Under a White Sky

Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert

The End of Nature is one of the most poignant books I’ve ever read. Throughout the book, Bill McKibben demonstrates that there is absolutely no place we can go that has not been altered, probably irretrievably so, by modern humanity. No matter how protected or remote it is, we have altered the chemical make up of the air, soil, and water through our massive industrial project. With climate change this is even more evident, as we have changed the entire climate and weather systems of the globe. Each year we hear more of this, from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the absence of ‘quiet’ in the world, and the spread of microplastics to every spot on the globe.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s newest book, Under a White Sky, takes on examples of the many ways humans have altered the environment, intentionally or not, and the ways we are now trying to fix it – although we may not be able to predict the consequences. The book covers numerous examples of this, with all of them leading to the most massive and visible ways we could change the climate, through geoengineering projects.

Kolbert’s book is a fascinating exploration of how we have changed the world dramatically and then go about trying to save it. She examines the ways that we had altered the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, and how we now need to alter it further to stop the spread of invasive species such as Asian carp. When Chicago was a growing metropolis the Chicago river was thick with sewage. We built a new drainage canal and rerouted the sewage, changing the watersheds and creating a connection where there never was one before. Now we need fish barriers and electrocuted water to stop species from spreading between the two. We also need barriers to ensure other domestic fish don’t get into the electrocuted water. It was one of only many times in the book I considered this Simpsons clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY

Other entries deal with how to preserve species that we are driving through extinction. Some through relatively well-understood, if ambitious processes. Going from pond to pond in Devil’s Hole to gather pupfish, for instance, trying to breed hardier coral reefs and thinking of ways to shade and protect the Great Barrier Reef from heat induced bleaching events. (Although even then the highly acidic ocean water will be a problem.) These are testimonies to what some of us will do to save other species, even if we can never truly preserve what we’re destroying. With Styrofoam breeding shelves and climate controlled indoor pools, we have only a poor simulacrum of pupfish habitat. With the Great Barrier Reef, as Kolbert points out, to save a mere one-tenth of it we will have to shade, protect, and reseed with hardy coral species an area the size of Switzerland.

These technologies in themselves are experimental and no one knows exactly what the result would be – can we actually recreate a reef by crossbreeding new species? But from here we move to the truly unknown. Genetically engineering not only for agriculture but for control of nature. Kolbert begins with an anecdote that made me squirm, of sending away for a genetic engineering kit from Odin and creating drug-resistant E. coli  in her kitchen. CRISPR has revolutionized what we think might be possible with genetic engineering and we now have the capability to think of engineering into a species its own self-destruction – such as with Anopheles mosquitos – or minimizing what makes them such a threat, a project currently underway with cane toads in Australia. What is actually quite terrifying to think of here is what really happens when all of this gets out into nature. It’s hard enough to limit the spread of genes in our highly controlled agricultural environment. And every day we learn so much more about how there is interaction between the genes of different species – hell, of different kingdoms of life. What are we unleashing into the world?

And then, of course, we come to geoengineering. The ways to fight climate change with geoengineering also run the gamut. Some of them, such as carbon sequestration, seem an engineering and financial challenge but not necessarily destructive in any new and terrifying way. Simply put, the idea is that need to scrub carbon from the atmosphere and then store it somewhere. This could be done through planting billions to a trillion trees and then cutting them down, storing the carbon, and starting the process over again, or by either capturing emissions at their source or scrubbing them from the atmosphere and then storing the carbon somewhere. Unfortunately, Kolbert’s tour of a carbon-intensive greenhouse not withstanding, the only current funding for CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) right now is to use it for enhanced oil recovery, which doesn’t seem to be much long term help. Alas, we just don’t drink enough soft drinks.

The experts and engineers Kolbert interviews address some of the moral concern over CCS, namely the argument that if we think there’s a way out without changing anything no one will invest in clean energy and decreasing our emissions. Sadly, I agree with the perspective presented here that it’s too late for that sort of concern. I did feel that investing in CCS was a distraction and excuse 20 years ago; now we’re in a desperate situation and there’s no way to avoid going over 2C without removing carbon from the atmosphere. Carbon doesn’t disappear immediately, after all, so anything less than zero emissions means that the amount of CO2 will increase for several years. No, the problem is one of money and space – it’s hard to see how we could ever have enough removal on a practical level to offset our emissions. I’m all for planting One Trillion Trees, but it would take an area the size of the continental United States + Alaska to do so, and we’d need to stop deforestation immediately. And even that can only capture ¼-1/3 of all of our emissions so far over their lifetime. Trees live a long time. The other technology she mentions is either injecting carbon into basalt formations where the carbon becomes stone, or spreading crushed basalt to absorb carbon. Sounds great but again, to remove one billion tons of carbon would take three billion tons of crushed basalt. Kolbert contrasts this with the 8 billion tons of coal we mine and ship each year; she does not contrast it with the 43 billion tons of CO2 we currently emit. I don’t say this to discourage us from trying everything to lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, just to share how exceedingly pessimistic I am that anything other than massive change in energy production and how we live today will save us from an extra 20 feet of sea level rise.

