green vs. ecological economics

So the current economic model is growth-based, hence unsustainable, and consequently in need of revision. But why push the revisions to the opposite extreme? Why not stop at a halfway point such as the green economy? Why go to all the way to an ecological economics model? Wouldn't that throw out the baby with the bathwater? Can we not compromise? R. Costanza, in the 2013 State of the World Report, p. 127, explains the different roles of government: in the current economic system,

government intervention [is] to be minimized and replaced with private and market institutions; 

in a green economy, there is

recognition of the need for government intervention to internalize natural capital; 

and in ecological economics,

government plays a central role, including new functions as referee, facilitator, and broker in a new suite of common-asset institutions.

So a green economy is still capitalism, but with less freedom and more regulation than before, whereas an ecological economy, by the Costanza et al. definition, is a post-capitalistic model. It's a type of planned economy, a centralized system with a tightly regulated market and a state whose priorities are those of sustainable democratic socialism. In Naomi Klein's words (the title of chapter 4 of her 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate): "planning and banning--slapping the invisible hand."

That sounds like old-style communism, but there's a simple difference. The planned economies of real existing socialism in the past century were growth-based economies, just like their capitalistic counterparts. In both capitalism and communism, growth was a structural feature; in capitalism, it's a byproduct of market dynamics, and in communism, it was built into the five-year plans geared towards productivity enhancements. By contrast, the ecological economics model is something new: it's a steady-state economy, geared to maintain stability without the need for growth.

By the same token, this distinguishes ecological economics from the 21st century version of communist economics, China's current economic system, which Americans call 'state capitalism,' but which is technically speaking Leninist economics. Deng Xiao-Ping, China's leader and the creator of this economic system after Mao's death, was schooled in Moscow during Lenin's New Economic Policy era. The New Economic Policy (NEP) from 1918 to 1924 was a blend of government dictates and market opportunities. This was quite unlike the later Stalinist collectivization that became the standard of a planned economy in the USSR and in the PRChina under Mao. However, the Leninist design of China's present-day state capitalism remains a growth-based economy. Ecological economics is in a different category.

Here's a visual primer on ecological economics vis-a-vis the green economy and the current capitalistic economy, from Constanza's Report to the United Nations for the 2012 Rio+20 Conference on Building a Sustainable and Desirable Economy-in-Society-in-Nature.

This is the theoretical background for Naomi Klein's work, to which I'll turn in the next post.

Jeffrey Sachs on growth

Sachs' remarks on growth are a mix of good and bad in need of differentiation, hence this postscript. Let's start with the climate quote at the end of the last post. Good is Sachs' recognition that "markets alone ... will not carry us to safety." But bad about Economics for a Crowded Planet is that there is no serious engagement with economic growth as a problem. Sachs is an old-school developmentalist--development is good, growth is better, and even a mature technology-based economy should not spell the end of growth. Indeed, long-term economic growth, nudged along by government intervention in markets, remains the ultimate invariant goal for him (cf. 211-212).

This conclusion is contradicted by research from the likes of Assadourian, Alperovitz, Costanza, Daly, and other ecological economists. According to the critics, systemic change is unavoidable, while Sachs, and the establishment that celebrates his work, contend that political and technological change alone will suffice. Both sides agree that change is needed. But the critics insist there must be a paradigm shift, while Sachs hopes we can get by with tweaking the system a bit. I fear the planetary boundaries will dash this hope. So the reason why Sachs ranks last on the list is that he fails to recognize the need to get out of the economic-growth paradigm.

At the same time--hence the need for differentiation--he does clearly recognize the need to get out of the demographic growth paradigm. "Completing the Demographic Transition," chapter 8 of Crowded Planet, makes a frank case that population growth is for losers, that zero growth is the way to go, and that the worries over the costs of an aging population, with fewer workers and more retirees, are overblown (cf. 201). The presumed costs are exaggerated:

First, with slower population growth or even outright decline, society will not ned to invest in major infrastructure (roads, power, and the like) merely to keep up with poplation growth. This marks an enormous social saving. Second, it is likely that retirement ages will rise, probably with more flexible work times. We are, mercifully, not only living longer but living better, with more healthy life years. (201-202)

His critique of demographic growth is also ballsy: the section "The Bush Administration's War on Family Planning" (197ff.) doesn't mince words, and neither does the opening of the chapter. About the cuts in direct U.S. funding of family planning services in developmental aid, Sachs writes,

It's hard to think of a single more misguided policy; it runs directly against American interests in the reduction of conflict and terror, as well as against the support of economic development and environmental sustainability more generally." (181). 

