Climate Change: Processing and Brainstorming

Why would I even want to delve into this topic? It’s not fun. In fact, it’s a major bummer. I’ve shuffled through many different stages as I process this topic and I now realize that I’ve been moving through the steps of grief. I want to write about this as a kind of therapy. It’s a way to examine my own feelings on the subject; to look at the problem and to understand the way I relate to it. I also want to educate myself about global decisions that have led us down this path and brainstorm exit strategies.

I’ll start by describing my process in facing climate change.

For a long time, I had been looking away. It felt like too much to bear. I would scroll past articles about the melting arctic and raging wild fires and feel my chest tighten. I tried my best to quickly move past this information without taking it in so I wouldn’t get sad. I felt guilt and shame for the role I play as part of the problem. All I could do was helplessly and despairingly watch the storms destroy coastlines, fires burn down forests and homes, droughts belabor already overburdened resources and polar bears starving to death while plugging my ears and going “lalalalalalalala!”

I tried to be one of those people that shuts out entire scientific fields and global events in favor of puppy videos and things that make me feel nice. That doesn’t make the guilt and shame go away though, it only makes those feelings worse in the moments when you can’t ignore what you are allowing to happen. For example, when you can’t go outside because the air is toxic from wild fire smoke or when a hurricane destroys a place you love.

I told myself that unless I was actively working on a solution then there is no point in worrying about it. The developed world has 1.03 billion heavy consumers. Even if I had zero carbon footprint (which isn’t possible and even minimizing it is a full-time job!) what difference would it make besides make my life more difficult, more expensive and less enjoyable?

At some point, I just accepted that the future might not include humanity. Why is our material existence so important, anyway? We are just temporary manifestations of some larger consciousness that permeates the entire universe and cannot be destroyed. Surely the universal consciousness will manifest itself in some other form at some other point in space and time. I got more into meditation and connecting with “the oneness”. I said shit like this on Facebook (in response to a friend asking if we think about about climate change)

What was I trying to do there? Be comforting? I’m like “we’re all going to die, that’s fine. Let’s all just accept that and forget about having children. Fuck the children who are being born to other people right now!! lol #blessed”

There is a term for what I was doing. It’s called “Spiritual Bypassing”, defined as the "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."

My next tactic was manically trying to convince everyone I know to stop eating beef. The beef industry accounts for 25% of all green-house emissions and is responsible for much of the clear cutting of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s most crucial carbon sink. It’s so easy to switch to a different protein…chicken also tastes good! Tofu is so cheap and versatile! Beans are high in protein! It’s a totally insignificant life style change. I thought if more people knew about the enormous negative impact of their burger, they would just eat something else.

This doesn’t work. People don’t care. They will buy what’s cheapest, familiar, most delicious, or most convenient every time. And after all, most people probably realize, as I should have, individual consumer choices don’t make a difference besides giving us something to feel self-righteous about. The market will not sort this out for us on its own, we need government regulations.

I see other people grasping at their own delusional coping mechanisms as well. Recently, I was talking to a friend about my anxiety surrounding climate change and he said, “I just figure scientists will come up with a solution.”

I can see how this feels nice to believe. It’s tempting to tell ourselves that we can maintain lifestyles of heavy consumption and excessive waste and someone will invent a machine that cools the earth right down again and we’ll all live happily ever after.

I agreed with him for a second, because humans are quite crafty and we have come up with some amazing technology. I’ve heard of interesting methods for CO2 sequestration that give me tremendous amounts of hope, like this one.

Then I remembered… wait, I’m a scientist. I’m not working on technology that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. I associate with hundreds of scientists all over the world. None of the scientists I know are working on this. We are all working on developing products that people buy, especially smart phones. There is no trendy, money-making product associated with carbon sequestration.

How many scientists do we imagine are working on this and with what money? And why am I talking about “scientists” as though they are some abstract, mysterious, monolith when I’m one of them?

Even if all the money and scientists in the world were being thrown at this problem, let’s consider the scale of this engineering feat. We are talking about planetary engineering of a global weather system here. Do we seriously think that even though nothing like that has ever been attempted or even experimented with, “scientists” are going to come up with a great solution in the next few decades and that it will have no negative consequences? Shouldn’t we maybe try this out on Venus first as a test planet?

And who would govern and over-see this project? Who do we trust enough to manipulate the global systems on which life itself depends? Who would pay for it? Forget about the science and engineering challenges, the politics of this alone seem insurmountable.