Then we get into the real geoengineering technologies, the ones that frighten me. Shooting aerosols into the sky, for instance, to mimic particles from a volcano, increase reflectivity, and decrease the temperature. This massive-scale engineering is terrifyingly irresponsible and won’t solve all the problems of global warming. Those who are working on it stress the unthinkable catastrophe that would be 4-5C temperature rise (in the realm of possibility), or even a ‘mere’ 3C. And I agree with that. But as Kolbert points out, one of the challenges with this is that it would be, of course, massively expensive – far more expensive than just halting fossil fuel subsidies – and that if we ever stopped spraying particulates into the air all the warming would happen at once. Each time we spray it is a very short term solution. There is the question of what an increase in microparticles would do to the air. There is the fact that we don’t know exactly how much this would decrease temperatures or what this massive addition would be to our weather patterns, but it seems unlikely it would have no effect. And there is the fact that such incredibly high levels of carbon are destabilizing in and of themselves. The die offs of coral are partly from heat induced bleaching, but part of the disruption of reef and ocean ecosystems is that calcium carbonate can’t be formed in acidic oceans. Which means no reefs and no shell fish.

Kolbert seems to be wrestling with what to think of these projects. She wrote The Sixth Extinction; she has borne witness to the destruction we have wrought; she knows the threats of global warming and the need to do something. She also knows how much damage humans have done in the need to do something. She raises this uneven track record with David Keith, one of the physicists working on injecting reflective particles, and he says that is her own bias showing. As an example he mentions that people brought in a beetle to deal with tamarisk, an invasive species in the American Southwest that seems to be doing well. It’s a shame Kolbert didn’t dig into this offhand comment further because the beetle is now threatening nesting habits of endangered native birds.

What’s really depressing, though, is that in some cases the easiest thing really would be to just stop making the problem worse. Kolbert shares some examples of the potential negative impacts of gene editing and that sometimes the best thing is to do nothing. This is true, and something our species is bad at. But in terms of global warming in particular the right answer is to do less: drill less, build less, drive less, and have less. Rather than turning the sky white with particulates, we could have less stuff, use more public transportation, stop fossil fuel transportation. We would have to rethink much of society, yes, but it wouldn’t be impossible. Let us hope for and work for a world where biking more and having a slightly smaller house isn’t more unthinkable than changing the color of the sky.

This Changes Everything

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, by Naomi Klein

The problem with Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything is that, from my reading of this book, the slow motion apocalypse that is the climate change crisis does not, in fact, seem to change anything. Instead, it’s just another environmental crisis with the same solutions—the stuff we’re doing is bad, businesses are bad, indigenous ways of life have much to teach us—that I have seen in environmental books my entire life.

To be clear, I agree with that assessment wholeheartedly. We are destroying the earth, oil companies are knowingly leading to a civilization threatening catastrophe, and indigenous and other traditional ways of life are probably very useful for our consideration. And it’s not as if Naomi Klein entirely paints it as just another crisis. She talks about the climate despair she felt which many of us are going through, and learning to sit with it. She goes into some of the tragedies of the climate crisis. She emphasizes that Nauru will be gone. It’s just that, surprisingly, while she says the whole thing is bad, I never got the sense of urgency I was looking from her condemnations or her prescriptions. In many ways I didn’t think this book was up to scale.

What I learned here was the Deepwater Horizon spill was terrible, and that the Alberta tar sands are destroying the regional environment. I learned of how oil companies have exploited indigenous communities and communities of color. I learned that extractive industries, often with state support, destroy the land with no long term thought, destroying species and cultures. But while all of this is awful, it is also what us environmentalists have been complaining about forever. It is localized destruction, localized tragedy, and could, in theory, all be fixed by being more conscientious.* What makes climate change unique is that it is something that is happening to everyone and everything everywhere. There is no clean up to be done; there is no localized destruction; there is no one industry at fault. ^ǂ Rather, it is our entire way of life that is at fault, and it is threatening everything. A few hundred birds dying on a tailings pond is tragic. Half of the bird species in the Americas going extinct from climate change is ecocide.

Published in 2014, This Changes Everything did come out before some of the most distressing news of the last few years. The IPCC report highlighting the difference between 1.5C and 2.0C came out in 2018, as did The Uninhabitable Earth, a truly astounding and terrifying read. It came out before Hurricane Harvey; it came out before the heat waves that literally melted the roads in India; it came out before a weather station in the arctic circle measured 94F for the first time ever and the tundra started burning. But 2014 was still well into when we realized how serious climate change was and how much of an effect it was having. 2014 is the year The Sixth Extinction came out, based on research and observations of the previous decades. It is after the 4^th IPCC report came out (2007) and after Super Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines killing 6300 people (2013). It is after the first of the now-regular deadly heat waves hit Europe (2003) killing up to 30,000 people across the continent. And so while day of life in the Anthropocene brings more evidence, more fear, more calm reports from scientists cataloguing the end of life as we know it , 2014 was well into the time when we knew what we were up against.