Here's why:

The evidence ... is that a youth bulge significantly raises the likelihood of civil conflict, presumably by raising the ratio of those who would engage in violence relative to those who would mediate disputes. Most directly, unemployed young men become prime fodder for militias, raiding parties, terrorist groups, and armies. ... Three kinds of demographic stressors are related tothe likelihood of civil conflict: the youth bulge, the shortage of arable land per capita, and the rapid growth of urban areas. All, of course, are lreated to the persistence of high total fertility rates. (198-199)

Here and the preceding chapter, Sachs points to a phenomenon that has become a pattern: whereas the United States "played a major role in Bucharest [the first major intergovernmental conference on population in 1974], urging the widespread adoption of bold population programs" (179), American leadership collapsed with the rise of the religious right, whose disproportionate political might stymied any further American initiatives.

Obviously, the religious right would take offense at the peer-reviewed evidence Sachs presents and the logical conclusion he draws. Therein lies the problem: the shift to the right after 1980 yielded in the American Disenlightenment. Enlightenment, in its modern, western sense, refers to the respect for facts, the authority of the sciences, and the value of universal human rights. Disenlightenment, in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, meant a turn away from fact-based policies, contempt for scientific counsel, and embrace of values of the religious right.

On such values, in the context of female empowerment and the education of girls, Sachs makes a remark so terse it would make Nietzsche proud:

The cultural assumptions ... have developed under a set of demographic conditions ... that are no longer applicable. (187)

Ouch. That's the other reason, next to his gifted information-compression, why such an otherwise conventional thinker like Sachs still makes the list. A transformation of values is in the making because the material conditions that shaped the conservative value-set don't apply anymore. Rightwing values, from the political ('the manifest destiny-doctrine') to the social (the 'virtue of selfishness'-doctrine) to the religious (the monotheistic doctrines), all arose in a cultural context of a lack of material boundaries. But today, we're at the limit, and the challenge is to turn this into an opportunity for cultural evolution.

rank 5: Jeffrey Sachs

The top five intepreters with authoritative command or Deutungshoheit are all prolific authors, with many, many publications under their belts. For the sake of brevity I'll limit myself to one book per author. The environmental economist Jeffrey Sachs, number five, is the most conventional of the interpreters on the list. He has an Ivy League pedigree. He has been extraordinarily successful in the academic establishment. He is held in high esteem not only by progressives and environmentalists, but also among the middle-of-the-road folks. Sachs teaches at Columbia, where he holds the chair for Sustainable Development and serves as the director of the Earth Institute.

One reason he makes the list is because of his exemplary 'compression' of  information. If one had time to read only one of his books, then Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (London: Penguin 2009) should be it, in my opinion. Its fourteen chapters are 'Common challenges, common wealth,' 'Our crowded planet,' 'The anthropocene,' 'Global solutions to climate change,' 'Securing our water needs,' 'A home for all species,' 'Global population dynamics,' 'Completing the demographic transition,' 'The strategy of economic development,' 'Ending poverty traps,' 'Economic security in a changing world,' 'Rethinking foreign policy,' 'Achieving global goals,' and 'The power of one'. The goals Sachs refers to are the Millennium Goals of the United Nations.