Systems like the one described above take tremendous amounts of time and energy to put in place. This factory is touted as being able to remove CO2 as effectively as the Amazon rainforest. Well, if we left the Amazon rainforest alone, it would take ~50 years to absorb all the atmospheric CO2 we’ve already emitted to get us back to preindustrial conditions. Do we have time for this?

No, we don’t. This is an unrealistic fantasy. It’s magical thinking. This is just another way of looking away from the problem and sweeping it under the rug for the next generation to deal with.

None of these coping mechanisms are working for me so I’m going to try something different, at least for the duration of the time it takes me to write this blog post. I am going to try to emotionally process this and work through the emotions I have around facing the extinction of my species.

This is some heavy shit. I know I am not the only one that needs to talk this out. In fact, a major source of inspiration for wanting to write and talk about this is my brilliant comedian friend Jessica Sele who has a podcast where she talks about climate change with other comedians. I love it. I’m a huge fan. Comedians are able to speak deep truths on important issues when others cannot. They can bring dismal topics into conversation with silliness and lightheartedness. We need this with climate change.

People are feeling deep anxiety in the face of existential doom, how could they not be? We are going to have to support each other through this. Climate change is going to cause a lot of suffering. It already is. This means we need to be practiced in the art of compassion. And if we are able to get our asses in gear and actually make the enormous, ambitious changes necessary to mitigate climate change before it causes mass extinction, that will mean a lot of sacrifice. It will mean giving up several luxuries that we feel entitled to…at least in the short term while we come up with other solutions.

In the last few weeks I’ve been more or less immersing myself in climate change related content: reading books about the economic policies that trapped us in this situation, watching David Attenborough warn us that collapse of civilization is on the horizon, reading reports from scientists all over the world explaining that we are on a path the leads to extinction of most of the natural world. 

It’s wearing on me to hold all of this alone. So, I want to talk this out. I want to brainstorm with people. I don’t want to shrug and sadly accept that humans are going to be extinct in 100 years, along with most other species on this planet. I want to work on solutions.

I think we all know in our hearts that we need to at least try to save the world, even if it seems hopeless. Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s just not a good story if we don’t. Can you imagine if Super Man was like, “meh…I could try to stop that meteor from colliding with Earth, but why bother?”

I have to try. It’s the only way I could live with myself. 

The more time I spend on this, the more I feel like talking with people, identifying the problem, educating ourselves on what needs to change and brainstorming solutions IS actively working on the problem. This feels much more productive than anything else I’ve done to make the future better lately.

But before I get to brainstorming solutions, I want to give myself space to process how this is emotionally affecting me and influencing my life choices. Most poignantly, it’s crippling my will to have children.

My parents, especially my dad, often encourage me to have children. I think that is a life experience I might want to have someday. But if I had a child right now, could I imagine explaining to her that I knew we would likely be going to war over water in her lifetime and I decided to have her anyway? That I knew she would have to live through decades of unpredictable extreme weather events that would make agriculture impossible which would probably cause the collapse of civilization?  Could I explain that I knew that extinction of humanity was on the horizon with no alternative route being planned and I still decided to bring her into this world?

I’m not being dramatic here. This is the trajectory we are on, ask any earth or climate scientist. If we don’t make large changes now, these are the issues our children are going to face. Can anyone fathom a more unfair burden to put on someone’s shoulders? There is absolutely no worse fate to hand someone then the extinction of their species.

Never in the history of humanity have we faced an existential threat of this magnitude. The closest we’ve ever come was during the black plague. But climate change is worse because we know what is causing this, it’s us. We don’t have to continue down this path. It is within our power to reverse this. We could come together as a global society and agree on certain regulations and limitations on how much we can pollute the planet. Are we doing this? No. Quite the opposite, in fact. If anything, we are competing with each other on who can extract more and who can consume the fastest. Every half-assed attempt by global bodies of government to limit and slow this gluttonous habit of extraction and consumption have been weak, unambitious and nonbinding.

How could I explain to my child that we had the power to save her life but we didn’t? And would I even want to bring a child into a world of greedy, selfish, cowards that are unwilling to make sacrifices for their own children?

My sisters both have kids. One time, when I brought this topic up with one of them, she agreed that the future looks grim, “but I still want to live my life”, she said.

Having children does seem like it’s part of a happy and complete life. But it’s not just about my life being happy and complete, it’s also about the kid’s life.

I’m woman in my 30’s which means I’m at the age where if I want to have kids, it needs to be in the next few years. A big part of me wants to resolve that I will not have children until it is clear we are on a markedly different path as a society, which could be never.

