Disclaimer: I am now retired, and am therefore no longer
an expert on anything. This blog post
presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.
Dag Hessen’s “The Many Lives of Carbon” is the best book I
have been able to find on the chemical details of the carbon cycle and
CO2-driven climate change (despite some odd idioms that make it difficult to
understand him at times). In particular,
it goes deeply into “positive feedbacks” that exacerbate departures from
atmospheric-O2 equilibrium and “negative feedbacks” that operate to revert to
equilibrium. In the long run, negative feedbacks
win; but the long run can be millions of years.
More precisely, if humans weren’t involved, there are
medium-term and long-term “global warmings” and coolings. The medium-term warming/cooling is usually
thought to result from the Milankovitch Cycle, in which Earth orbit unusually
far from the Sun during winter (“rubber-banding” of its elliptical orbit), a
more severe tilt of the Earth’s axis as it oscillates periodically, and “precession”
(wobbling back and forth on its axis) combine to yield unusually low Northern-Hemisphere
winter heat from the Sun, which kickstarts glaciation, which acts as a positive
feedback for global cooling along with atmospheric CO2 loss. This cooling operates slowly over most of the
next 100,000 years to descend into an Ice Age, but then the opposite effect
(maximum heat from the sun) kicks in and brings a sharp rise in temperatures
back to its original point.
Long-term global warming is much rarer – there are instances
55 million years ago and 250 million years ago, and indeed some indications
that most of the previous 5 largest mass extinctions on Earth were associated
with this type of global warming. The
apparent cause is massive volcanism, especially underwater volcanism (the
clouds from on-land volcanism actually reduce temperatures significantly over several
years, but then the temperatures revert to what they were before the eruption). It also seems clear that the main if not only
cause of the warming is CO2 and methane (CH4) released into the atmosphere by
these eruptions – carbon infusions so persistent that the level of atmospheric
CO2 did not revert to equilibrium for 50 million years or so after the last
such warming.
For both medium-term and long-term global warming/cooling, “weathering”
acts as a negative feedback – but only over hundreds of thousands of
years. Weathering involves water and
wind wearing away at rock, exposing carbon-infused silica that are then carried
to the ocean. There, among other
outcomes, they are taken up by creatures who die, forming ocean-floor limestone
that “captures” the carbon and thus withdraws it from the carbon cycle circulating
carbon into and out of the atmosphere.
Human-caused global warming takes the slow negative feedback
of animal/plant fossils being turned into coal, oil, and natural gas below the
Earth’s surface and makes it into an unprecedentedly fast direct cause of
global warming, mostly by burning it for fuel (hence “fossil fuels”). The
net effect of CO2 doubling in the atmosphere is 2-2.8 degrees Centigrade land-temperature
warming, but it is also accompanied by positive feedbacks (including increased
cloud cover, increased atmospheric methane, and “black carbon”/soot decreases
in albedo [reflectivity of the sun’s heat]) that, in a slower way, may take the
net global warming associated with CO2 doubling up to 4 degrees C. Some of this can be overcome by the negative
feedback of the ocean’s slower absorption of the increased heat, as the ocean “sink”
can take more carbon out of the atmosphere, but at some point soon the ocean
will be in balance with the atmosphere and much of what we emit in carbon
pollution will effectively stay aloft for thousands of years.
My point in running through the implications of Hessen’s
analysis is that there is a reason for scientists to fear for all of our lives: The global warming that, in the extreme,
disrupts agriculture and food webs extremely and makes it unsafe for most of us
to operate outside for more than a short period of time most of the year,
except in the high mountains, is a CO2-driven “irresistible force”. There is therefore a good case to be made
that “mitigation” – reducing carbon emissions (and methane and black carbon and
possibly nitrous oxide) is by far the best way to avoid the kind of global
warming that literally threatens humanity’s survival. And this is a point that I have argued
vociferously in past blog posts.
The Other Irresistible Force: The Business/Legal Bureaucracy
And yet, based on my reading, I would argue that there is an
apparently equally irresistible force operating on its own momentum in today’s
world: what I am calling the Business/Legal
Bureaucracy. Here, I am using the word “bureaucracy”
in a particular sense: that of an
organization operating on its own momentum.