Already the first chapter (p. 3-15) is a brilliant exercise in a total-field image. It powerfully compresses information. Normally, squeezing the facts down to their quintessential meaning risks resulting in trivialities and commonplaces, but the times we're living in are so interesting that Sachs can pull it all together and remain compellingly eloquent. For example, the opening sentence reads:

• The twenty-first century will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life. (p.3)

In the remainder, the following 'fact-squeezes' elaborate the opening statement:

• The defining challenge of the twenty-first century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. (p.3)
• Our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the practical means to achieve them. (4)
• The forging of nationwide commitments was [by 2015, this should probably be replaced by 'is'] hardest in societies like the United States, which are divided by race, religion, ethnicity, class, and the native born versus the immigrants. (5)
• The world can certainly save itself, but only if we recognize accurately the dangers that humanity confronts together. (5)
• Human pressures on the Earth's ecosystems and climate, unless mitigated substantially, will cause dangerous climate change, massive species extinctions, and the destruction of vital life-support functions. (6)

Later in the chapter, he pits the historic Peace Address (June 1963) by President Kennedy against "the Bush administration's unilateralism" (p. 11). In the middle of his speech, JFK remarks:

So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

Contrast this with Sachs' characterization of the Bush administration (loc. cit.):

The Bush's administration's unilateralism ... has deep roots in one facet of American foreign policy [i.e., "the reckless unilateralism of the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba," p. 10], but its crudeness and violence are unprecedented. Like the earlier excesses during the Cold War, the Bush administration's excesses are rooted in a perverse belief system in which American goodness can and must be defended against foreign evil by violent, covert, and dishonest means. Both the Cold War' and today's war against Islamic fundamentalism are born of a messianism that sees the world in black and white, and lacks the basic insight that all parts of the world, including the Islamic world, inhabit the same planet and breathe the same air. Indeed, as deeply ecologically stressed parts of the world, the Islamic drylands of the Sahel of Africa (just south of the Sahara), the Middle East, and Central Asia have a greater stake in international cooperation on the environmental challenges and extreme poverty than just about any other part of the world. Yet the United States has completely failed to recognize our common links with these regions, and instead has carried on an utterly destructive war on peoples and societies that we barely understand.

This is spot on. In 2006, my university dismantled the environmental studies department for ideological reasons and encouraged the green junior faculty to find employment elsewhere. As an academic, I went through this period and remember how close to fascism it veered. Most of my colleagues were not gutsy. Although the Bush-Cheney nightmare has passed, and although Obama ended the two wars the Republicans wilfully started, the failure of recognition of common links with the Islamic region--Sachs claim--still rings true. America remained too divided to conduct a war crimes trial and bring the warmongers and torturers to justice. The creation of the Africa command under Obama's watch, the drone war, and the expansion of semi-covert US military activities in the Sahel and environs have only intensified the fundamentalism there. In the chapter on foreign policy, Sachs writes (p. 271):

The United States is on the wrong track in foreign policy and is thereby endangering itself and the world. ... Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has failed to play a leadership role in global poverty, environmental and climate policy, energy policy, and global population change.

Regulatory capture by oil corporations prevents US leadership in climate and energy policy. Market dogmatism breeds social stratification and prevents leadership in global poverty eradication. Evangelical Christianity, with its doctrine of sexuality serving procreation in the sacrament of a heterosexual two-people marriage, prevents leadership in global population change.

And then there's climate change. Here's the opening passage of chapter 4 "Global Solutions to Climate Change," p. 83, written in 2008. Consider how much truth-value it has gained since then:

In recent years the Earth's climate has been buffeted by extremes. ... A consensu exist among scientists that these changes are human-induced, or anthropogenic. Anthropogenic climate change is the greatest of all environmental risks, since large-scale cliamte change would disrupt every ecosystem and impose catastrophic hardships on many parts of the world. The risks are growing markedly as we delay launching strong measures in response. The reason for hope is that powerful technologies will likely be available to enable us to mitigate the climate shocks at a very modest cost, much lower than the costs of inaction. But these technological opportunities will be small consolation if we keep closing our eyes to the dangers. Markets alone, on a business-as-usual path, will not carry us to safety.

The 'powerful technologies' are now implemented in the German Energiewende, so the future's here. In chapter 2, there's another perfect one-sentence 'compression' of the climate challenge:

Climate change will render large parts of the world unfit for agriculture unless we are able to mitigate the man-made climate trends as well as adapt successfully to them. (p. 29)

(Contined in next post)

deutungshoheit

What do you do in a postmodern age when a zillion opinions weaves a tapestry of voices threatening to drown out what's important? Well, you reassert the truth! Truth is the voice with the strongest evidence, the plainest facts, and the clearest logic. It is this perspective that rules over the others.

