https://youtu.be/3daIhMb6bVo

“Since the climate is not affected by anyone’s sense of optimism or pessimism, what matters is how our disposition affects our engagement with the issue. If optimism leads to us taking action to build a sustainable society, then we should be optimistic.”

I agree.

I probably should not have used the word “optimistic”. It’s a distraction from what I really meant, but to get at what I really meant might take more time and words than I want to give to that question. Maybe by passing by that topic I can begin to get at what I meant in a roundabout way.

“The carbon budget concept doesn’t imply that we should continue emitting carbon, but rather highlights the need to reduce it towards zero at a rapid rate. It provides a framework for understanding our task and helping to measure progress. I agree that 2C warming is not safe and shouldn’t be regarded as a better target than 1.5C .”

I believe the carbon budget concept was once useful, but that those days are now behind us because multiple positive feedback “tipping points” are already kicking in and, in general, the harms being caused by current atmospheric greenhouse gases are rapidly growing worse — and are scary.

Arctic wildfires are releasing as much carbon as Belgium did last year
By Maddie Stone on Aug 2, 2019
https://grist.org/article/the-arctic-is-having-unprecedented-wildfires-heres-why-that-matters/

I believe we’re well into a “dangerous” phase in anthropogenic global warming and that nothing short of a very rapid and radical leap from industrial civilization — as we now know it — will be a necessary response. This would necessitate an almost immediate end to economic growth and a rapid transition to an economy with vastly lower throughputs of energy and materials — which is to say a deliberate and planned economic descent.

Why? Because it is simply not going to be feasible to convert — in the necessary time frame — from a fossil fuel based energy system to a renewable one while also significantly lowering carbon emissions each year over the next decade, as called for. It’s just plainly not possible. This inevitably means we must rapidly deindustrialize — but not into the stone age. We’ll still have need and use of some metal tools, plate glass for windows for passive solar retrofits… and some industrial products. But we have got to relinquish the basic shape of the economy which we now have. Fundamental, radical economic transformation is called for. And it will not only not involve further GDP/GNP growth, it demands a deliberate, careful, planned near-complete abandonment of the industrial economy.

“But a suggested warming limit means little without a feasibility analysis, which is complex and should be subject to a host of considerations and democratic deliberation.”

We’re already beyond the line of anything reasonably called a “warming limit”. We have already used up our wiggle room within a “safe” climate system. The best we can now hope for is not going to be what any of us hoped for, and may be much worse than most of us want to imagine. We’ve almost already insured that there will be very bad near term food shortages on a global scale. And we’ve already determined the fate of countless species which are on an extinction path.

“If climate change was our only problem, then we should reduce emissions as fast as possible. A major issue is that various other obstacles or considerations suggest that we’ll need to moderate our decarbonization rate, including “energy trap” problems discussed by energy analysts and the fact that societies are currently organized and provisioned with fossil fuels, which means significant social harm may result if new provisioning systems aren’t simultaneously put in place.”

Precisely. However, “energy trap” portraits and scenarios such as this one — https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-10-19/energy-trap-0/ — assumed all kinds of things we can’t assume today. In that article, the author says, “But our reaction to a diminishing flow of fossil fuel energy in the short-term will determine whether we transition to a sustainable but technological existence or allow ourselves to collapse.” This assumed that limits to access to fossil fuels would be the bottleneck and the driver (and motivator) of change — and that our target should be a “technological existence” (which I interpret to mean a continuance of industrial civilization much as we have now, only using renewables rather than fossil energy to sustain it).

It is the “picture” of a desirable and achievable future which too many in the climate and environmental movement which I’m challenging. It is a picture of a post-carbon (decarbonized) human economy in which folks still drive automobiles, but these are electric cars … it is a picture in which most everything looks pretty much as it does now, but it is all powered by wind turbines and solar panels. It is this picture of a desirable and achievable future which I’m wanting us to abandon in light of the hard facts.

“How fast can we decarbonize?”

As soon as we relinquish this now quite outdated, obsolete “picture” of a desirable and feasible future we will be able to decarbonize with an astonishing rapidity. But what we’re decarbonizing then becomes something other than industrial civilization as we know it. What we’re decarbonizing is the “economy” — the material economy. We can’t bring this material economy into that future. And this means we simply have to re-imagine our total future world so that we can help bring a more realistic and honest future material economy into being.