Francesca Fiorentini presented a great converse to that argument on Jessica’s podcast. She said something along the lines of: making decisions like not having children because the future looks too terrible is giving up. It’s letting evil win. It’s a way of saying, “Ok, you psychopathic assholes in power: you can destroy this planet. I have stopped believing in the regenerative nature of the Earth and I give you permission to flush it down to toilet.” It’s a way of writing off the future all together.

But if I had a kid, would I fight for this harder? Even writing this blog post has been so emotionally exhausting. I’m depressed. I feel powerless.

Then I look at my own consumption and my own carbon footprint. This is where the guilt and shame come in. I get on airplanes multiple times each month, mostly for work. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were in the top 1% of people in this world who travel by air the most.

I often ask myself, “How could I possibly encourage people to pay attention to climate change when I’m getting on airplanes all the time? I’m such a hypocrite. I have no right to even talk about this.”

Lately I’ve been noticing that this is a very common and effective way to silence people and stop them from criticizing a system. The technique is to shame them with ways that they are contributing to and benefiting from the system. This is done on all sides of the political spectrum. It works great to shut people up and stop them from advocating for all kinds of positive change. Here’s an example: Check out this clip of Fox News saying Russel Brand can’t protest the rising rent that is pricing people out of their homes London because he himself is a wealthy person in London.

So, who should advocate for change then? The underprivileged? People with zero carbon footprint? Probably the people in this world with the smallest carbon footprint are the people that live in shanty towns with no energy or water connections. Those are the people with the least amount of influence and power. I imagine most of their time and energy is consumed with getting their own basic needs met, like securing food and clean water for the day. They don’t have time to start a revolution, they are struggling to survive in a system which keeps them poor.

The wealthiest and most privileged people in this world are the ones who MUST be talking about climate change. Yes, you can benefit from and contribute to a system and still be critical of it. It’s wildly unproductive to silence people who are trying to help by telling them they are hypocrites who have no right to criticize. We need all the help we can get.  

To that end, I’d like to say a few words about travel. When I think about the experiences in my life that have most enriched me spiritually and intellectually, the events in my life that taught me and opened my heart the most, the moments that made me a better person, almost all of them involve traveling. Getting on planes or taking long road trips might be a carbon intensive activity, but I still believe more people traveling further from their homes would make the world a better place. It’s makes our planet seem like a smaller and more interconnected community, and this is a mentality we need if we are going to face global issues together. Traveling to foreign countries alleviates the otherness and negative judgments we might place on people from unfamiliar cultures. The more people I meet from around the world, the more I'm sure we are all cut from the same cloth. My travels have made me love this planet and all of its people much more. Maybe it’s what makes me want to fight for its future. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the ability to get on a plane and go to a far-off land, in fact I think the world would be better in many ways if more of us did just that.

In sum, I feel powerless, depressed and reliant on fossil fuels but simultaneously somewhat justified in my carbon-intensive behavior and unwilling to change it. So, what’s the path forward from here?

This is when I put on my scientist pants and remind myself that when attacking any problem, the first step is to identify the root cause.  

I’ve been reading this great book by Naomi Klein called “This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate”. She makes it very clear that the root of the climate crisis is unregulated global capitalism. We have strapped ourselves to an economic system that requires constant growth and constant consumption. Our system provides maximum freedom to multinational corporations to produce their goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible-- all while paying as little taxes as possible.

In the 1980’s, with the dawning of what came to be called “globalization”, the prevailing idea was that economic growth would be fueled by giving corporations the freedom to do whatever they want with no regulations. Corporations were given freedom to outsource labor to whichever country would provide it the cheapest and short-cut environmental regulations of the developed world by moving their dirty mines and factories to the undeveloped world. According to globalization theory, wealth generated from unmitigated corporate freedom would eventually trickle down to the rest of us.

So, has it trickled down? No, it turns out. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened enormously since the 1980’s. At this point, a tiny group of oligarchs control half of the world’s wealth. In fact, just nine of the world’s richest men have more combined wealth than the poorest 4 billion people. As CEO of Exxon, Rex Tillerson made more than $100,000 dollars PER DAY. Compare that to how much you make in a year and get sad.

Giving corporations the agency to do whatever they want is only working out favorably for a small number of people. More importantly, constant extraction, consumption and growth is a dead-end path and we are nearing the physical limitations imposed by our planet. If we want to survive, we have to put limitations on the free market and, with the exception of the poor, we all have to consume less.

