The depressed environmentalist? Part 1

Sometimes you feel like it is time to give up. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reaches 400ppm for the first time; our hope of staying under the “safe” 2C rise depends on increasingly urgent policy changes and on international action which seems ever-distant; the UK government seems to be turning away from renewable energy. This piece from Rob Hopkins sums up some of the gloom:

Certainly as we hit 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human existence, with not even a plan to avoid 600 ppm, 800 ppm, and then 1000 — not even a national discussion or an outcry by the so-called intelligentsia – it is worth asking, why?

and he goes on to note a UN source who has told him that

that it was her sense from talking to people she knows in the UN and other organisations, that there seems to be a consensus to give it another 18 months, 2 years at most, and then the funding and political effort will shift from mitigation and into adaptation and defence….
The consensus will shift to the assumption being that it is now too late.

Meanwhile, our species is spending around 1% of global GDP on trying to locate and exploit new oil reserves, twice the investment on renewable energy. But we need to keep the oil flowing or else the economy will collapse, or at least the oil companies’ value will be drastically reduced, taking down our pension funds and everyone else who invests in them. And so on…

Few seem to see these issues as priorities, and a small but loud minority try to convince others they aren’t true or worth bothering with at all: engaging with such people seldom does anything except use up valuable time.

It’s no wonder that hope is in short supply in some quarters, particularly for those who think we’ve already passed the tipping point into inevitable and serious climate change effects. I’ve previously written about the Dark Mountain Project; the latest trend doing the rounds is Near-Term Extinction (NTE), sparked off by a long essay, The irreconcilable acceptance of near-term extinction by Daniel Drumright. On his reading of the evidence, we are now committed to the destruction of a large proportion of the life on Earth in the next few decades, and mass famine for humanity before that.

Amongst the questions he poses is how we respond to this personally and emotionally. How do we face the future when we have no future? For him, the answer may be suicide: a rational choice “to avoid needless suffering”, but he recognises others’ answers may be different.

Even if you aren’t as pessimistic as Drumright and only believe that humanity is in decline, or perceived decline, or just faces great instability and uncertainty this is a reasonable question to be asking. You can look around at what humanity is doing, and see its greed, lack of care for future generations and just sheer stupidity. You can look back at the dream of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s and see how much of their hopes were fulfilled. John Michael Greer writes on this topic

Back in the heady days of its early successes, … environmental protection [was seen] as the next step forward in the same trajectory of social progress that included the civil rights movement and second wave feminism… That hope is dead. If there was ever a chance to achieve it, it went whistling down the wind decades ago, and at this point the jaws of resource depletion and environmental degradation are tightening around the collective throat of the world’s industrial societies, in exactly the fashion predicted in detail forty years ago in the pages of The Limits to Growth. Even if the green technologies promoted by an increasingly frantic minority of environmentalists could support something like today’s rates of energy use, which they can’t, we can no longer afford the sort of massive buildout of those technologies that would be necessary to supplant even a significant part of our current fossil fuel consumption.

With the realistic chance of a smooth transformation to a sustainable future almost certainly well gone now, we’re facing a difficult future even if, by some miracle, we start make wiser choices, and even the ideal way forward is extremely unclear. Somehow we need to cut the Gordian knot of our overentangled unsustainable existence without the whole thing falling apart completely.

So it’s temping to think (in the words of the Internet meme) “I don’t want to live on this planet any more”. Or, moving from Futurama to St Paul, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ” (Philippians 1:23). If it were possible to precipitate the second coming and let God sort the mess out, I’m sure many Christian environmentalists would be tempted to do so.

What do we do and how do we respond to this situation? How do we keep going? Reflecting on these issues, I’ve found a few things helpful, which I’ll describe in part 2 of this post next week.

John Vidal on climate change and its effects on food supplies

Well worth reading is an article by John Vidal from yesterday’s Observer which gives some forecasts as to the likely effects of climate change on food supplies over the next 20-40 years. Nothing particularly new, but good to have everything in one place reasonably clearly.

As you might expect, the news isn’t good, with North Africa and South East Asia possibly at greatest risk in the short term. The former is likely to be hit by increased temperatures beyond which most current crops can’t grow, the latter by increased and more unstable rainfall patterns, damaging rice crops in particular.

Bitcoins: what will our grandchildren think?

Bitcoins may seem a little esoteric and offtopic for this blog, but looking at them provides some interesting insights into our society and economy. Broadly it is an online currency, independent of any national or bank control, and anti-inflationary by design: the total supply is limited to 21 million, a point that will be reached in the year 2140 – some forward thinking here! More details available for instance at Wikipedia.