“How fast should we decarbonize?”

As fast as we can emplace the more honest, realistic, realizable alternative material economy which awaits us. It will necessitate the relocalization (and regionalization) of the systems by which we provide such basics as food, water, shelter, transportation — everything we need. Because doing so will be in the context of an already disrupted climate system, we must use care not to abandon those who would die when local and regional crops fail due to droughts, floods, heatwaves, etc. You may not expect me to advocate for industrial activity, but I think we should in fact have an immediate build out of rail systems (energy efficient and fueled by wind and sun — electric) in the USA. These will be useful in moving food to the stricken, but also whatever reduced industrial products we decide to keep — e.g., glass windows, metal hand tools, etc. Also, these networked rail systems will ease the path to a complete abandonment of the private automobile. Intra-urban transportation would be a mix of efficient / renewable /electric public transport, bicycles and enclosed, ultralight electric vehicles (and such), with most of the street traffic paced to the safety needs of the predominant mode — the bicycle.

So I do not advocate for a total abandonment of industrial civilization. Rather, I think it should be shrunken to a scale in which we could, if need be, drown it in a bath tub. We will not choose to drown it though, and we should not. We’ll need it for some of our basic necessities.

In the ideal future I imagine, ecovillages would be the basic scale and type of community — with cities and suburban areas retrofitted in that sort of direction. The bioregional concept will also be very handy, allowing these villages to be networked to one another and the larger society of which they are a part. Permaculture will also serve as a useful set of ideas and principles, as will the field of ecological design more generally.

“These topics must be taken up prominently in the climate movement, which should aim to broaden it into a society-wide discussion.”

I couldn’t agree more!

Thank you for the comment James. Since the climate is not affected by anyone’s sense of optimism or pessimism, what matters is how our disposition affects our engagement with the issue. If optimism leads to us taking action to build a sustainable society, then we should be optimistic. Seemingly insurmountable power systems have been overcome in the past, sometimes in a rapid way that no one could predict, thus we cannot definitively say what tomorrow brings. For those who cannot muster optimism, then try to act despite your pessimism–Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

The carbon budget concept doesn’t imply that we should continue emitting carbon, but rather highlights the need to reduce it towards zero at a rapid rate. It provides a framework for understanding our task and helping to measure progress. I agree that 2C warming is not safe and shouldn’t be regarded as a better target than 1.5C, for example–Kevin Anderson has pointed out that 2C warming should be understood as the threshold between dangerous and extremely dangerous climate change. But a suggested warming limit means little without a feasibility analysis, which is complex and should be subject to a host of considerations and democratic deliberation. If climate change was our only problem, then we should reduce emissions as fast as possible. A major issue is that various other obstacles or considerations suggest that we’ll need to moderate our decarbonization rate, including “energy trap” problems discussed by energy analysts and the fact that societies are currently organized and provisioned with fossil fuels, which means significant social harm may result if new provisioning systems aren’t simultaneously put in place. How fast can we decarbonize? How fast should we decarbonize? These topics must be taken up prominently in the climate movement, which should aim to broaden it into a society-wide discussion.

In reality, 2 C warming is catastrophic, as we see by taking note of the positive feedback loops already kicking in at about 1 C above pre-industrial atmospheric CO2. So the notion of a “carbon budget” is as much in the rear view mirror as is the notion that we can avert a prolonged recession (a.k.a., depression), or somehow maintain something like the industrial civilization we now have.

The only way to salvage anything at all would be to swiftly de-industrialize, but not back to the stone age. We can have some of the benefits of the industrial epoch, but with a vastly smaller total energy throughput. And that means that we should look to ecovillage type and scaled de-urbanization (re-ruralization), neo-agrarianism, permaculture, bioregionalism… and that sort of thing for inspiration on how to get there.

The personal/private automobile and frequent jet travel will have to go immediately — and I include electric cars for reasons I can detail. Let’s toss the worst culprits out ASAP, by which I mean our energy-consuming devices and habits–the worst of them.

There will not be industrial civilization as we know it in 20 years, by any scenario. Our best hope is to reduce industrial processes and energy consumption dramatically and swiftly.