This should be something that is up Klein’s alley. She is well equipped to explain terrible and terrifying situations and how we got there. I remember reading No Logo and feeling as if eyes had been opened. The Shock Doctrine is still an essential books, explaining in detail the way neoliberal programs have been pushed forward without warning, and well worth reading to understand the current state of the United States and Britain. What is most fascinating about both of those books is how adept Klein is at pulling back the curtain and showing the pieces of policy that we don’t often pay attention to and how they rule our lives. Small process decisions; technocratic courts; provisions in bilateral agreements. These are the details that even many of us highly politically engaged people in democratic countries don’t think about, and are all but invisible to those in countries struggling with governance, freedom of information, or meeting their daily needs. It is the fine print that then comes in to play and we realize we are locked into a system no one wanted.

It is in this area that Klein was most interesting in This Changes Everything as well. I had read other works on trade and the undemocratic trade courts, but am always surprised how much power they can have over local jurisdictions. Klein lays out how one promising bill to increase solar and renewable production in Ontario was cut short because the renewable standard included rules around local jobs and local production; the trade courts ruled this was illegal interference. Canada is not always the hero, though. They threated to sue under NAFTA guidelines if the United States halted the Keystone XL pipeline. But this chapter was far too limited in scope, in my view. While this is probably new to many readers, many of the struggles she detailed around oil fights in Nigeria, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or the tar sands in Canada, are either well known in environmental readings or similar to the stories we might hear elsewhere.

And it is surprising to see how this book fell short because it seems the climate crisis is well poised for a Shock Doctrine style analysis. We are currently in the desperate situation where we cannot have gradual change. She devotes a chapter to geoengineering but doesn’t delve into the process analysis I was expecting. That perhaps a part of the hope of current companies is that the crisis will get to the point where there really will be no choice but to use geoengineering, something for which the companies will be well compensated. Or where expanding nuclear is the only way forward. Something, anything, other than the obvious and easiest solutions –use less, have more off grid and community owned power, and use renewables where the fuel cannot be bought and sold.

What I was expecting from this book was more process, more analysis, and, crucially, more vision. Because the fact is that this actually does change everything. We are currently in a world where over one foot of sea level rise is almost guaranteed. If we are very lucky and make all the changes we need right away we can see that in 70 years instead of 20-30. This keeps me up and night. I play with the NOAA sea level calculator at least three times a week looking at the places that will be under water, including many of my favorite places from growing up in Florida, and try not to think too hard about the entire countries and cultures who will be wiped off the map, mini-Atlantises all of them.

We must change our energy usage rapidly. And beyond that our usage of everything. Renewables have gotten to the point where they can power us, yes, but the infrastructure is not there yet. While renewables are scaling up we will need to rapidly decrease our electricity usage. We will need to invest heavily in ways to drawdown carbon, which, at current technology, primarily means protecting wide swaths of nature, switching our building materials, planting one trillion trees, and growing our crops and gardens and landscapes differently. It will almost definitely mean less of Earth devoted to our use, different ways of transportation, a shift away from all of us having so much, and with that, a shift away from an economic model predicated on unlimited growth. And for those of us who have enough, the shift needs to be incredibly rapid so that those who are still struggling to get by have a bit more room to get enough calories and medicine and lights in their hospitals.

And so what we need now is vision. We need to think about what this new world looks like and how we get there. And we need to start considering where we have been to get there. I am greatly in support of old traditions, but that may be too far back. What did our society look like before the current modern world? It’s not that this doesn’t happen, and that there aren’t thinkers. Many of the economists considering inequality are thinking of this in creative ways. One of my favorite books, Deep Economy, by Klein’s colleague and 350.org director, Bill McKibben, is incredibly thoughtful on the how and the way of changing our way of life and even books like Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism take into consideration other ways of governing ourselves and the globe, systems that were around a mere fifty years ago.

The fact is that we need to deeply, completely, internalize the fact that this is an existential crisis for all. Every last person on earth. We are facing constant climate disasters. Over one billion refugees. Small island nations, entire cultures, and many of the world’s largest cities disappearing below the waves. Food crises as agriculture and harvests become unpredictable and fisheries collapse. None of us know for certain what the new world will look like, but it is terrifying. We have let it go on too long for a gentle change. We need to change everything, we need to change dramatically and we need to change now. And that cannot happen unless we have more people devoted to thinking and talking about what that looks like and what that means, not just what we have to leave but where we are going. Or we will never achieve the world we want, and need, to see.

*I stress the “in theory” part. The companies are never more conscientious, and bankruptcy is always waiting if too much money is needed for clean up or complying with the law.

^ǂ Although, yeah, the fossil fuel companies are probably the worst.