To what extent it will work as intended, or last even until 2020, let alone 2140, is uncertain. Some think it may just be another Ponzi scheme. But two particular aspects are quite troubling.

The first is that although hoped to be a stable currency, it has been nothing but: some of this has been due to concerns about online security and fraud which have sent the value crashing. But in recent weeks there has been a substantial spike, largely attributed to people seeing it as a potential safe haven after fears over the Cypriot banking system.

The second though is that it has a considerable and increasing environmental cost. The way that the number of bitcoins are limited is that they are generated by people solving problems on computers that get steadily harder, and the more people trying to make bitcoins, the faster they get harder. All of this processing takes a lot of computer power. One estimate (from this article is that the amount of electricity being used is just short of 1000MWh daily, or a million units in UK measure. Or enough to power 31,000 US homes. A friend, Eddie Edwards, has computed that the cost of a single bitcoin is currently $35. (Although this doesn’t take into account manufacturing costs for the computer equipment, etc.)

What does this say in a world where we ought to be trying to reduce electricity usage?

Cleaning the Ocean Gyres and entropy

One of the less well-known aspects of environmental damage is the problem of plastic (and other debris) in the ocean gyres. These are parts of the ocean where currents go in circles, tending to concentrate waste in those areas. Often it’s a case of “out of sight, out of mind” since they’re well away from land, but researchers are beginning to discover just how much plastic ends up there. And others are thinking about how they might conceivably be cleared up.

This has led to a detailed but interesting post explaining just how impractical and expensive this might be. While the popular perception might be of floating islands of garbage, reality is that the pollution is spread over hundreds of square miles and to a considerable depth, and becomes combined with animal and plant life. Extracting it thus becomes near-impossible without denuding the ocean of life, and it makes any recycling of the plastic very difficult too.

Not that the plastic is of much use: it gets degraded through use and exposure to the elements, so there is not much that can be done with it economically.

It’s an illustration of the point made well by Tom Walker on the SCORAI list:

Messy systemic problems do not lend themselves to tidy one-size-fits-all
solutions. And they lend themselves all too easily to confirmation-biased
research claims. Contrary to popular usage of the term, it isn’t
“consumption” that is the problem as much as it is the fact that nothing is
really consumed—it is transformed from low-entropy material and energy
to high-entropy waste.

Entropy, for those who don’t know their physics, can best be thought of as equivalent to chaos as opposed to order. You can think of plastics as going from reasonably well ordered when made, to more chaotic when finished with, to totally chaotic when discarded, shredded and degraded in the ocean. The point at which we grab them and do something with them determines how much of this order is “lost” – not using the plastic at all preserves the order, recycling saves much of it, grabbing it from the ocean causes it to be lost.

There’s a spiritual aspect to this too. God’s original creative act, as described in Genesis 1:1, was to bring order from chaos. This continues: we have a world in which, eventually, our waste products will be dealt with and recycled into something new. It just takes rather longer than we’d like. Or we have the energy from the sun to be able to help us along. Our problem is that the rate of consumption (or entropy increase) is too much for either of these processes to deal with, at present, and as noted above, technological solutions are as yet rather limited.

Which? Consumers in 2030

It’s always interesting, and sometimes encouraging, to see more mainstream groups take an interest in sustainability issues. Which (a major UK consumer-interest group) have recently published Consumers in 2030: Forecasts and projections in conjunction with Forum for the Future.

The report takes into account two major factors: resource shortage (and consequent economic growth) and technological advances:

Our data and social trend analysis shows that in
2030, people in the UK could be living in a world
where slow growth, resource scarcity and rising
commodity prices have become the norm;
where demands on public finances will have
been impacted by demographic shifts, and where
ongoing scandals such as MPs’ expenses, gas price
fixing and the rigging of the Libor rate have led to
a crisis of trust in institutions.

As well as these social and economic trends,
technology will be revolutionising our homes, and the
way we run our lives. For example, increasing use of
robotics in the service industry – already familiar in the
form of self-service checkouts – could fundamentally
change the nature of customer service, making
personal ‘human’ service the new First Class.

A consequence of this is that levels of disposable income are likely to remain below the 2008 peak for at least the next two decades, and they note a worrying trend towards income inequality, so the poor end of society will continue to suffer.

There’s lots of good stuff in this report, and it’s well worth reading. But a surprising omission is the issue of climate change, the costs of extreme weather, and in particular increased risks of flooding. We already have a major consumer issue of housing that is impossible or prohibitively expensive to insure, and this and the other costs of mitigating against, or tidying up the damage from extreme weather seems to be a further major factor to be taken into consideration.

