered a long black (decaffeinated, of course). Why black instead of my customary delicious soy cappuccino? I’m ashamed to admit the necessity of dieting. For the past two years, I’ve been nattering on about a new WFPB (whole foods plant based) diet to tackle incipient heart problems, but since a trip to Italy, I have slowly and steadily put on weight. My mealtimes have been pristine but I’ve snacked. Now I need to shed around five kilograms. Whether to do so fast or gradually, that’s an open question, but I have begun.
