Looming Void: November 18, 2024
Emissions are rising not falling and the latest COP is a debacle; I jog a Parkrun so, so slowly
10,000 minutes
I lost momentum last week. Being swamped by newsletters such as this, plus books and movies crying to be devoured, plus research reading (simultaneous pronuclear and antinuclear efforts, namely Marco Visscher’s The Power of Nuclear and M. V. Ramana’s Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change) doesn’t help, but probably the main reason was that recent editing efforts have daunted me. Who am I to be writing this?
This week will pick me up…
Monsters
David Wallace-Wells’s latest post-Trump article sees him in the gloomiest mood I’ve ever read:
Trump’s election may look like a black dawn to climate activists. And indeed it is: When the timelines of climate action are so short, and the paths to climate stability so narrow and difficult, any setback is a disaster. In 2018, considering a world 1.5 degrees warmer than in preindustrial times, the world’s scientists issued an unignorable warning about the consequences; in 2024, according to a Carbon Brief analysis, we have already surpassed 1.5. And now we know, almost surely, that the United States will be leading the world more quickly and belligerently into that danger zone, not helping to chart a way out of it.
The rest of Wallace-Wells’s article offers more nuance. He claims, and it seems reasonable, that Trump is just another indicator of a breakdown in the global commitment to fight climate change. I can see that breakdown all around. Jessice Hullinger writes:
Global fossil fuel emissions are projected to rise again this year, and there is “no sign” of a peak, according to the Global Carbon Project. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning oil, gas, and coal in 2024 will hit about 37.4 billion metric tons, up 0.8% from 2023. Total CO2 emissions – including from land-use changes like deforestation and wildfires – will rise to 41.6 billion metric tons, up from 40.6 billion metric tons last year. Projected emissions vary on a regional level: China’s are expected to rise by 0.2%, while U.S. emissions are expected to fall 0.6%. India’s will be up 4.6%, while the EU’s will be down by nearly 4%. Notably, emissions from land-use changes have been falling for a decade but are set to rise this year. … The research team behind the project estimates that the 1.5 degrees Celsius target will be breached in six years.
How can we tackle this crisis globally if the COP process itself seems to have been skillfully hijacked by the fossil fuel industry. Rebecca Wisent:
Meanwhile, humans are debating whether and how to limit our collective greenhouse gas emissions and other measures to curb climate change at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP29. This year, the talks are being held at what climate activist Greta Thunberg calls the “beyond absurd” site of Azerbaijan, a country that she has called “an authoritarian petrostate.” Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev told attendees at the conference that oil and gas are a “gift of God.”
Visibly stunned Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama abandoned his planned speech and asked, “What on earth are we doing in this gathering? What does it mean for the future of the world if the biggest polluters continue as usual?”
Twenty-two major climate change voices, including a couple of my heroes, Christiana Figueres and Johan Rockström, have signed a Club of Rome open letter with seven much-need improvements to the COP process. But no one is listening, at least no one remotely close to my world.
In his well-timed article, Wallace-Wells points me to Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton:
In “Overshoot,” a rageful, radical and timely new history of the ecological present, the activist scholars Wim Carton and Andreas Malm ask how it is — how it could be — that the world seems to be surrendering to climate breakdown. “What do we do when catastrophic climate chaos is a fact?” they ask. The apparent answer is “Let it continue for the time being.”
Ordinarily, I’d regard someone as Andreas Malm to be “interesting but too radical for someone as ordinary as me.” I enjoyed his How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (and the resultant movie) while internally decrying violence, but really thought I’d never read anything more by him. But right now the world hovers somewhere dark, so onto my bookshelf goes Overshoot.
If I keep using words of anger, that reflects a growing sense in me that our struggle to grant our grandchildren a potent, hopeful life is no longer a struggle against denialism but a recognition that an entire older generation (anyone over age 50, say) knows what is happening but is too fat, dumb, and lazy (to use a phrase my Chinese colleagues in the 90s taught me) to do anything about it. A scorching essay by Tim Winton in The Guardian (“Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread”) captures my new horrid dread:
If young people feel they’ve been conspired against, it’s because that’s exactly what’s happened. The numbers are in. A child born now will experience 24 times the number of extreme climate events as a politician born in the 1960s. Here, then, are the wretched, those damned for the sins of others. The burden of that legacy is being expressed physically and mentally right now in every time zone and culture. But while its might is terrible, it is not insurmountable. And neither is the occupying force that exerts it.
To sizzle up your rage, but also, strangely, to reassure you that there are fine people on this earth striving with all their might to understand our amazing planet and what we’re doing to it, read this amazing interview by Elizabeth Kolbert (one of my heroes) of Gavin Schmidt (another hero). He’s puzzling over a vital question: why have temperatures been so anomalously high since last year? If I were the king of the world, I’d put a million scientists onto the job of mastering this science, oh, I would.
Mortality
Anyone seeking to lose weight has my sympathy. It’s a tough process. Some of my friends seem to find it easier, many of them clearly find it impossible. I’m hewing to my WFPB diet with a daily caloric deficit of somewhere between 500 and 1,000 calories (it’s hard to tell because I’m unclear on what my “steady state” daily calories are). After a week, I’ve lost three kilograms but I’m very vulnerable to putting them on again. I need to maintain the discipline for a lot longer than a week and, frankly, I’m not sure that’s possible.
Eating less fat has already improved my bodily sensations of wellness, and energy levels have picked up on some days, but on other days, the caloric deficit has led to a common problem for dieters, a lethargy looking for low energy expenditures.
I’m exercising daily once more, with fortuitous timing as the weather is at last turning generally balmy. I ran a nearby Parkrun on a Saturday morning of blue skies, only managing to run nonstop half the 5 kms, and came 297th out of 331 (3rd in my age group, there being 3 in that age group). Rather depressing, but I felt wonderful afterwards and see it as one step toward some level of restoration of my old jogging capabilities.