Can we AVOID dangerous climate change?

There’s been a lot of coverage in the last few days of a speech that Energy Secretary Ed Davey gave to the AVOID symposium at the Royal Society. See for instance The Huffington Post, with the full speech on the UK government site. It’s a powerful piece of rhetoric saying that we should listen to the scientists, stand up to the deniers, and work for a strong international agreement in 2015.

AVOID was a new group to me, and their web presence somewhat limited. I’ve not seen any further coverage of the symposium and what was said. They’re a research programme sponsored by DECC whose remit is to advise on how to avoid dangerous climate change, and are a joint project of the Met Office Hadley Centre, the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, the Tyndall Centre and the Walker Institute – all big hitters.

What’s on their website is worth looking at. It presents estimated trajectories for global temperature rises dependent on when emissions peak and how fast they drop with sliders so you can do your own experiments, and see how likely staying under the usual 2C rise is going to be. They say:

Current research suggests we are at a stage of damage limitation but can still avoid the worst effects of climate change projected to occur without mitigation. AVOID has shown that limiting global warming to just under 2 °C above historical levels is possible yet scientifically and technologically challenging.

What this means according to their figures is that if we peak emissions in 2016 we then need to cut them 4% year-on-year for the expected rise by 2100 to be less than 2C, or if we peak in 2020 then it has to be 5%. For reference, these are over a pre-industrial baseline, with 1990 being 0.56C over it, 2013 0.95C, and expected rises of 2C by 2044 and 4C by the 2090s in their average scenario.

Note also that “expected rise” is a middle figure, so this only gives us a 50/50 chance. For a 90% chance, we are looking at a 5% cut from 2016. In practice, they say, we may need some “negative emissions” (geoengineering or other means of getting carbon out of the atmosphere). It’s worrying to compare these dates with those of the international agreements that Davey is looking forward to: 2015, with things enforced from 2020, is the current timetable. All this is in line with reports such as Greenpeace’s Point of No Return (PDF) and the IEA, both of whom say that projects now being planned will take us over the line beyond which a 2C rise is inevitable.

Davey concluded his speech with:

In reality, those who deny climate change and demand a halt to emissions reduction and mitigation work, want us to take a huge gamble with the future of every human being on the planet, every future human being, our children and grand children, and every other living species.

That bet may already be on the table…

Nature services, technology and grace

Why do so many persist in seeking technological solutions to our environmental problems, whilst denigrating social solutions, or allowing nature to do what it does best? This article from the frequently excellent Contraposition blog explores some of the reasons: like it says, nothing new, but a good summary of the debate in one place. One example is quite striking: our attempts to mimic nature through artificial means often make headline news, even if what we’re achieving is quite modest by nature’s standards.

The article ends as follows:

However, it’s this last issue that I think hasn’t really been addressed or resolved yet—how to make this new kind of permaculture-oriented struggle (likely as meaningless, in the sense of Camus, as the one that it seeks to replace) feel more worthwhile to people and societies who have, for a very long time, defined themselves by a “progress”-driven struggle against nature. It’s the challenge of replacing this long-held drive to commodify not only nature, but also other people in the process, that will require not only thought, but action that seems to not yet be a focus of those thinking about these issues today.

I entirely agree that this cultural issue is a major challenge, perhaps the biggest single one. It’s something that EF Schumacher, Ivan Illich, and many others have warned us of for decades, but with little effect on the majority. But what can we say theologically?

The most obvious point is that the breakdown of relationships between humanity and nature, and between human and human, is exactly what we are told happens as a result of the Fall, or or human sin. Exploitation of the weak and powerless is far from a new problem. The solution is the redemption of all through the cross (Colossians 1:15-20), but this has to be thought of properly, and there are two traps we commonly fall into where our theology has become infiltrated by our culture.

The first is seeing the human-God relationship as dominant, to the exclusion of all else. Some strands of Christianity seem to have reduced the Gospel to largely personal ethics, with the only other humans that count being family and church, and nature just being “stuff” that God gives us. Seeing a three-fold relationship (God, human, creation) is necessary to restore our attitudes to what they should be.

Together with individualism comes the second, taken from economics. Only transactions count, preferably those with a financial element. I’ve been preparing for a youth weekend away with the overall theme of “giving” and realising how alien the idea of God’s grace is to modern society: everything else we have to pay for or earn in some way, so it’s hardly surprising that so many struggle with the idea that God’s salvation (and his creation) come to us for free out of his love.

Fixing these isn’t going to be easy, but at least if we come at things from a more correct theological viewpoint, the church has the opportunity to influence the wider world for the better.

All ideas I’d like to think through at greater length in time.