A German neologism comes to mind: it's Deutungshoheit; that's 'interpretation' (Deutung) plus 'highness' (Hoheit), as in 'your royal highness,' 'majesty,' or, figuratively speaking 'authority'. Deutungshoheit is the one perspective that rises above the tapestry, like the one ring to bind them all. It may not necessarily settle all the issues but essentially frames the debate.

The survey of big-picture perspectives that started with a systems-approach to sustainability and continued with the State of the World reports should be completed with the most authoritative readers of the crisis, with those interpreters who have Deutungshoheit. They're not necessarily climatologists, since holistic interpretation of information in the data fog depends on the art of synthesis more than on the rigors of analysis, and synthesis is an expertise all of its own. In the English-speaking world, Lester R. Brown would probably make the top of almost any such lists, or range very high on them, and he certainly tops mine. He's called an 'environmental analyst,' but this reflects a shortcoming of the English language--everybody understands what an analyst is, but the more appropriate word 'synthesist' remains obscure in this culture of cognition. Blame the Scottish Enlightenment. Anyway, Lester Brown is number one.

Next up are the eminent biologist and myrmecologist (ant-specialist) Edward O. Wilson. Places three and four of the Deutungshoheit list go to two social critics: Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein. On place five is the superb environmental economist Jeffrey B. Sachs. There's no place six, but honorable mention goes to the critic of surburbia, Jim Kunstler.

Each of the top five, from Brown to Sachs, consistently articulates commanding and well-informed viewpoints of the crisis. Also, each of them represents a primarily empirical viewpoint that's accordingly outside philosophy. But I think that the empirical cannot be marginal to the project of climate philosophy. Climate philosophy aspires to wisdom grounded in biospherical reality, which requires a de facto reliance on substantive interpretations of empirical information. So these viewpoints, albeit empirical, belong to the climate-philosophical groundwork. Each of them is laced with a good does of criticism. The critiques are quite different in each approach, but they're all driven by the same moral commitment, which is also part of the foundation of climate philosophy: the value of life; that is, the value of collective existential flourishing. Confronted with the way things are, it is other things that trump flourishing, and these other things boil down to capitalistic profiteering, market forces unleashed, and the drive for ever more expansion, development, and growth--all in the name of 'economic rationality'.

It doesn't take a philosopher to adopt an ethos of humanism and biophilia, to apply its values to the socio-economic matrix, and to articulate its biospherical implications. This ethos is the point of contact of interpreters with Deutungshoheit and climate philosophy. The synthesizers and climate philosophy accordingly relate in two ways, by a shared set of values, and by the former grounding the latter. A philosophical orientation in the crisis must proceed from the wisdom of the classics as much as from a grounding in facts. This empirical groundwork finds completion with synthesizers of information and critics of the status quo. In the next post I'll say more about my top five list of Deutungshoheit-interpretations. For now I close with the honorable mention: James H. Kunstler.

Jim Kunstler is, in many ways, an artist. He majored in theatre before turning to architecture and design and eventually becoming a writer. His 1994 The Geography of Nowhere is a superb indictment of American suburbia. Suburbia represents a flawed design, and the flaws are infrastructural inefficiency and anthropological soullessness. The former matters to the energy wastefulness of the suburban lifestyle, which, as Kunstler rightly recognizes, constitutes a structural vulnerability in the coming austerity. The latter is the result of the solipsism, autism, lonelines, and narcissism that define the radically individualistic and paradoxically uniform lifestyle of American suburbia. Kunstler pits suburban soullessness against what the Wikipedia entry on him calls his "small town ethos". Both flaws matter as indications of a vastly larger maladaptation whose biospherical symptom is the climate crisis. Unsettling about this maladaptation is that it is worst in the very society that stood for progress in the past century. What does this imply for a transformation to a sustainable future? And where will this leave the United States?

This cultural maladaptation moves front and center in Kunstler's fabulous 2005 The Long Emergency. Its subtitle nearly says it all: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Convergent Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Grove, 2006). Here's a quote (p. 187):

Under the banner of free-market globalism, the chief side effect of oligarchical corporatism making its money piles bigger was the systematic destruction of local economies and therefore local communities. Thus, the richest nation in the world in the early twenty-first century had becoming an amazing panorama of ruined towns and cities with broken institutions and demoralized populations--surrounded by Wal-Marts and Target stores.