In the case of businesses, that means a large-business bureaucracy operating
always under a plan to make more profit this year than last. In the case of the law, that means a court
system and mindset always to build on precedents and to support property
rights.
To see what I am talking about, consider David Owen’s “Where
the Water Goes”, about what happens to all the water in the Colorado River
watershed. Today, most of that water is
shipped east to fuel the farms and businesses of Colorado and its vicinity, or
west, to meet the water needs of Las Vegas and Los Angeles and the like. The rest is allocated to farmers or other
property owners along the way under a peculiar legal doctrine called “prior
appropriation” – instead of the more typical equal sharing among bordering property
owners, it limits each portion to a single “prior claimant”, since in the old
mining days there wasn’t enough water in each portion for more than one miner
to be able to “wash” the gold effectively.
Each new demand for water therefore is fitted legally within this
framework, ensuring that the agricultural business bureaucracy will push for
more water from the same watershed, while the legal bureaucracy will accommodate
this within the array of prior claimants.
To see what creates such an impression of an irresistible
force about this, consider the need to cut back on water use as climate change
inevitably decreases the snowpack feeding the Colorado. As Owen points out, there is no clear way to
do this. Business-wise, no one wants to
be the one to sacrifice water. Legally,
the simple solution of limiting per-owner water use can actually result in more
water use from each owner, as seasonal and annual variations in water needs
mean that many owners will now need to draw down and store water in off-seasons
“just in case”. The result is a system that not only resists “sustainability”
but in fact can also be less profit-producing in the long run – the ecosystems
shafted by this approach, such as the now-dry Mexican terminus of the Colorado,
may well be those that might have been most arable in the global-warming future. And the examples of this multiply
quickly: the wildfire book I reviewed in
an earlier blog post noted the extreme difficulties in fighting wildfires with
their exacerbating effect on global warming, difficulties caused by the encroachment
of mining and real-estate development on northern forests, driven by
Legal/Business Bureaucracy.
The primary focus of the Legal/Business Bureaucracy with
respect to climate change and global warming, therefore, is after-the-fact,
incremental adaptation. It is for that
reason, as well as the dangerous trajectory we are now on, that I view calling
the most disastrous future climate-change scenarios “business as usual” as
entirely appropriate.
Force, Meet Force
It also seems to me that reactions to the most dire
predictions of climate change fall into two camps (sometimes in the same
person!):
1.
We need drastic change or few of us will survive,
because no society or business system can possibly resist the upcoming “business
as usual” changes: extreme weather, loss
of water for agriculture, loss/movement of arable land, large increases in the
area ripe for debilitating/killing tropical diseases, extreme heat, loss of
ocean food, loss of food-supporting ecosystems, loss of seacoast living areas,
possible toxic emissions from the ocean.
2.
Our business-economy-associated present system
will somehow automagically “muddle through”, as it always seems to have
done. After all, there is, it seems,
plenty of “slack” in the water efficiency of agriculture, plenty of ideas about
how to adopt businesses and governments to encourage better adaptation and
mitigation “at the margin” (e.g., solar now dominates the new-energy market in
the United States, although it does not seem to have made much of a dent in the
existing uses of fossil fuels), and plenty of new business-associated
technologies to apply to problems (e.g., business sustainability metrics).
An interesting example of how both beliefs can apparently
coexist in the same person is Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”, an argument
that the “reason reinforced by science” approach to the world of the late 18th
century known as the Enlightenment is primarily responsible for a dramatic,
continuing improvement in the overall human situation, and should be chosen as
the primary impetus for further improvements.
My overall comment on this book is that Pinker has impressed me with the
breadth of his reading and the general fairness of his assessments of that
reading. However, Pinker appears to have
one frustrating flaw: A belief that liberals
and other proponents of change in such areas as equality, environmentalism, and
climate change are primarily so ideology-driven that they are actually harmful
to Enlightenment-type improvements, and likewise their proponents within the
government. Any reasonable reading of
Jeffrey Sachs’ “The Age of Sustainable Development”, which I hope to discuss in
a later post, puts the lie to that one.