Instead of constantly growing and generating new wealth, we must spread out the wealth that already exists. There is enough crap in the human crap pile. We are at a saturation point. Want some evidence? Anthropologie is literally selling bundles of sticks for $42, and they sold out. 

We have to ditch this model of constantly generating more crap and creating more consumers to buy it. Think of all the bullshit jobs that only exist to generate consumption.  Naomi Klein goes so far as to call for “the introduction of a basic annual income, a wage given to every person, regardless of income, as a recognition that the system cannot provide jobs for every one and that it is counterproductive to force people to work in jobs that simply fuel consumption.”

I’m down with universal basic income. I love that idea, please bring it on.

I have a lot to say on this topic, as someone who has developed automation software and has encountered people who vehemently resist automation with the fear that it will take jobs from people. How did we get to this point where we are so committed to the notion that every single person must work some shitty, pointless job in order to justify their right to survive? It seems to me that we care more about jobs than we care about humans. It’s not a bad thing that machines are now able to do the brainless, tedious, repetitive and dangerous jobs so that humans don’t have to. That’s something to celebrate! Human time is more valuable than machine time. Instead of being trapped in shitty, soul-sucking jobs, more people can spend their time learning, creating art, building spaces for community activities and generally making this world a happier place. The sooner we get rid of this attachment to jobs for the sake of jobs, the better.  

But I digress, back to climate change: we need regulations on the extent to which corporations can extract from and pollute the planet. Any corporation who goes over that limitation will have to pay for the clean-up. In the same way tobacco companies had to pay for the medical lawsuits brought forth by consumers who developed cancer from using their products, fossil fuel companies have to be the ones to pay for the environmental destruction their products are causing.

For a long time, I was confused about why conservatives fiercely denied climate change. What is the rationale? Why would climate scientists be lying? What could they possibly have to gain from falsifying their own data? Any experiment worth it’s salt can be reproduced anyone who takes the time to read the paper and try the experiment themselves…And they will get the same results! This is what peer review is. I couldn’t find any logical thread to follow in the climate change denial argument. But now I understand, it’s not (just) that conservatives don’t have basic science literacy. It’s also because climate change seems like a cosmic, heavenly gift to the left. Conservatives deny climate change because they know that any kind of effective response to the climate crisis is going to require the things leftist advocate for and conservatives hate the most: government interference in business and a massive redistribution of wealth and power.

As long as there is money to be made in fossil fuels, companies will not stop drilling. We have to stop allowing people to profit from fossil fuels. A great first step would be to end fossil fuel subsidies.

I looked into this and it turns out, fossil fuel subsidies are absurdly high. Governments subsidize the shit out of fossil fuels. A 2016 IMF study estimated that global fossil fuel subsidies were at least $5.3 trillion in 2015. The study found that "China was the biggest subsidizer in 2013 ($1.8 trillion), followed by the United States ($0.6 trillion), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3 trillion).”

Just to get a grip on how much money this is, the cost for eradicating global hunger is estimated to be $30 billion; that’s 0.5%  of what we give to fossil fuel companies. HALF OF ONE PERCENT. This is our tax dollars. We are paying fossil fuel companies so that they can sell a product back to us that is killing us.

With the money we save from fossil fuel subsidies, we could build renewable infrastructure and provide monetary support to the poor to ease the transition away from fossil fuel dependency. Since fuel prices will undoubtedly go up with the end of fossil fuel subsidies, fuel credits could be given to people who are below a certain income threshold, kind of like food-stamps.

Notice, I am not advocating for increasing the price of fuel without giving people assistance. The riots that are happening in France right now over fuel tax are showing us that we cannot respond to this problem with an over-night increase in fuel prices that puts burden of sacrifice on the poor. It’s not the every-day person who should have to make the biggest sacrifice, the biggest polluters are the ones who should pay the most. The wealthiest among us, the ones who consume the most, the ones who can afford it, these are the ones who should pay the most for the transition.

If no one could profit from fossil fuels, there wouldn’t be a fossil fuel industry. However, for the time being, we still need fossil fuels. We are dependent. Fossil fuel companies are like evil drug dealers who have vested interest in keeping us hooked on what’s killing us. The solution could be to take fossil fuel out of the hands of private industry altogether. We could nationalize our energy system so that we have democratic control over it. It could be a commodity that is funded solely by taxation, like public schools. If we think it’s important enough to pay taxes such that every child can get a high school education, then certainly we think it’s important enough to pay taxes to make sure they have a habitable planet to live on. Maybe it could start out as increased tax on the wealthy, and then as infrastructure for renewables grows and allows for more alternatives, it could evolve into just a tax on fossil fuel.