Kunstler's perspective meshes with the 2014 State of the World theme of failing governance due to regulatory capture by corporate interests. Kristin Shrader-Frechette, in What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power (2011), raises an important question about the context of energy (and manages to use the word 'leadership' three times in the same breath, p. 246):

Why has the US allowed other nations--such as China, Denmark, and Germany--to make massive profits from their global leadership in renewable energy, while the US continues to lose this leadership by subsidizing outmoded technologies, like fission and petroleum, that provide no future economic leadership and no sustainable power?

Kunstler considers such questions rhetorical and doesn't mince any words in his conclusions. Here's a sample:

America's moment of being kicked to the curb by other nations is at hand.

This is fun but may be too rash an inference. The problem with Kunstler's intellectual angle can be summed up in one word: pessimism. Calling this a problem, on a blog called 'blistered orb,' whose former subtitle was 'notes on the coming Darwin award," may sound ludicrous, but let me explain. Of course there's ample reason to feel gloomy about the climate crisis. That's why it's called a crisis! But emphasizing the gravity of the situation we're in is not quite the same as being a pessimist. In Kunstler's case, this pessimism is of a political, cultural, and ethnic sort. It is of the sort that defines a conservative. Although he's far from being a Republican, Kunstler is like a Republican in his nostalgia for the 'good old times' of mostly white rural America. Against this I wish to pit a progressive attitude. Progressives, in the ideological, leftwing sense, are optimists by default. One doesn't have to go into the details of historical materialism, but the basic idea, in Marx, Engels, and elsewhere, is that it's no great loss that the past has passed, that the present is better anytime, and that the future holds the promise for even further improvements. Hence 'progress'. Kunstler is what they call a doomster instead.

Conservative pessimism doesn't fit into a progressive outlook--the only outlook compatible with environmentalism. There's also a racial and generational pessimism in his perspective. Kunstler shows little understanding of the sensibilities, energies, and creativity in non-white America. He doesn't get Afroamericans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and other minorities. He echoes rightwing sentiments in his repeated complaints about the lack of culture in Afroamericans, without giving any thought about the legal, material, and economic factors for the blight of Afroamerican communities. In this he sounds like a typical American rightwinger: the lack of the 'proper' values is to blame, but the lack of social security and the lack of equality before the law never catch his attention.

He doesn't get young people either (he only complains about their fashion and tattoos, which is simply beside the point). Befitting a cultural conservative, he doesn't get LGBTQ either. These are three limitations in his interpretive synthesis, and they're significant, for they show Kunstler still thinking inside the box. He's a great wordsmith, and The Long Emergency is a visionary piece of work, but in some sense he's the intellectual version of a cranky old white man. Too much pessimism, too little hope. Contra Kunstler, I say there's hope, and it lies with alternatives, the very ones he dismisses--the young, the non-WASP, and the non-breeders. This is why Kunstler fails to make the list. Yet his earlier critique of suburbia, his indictment of the automobile- and carbon-based infrastructure, and his lucid exposition of the links of American oil to misguided policies deserve an honorable mention.

state of the world II

Among the studies that evoke 'total-field' images in the State of the World-collection, two essays stand out in the 2014 volume: (1) the "Foreword" by David Orr and (2) "Failing Governance, Unsustainable Planet" by Michael Renner and Tom Prugh. Both max out at ten on the awesome-meter. Timely is their contention that resolving the eco-crisis requires a critique of the political economy. Naomi Klein points her finger at the free market ideology as the root of unsustainability, and she's right; it really is "Capitalism vs. the Climate," as the subtitle of her 2014 book has it, and indeed, This Changes Everything, as the  title goes. The two 2014 SotW studies supply data in support of this claim. For philosophy, this changes everything too, since the upshot of these data is that climate change is not just a moral problem, and that a climate ethics, while valuable in its own right, inevitably falls short. An appropriate philosophical response must be more comprehensive: it must transcend ethics and engage with epistemology, phenomenology, and progressive and comparative approaches. The crisis is a a structural problem of the economic foundation of global culture, demanding a structural solution. Cognitively, such a solution will only come into view when we look at the events more holistically and synthetically. In philosophy, the crisis changes everything in that wisdom transforms from an ancient aspiration and lofty ideal into mundane survival gear. And the free market ideology is just not wise.