In any case, Pinker has an extensive section on climate
change, in which he both notes the “existential threat” (i.e., threat to human
existence) posed by human-caused climate change, and asserts his belief that it
can be overcome by a combination of Business/Legal-Complex adaptation to the
findings of Enlightenment scientists and geoengineering. One particular assertion is that if
regulations could be altered, new technologies in nuclear power can meet all
our energy needs in short order, with little risk to people and little need of
waste storage. I should note that James
Hansen appears to agree with him (although Hansen is far more pessimistic that
regulation alteration will happen or that nuclear businesses will choose to
change their models) and Joe Romm very definitely does not.
One also often sees the second camp among experts on
Business/Legal-Complex matters such as allocation of water in California in reaction
to climate-change-driven droughts. These
reactions assume linear effects on water availability of what is an exponential
global-warming process, and note that under these assumptions, there is plenty
of room for less water use by existing agriculture, and everyone should “stop
panicking.”
So what do I think will happen when force meets force?
Flexibility Is the Enemy of Agility
One of the things that I noticed (and noted in my blog) in
my past profession is that product and organizational flexibility – the ability
to easily repurpose for other needs and uses – is a good thing in the short run,
but often a bad thing in the long run. How
can this be? Because the long run will often
require fundamental changes to products and/or organizations, and the more that
the existing product or system is “patched” to meet new needs, the greater the
cultural, organizational, and experiential investment in the present system –
not to mention the greater the gap between that and what’s going on elsewhere
that will eventually lead to the need for a fundamental change.
There is one oncoming business strategy that reduces the
need for such major, business-threatening transitions: business agility. Here the idea is to build both products and
organizations with the ability for much more radical change, plus better
antennae to the outside to stay as close as possible to changes in consumer needs. But flexibility is in fact the enemy of
agility: patches in the existing product
or organization exacerbate the “hard-coded” portions of it, making fundamental
changes more unlikely and the huge costs of an entire do-over more inevitable.
As you can guess, I think that today’s global economy is
extraordinarily flexible, and that is what camp 2 counts on to save the
day. But this very flexibility is the
enemy of the agility that I believe we will find ourselves needing, if we are
to avoid this kind of collapse of the economy and our food production.
But it’s a global economy – that’s part of its global
Business/Legal-Bureaucracy flexibility.
So local or even regional collapses aren’t enough to do it. Rather, if we fail to mitigate strongly,
e.g., in an agile fashion, and create a sustainable global economy over the
next 20 years, some time over the 20 years after that the average costs of increasing
stresses from climate change put the global economy in permanent negative
territory, and, unless fundamental change happens immediately after that, the
virtuous circle of today’s economy turns into a vicious, accelerating circle of
economic collapse. And the smaller our
economies become, the less we wind up spending on combating the ever-increasing
effects of climate change. At the end,
we are left with less than half (and maybe 1/10th) the food sources
and arable land, much of it in new extreme-northern areas with soil of lower
quality, with food being produced under much more brutal weather
conditions. Or, we could by then have
collapsed governmentally to such a point that we can’t even manage that. It’s an existential threat.
Initial Thoughts On What to Do
Succinctly, I would put my thoughts under three headings:
1.
Governmental. Governments must drive mitigation well beyond
what they have done up to now in their Paris-agreement commitments. We, personally, should place climate change
at the top of our priority lists (where possible), reward commitments and
implementation politically, and demand much more.
2.
Cultural. Businesses, other organizations, and the
media should be held accountable for promoting, or failing to promote, mitigation-targeted
governmental, organizational, and individual efforts. In other words, we need to create a new
lifestyle. There’s an interesting take on
what a lifestyle like that would look like in Peter Kalmus’ “Being the Change”,
which I hope to write about soon.
3.
Personal. Simply as a matter of not being
hypocrites, we should start to change our carbon “consumption” for the
better. Again, Kalmus’ book offers some
suggestions.
Or, as Yoda would put it, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Because both Forces will be against you.