At the very least, we need to get fossil fuel money out of politics. Politicians must be prohibited from receiving donations from the industries they regulate. This is a crucial first step. We can’t allow our legislators to be puppets to fossil fuel companies. If you are curious, here is a list of the top recipients of campaign contributions from oil and gas companies.

You may be disappointed to learn that Beto O’Roarke, the man we all rallied behind as the progressive who would save Texas, is the #2 biggest recipient of oil and gas money, second only to Ted Cruz.

With stats like these, it’s easy to become jaded. I often decide not to trust anyone who strives for a leadership role. If someone is egotistical enough to believe that they are the one who should be running the country then I already don’t trust them. I think it would be better if our leaders were randomized and chosen from a lottery system, like jury duty. Why not? Someone please give me a reason why that’s a bad idea.

I’m not an advocate for growing the government, despite how I’m making it seem. I don’t trust those assholes. I don’t want them to have any more control over my life then they already have. This is a sentiment that I share with conservatives. What I’m advocating for is decentralizing power altogether. Right now, power is completely consolidated in the hands of major corporations. When we think about the 1984 nightmare of the far-reaching government with a Big Brother always watching us, that is already happening! Only it’s not government, it’s corporations. They are installing cookies in our browsers to track our internet use, they are farming our private information to create incredibly rich dossiers about anything that could possibly interest us, all to manipulate us into buying more crap and keeping capitalism alive. 

Corporations have more power than any government. For the time being, government is our only avenue for taking their power away. Break up the monopolies. The last time a monopoly was broken up was AT&T in 1982, before the age of globalization. It may be time to take out the antitrust hammer and smash apart Comcast, Facebook, Google and Amazon, to name a few. But in the end, I don’t want government to have the majority of the power either.

I believe that what I’m advocating for is kind of anarchist/libertarian system of small communities that have localized control of their own industries. I suppose it’s similar to what Mahatma Gandhi was pushing for with his idea of self-sufficient village communities. I imagine local organizations that are owned and maintained by the employees in co-ops where workers have democratic control over the company and the profit is shared equally by all workers. Or perhaps there would be pay discrepancies based on merit, but these are structures that would be decided democratically by the owner/workers themselves. Bring the businesses back home and give the power back to the community.

There is a lot to feel positive and hopeful about right now. Even though at the time it felt like the most tragic mistake America has ever made, I now believe Trump’s victory in the 2016 election has been something of a God-send. It’s got people paying close attention to policy and educating themselves about government and economics, even people like me who aren’t historically interested in these things. It’s shaken things up and exposed how broken our system is and the level of deep dissatisfaction that many of us have with the status quo. It’s clear now that this two-party system where both sides are basically the same and neither is offering any kind of effective change is not working. We need a new model entirely.

Trump’s unexpected victory has spurred a new youth revolution. There’s more political demonstrations and activism among young people than any time since the 1960’s.  

I’m inspired by the Sunrise Group who are working to get politicians to commit to not receiving money from the fossil fuel industry. They recently hosted a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office with speakers as young as 7! 

I’m inspired by Greta Thunberg, a 15 year old from Sweden who has been leading a strike at her school that made headlines and who majorly shamed the world leaders at the UN for not taking a more proactive stance on climate change. 

I’m inspired by the Green New Deal, an economic stimulus program which proposes government-led investments in renewable infrastructure and will use climate change as a vehicle to create jobs and address economic inequality. With enough hype, the Green New Deal could be a major platform of whoever challenges Trump in the 2020 election. I hope it will be. We need this.

Scientific innovations are always inspiring. I’m happy to know that huge advancements have been made in electric airplanes. Perhaps in the near future, air travel will not be accompanied by guilt. 

There’s a lot to learn and a lot to accomplish. We’ve already accomplished a lot! I stumbled upon this article and was pleasantly surprised at all the victories for the environment that happened in 2018. It hasn’t all been bad, we are making great progress here.  

I’m not giving up. I believe in the innate goodness of humans and of nature. I believe we are too precious and improbable to allow ourselves to commit planetary suicide. I’m way too much of a Star Trek nerd to not hope with all of my heart that we end up in a technological utopia where every human has their needs met and our only goals as a species are to enjoy life, to learn, to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before!

It’s going to take some work and a lot of love, but I love us and I believe in our ability to work hard. I know that you do too. I think we are going to pull this off.