The 2013 volume contains two texts that are equally exemplary in their synthesis of information. The one is a theoretical argument for ecological economics and a disavowal of both the current economic model and the shallow, too-timid 'green economy: (3) "Building a Sustainable and Desirable Economy-in-Society-in-Nature" by Robert Costanza, Gar Aplerovitz, Herman Daly, Juliet Schor and many other leading environmental economists. The other is a bold and lucid essay that concludes the volume, entitled with a deliberately misleading question: (4) "Is It Too Late?" by the fabulous Sci-Fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Just consider this quote (print edition p. 377):

We never hear the current global system described as scientific capitalism. Maybe this is because the phrase sounds a bit oxymoronic, these two power centers being vaguely understood to be at cross-purposes. In fact, modern history could be understood as a struggle betweeen these conjoined twins for primary control of humanity's affairs. One view of their fight could portray capitalism as attempting to buy science's efforts and direct them to reinforce capitalist ownership, while science could be seen as attempting to reduce human suffering, repair damage, and dismantle injustice, all by its particular method of discovering and manipulating the world. ... We could say that capitalism is the residual of the feudal system while science is what we named the emergent next system long before we recognized it as the post-capitalism it has been from its very beginning.

In the 2012 volume, (5) "The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries," by Eric Assadourian, is another total-field study. It ends with the following outlook (print ed. p. 37):

In the end, whether societal leaders accept it or not, the natural limits of Earth--brought into view by increasing numbers of a population of 7 billion striving to live as consumers--will shatter the myth of continued growth, most likely due to dramatic changes to the planet's systems. Thus degrowth is part of humanity's future. Will people pursue this agenda proactively? Or will Earth and its limits drive the contraction of the global economy?

In the 2011 volume, (6) "The Climate Crisis on our Plates," by Anna Lappe, is a succinct summary of the looming geopolitics of food insecurity. One terse conclusion (print ed. 95) is this:

If we are to continue to feed the planet--and feed it well--in the face of global climate chaos, we should be radically rethinking the industrial food system. We can start with what is on our plates.

Dealing with "the connection between productivity, hours, and ecological footprint," as a section title runs, the study (7) "Sustainable Work Schedules for All," by Juliet Schor, in the 2010 volume, is another heuristic step towards a comprehensive outlook. Challenging the high-gear pursuit of material affluence, the alternative suggested here is downshifting, and a word to remember, in this context, is time affluence. How this matters comes out in the 2009 volume aptly titled "Into a Warming World". For the purposes of a seminar in climate philosophy, the whole volume is useful, not only in terms of its individual studies, but also in terms of the terminology compiled and defined--an indispensable lexical tool for philosophers wishing to work and research in an interdisciplinary context. This tool is "Climate Change Reference Guide and Glossary" by Alice McKeown and Gary Gardner. The study, though, that connects the 2010 and 2009 volumes, is (8) "Shifting Values in Response to Climate Change," by Tim Kasser. A take-home quote (p. 124) from Kasser's essay is itself a quotation, from D. Rosnick's and M. Weisbrot's Are Shorter Work Hours Good for the Environment? A Comparison of U.S. and European Energy Consumption (Washington, DC: Center for Economic Policy and Research, 2006), p. 1:

If, by 2050, the world works as many hours as do Americans it could consume 15-30 percent more energy than it would following Europe. The additional carbon emissions could result in 1 to 2 degrees Celsius in extra global warming.

In this sense, climate change is ultimately a structural-cultural problem in need of a structural-cultural solution. Unless it will be forthcoming, we'd be dealing with what Christopher Flavin and Robert Engelman call, in their keynote essay of the 2009 volume, (9) "The Perfect Storm".

If I could add one more essay, to make it an even ten, from all the SotW volumes to date (excepting the just published 2015 volume), then I'd select (10) "The Acceleration of History," by Lester R. Brown, from the 1996 volume. The title is meant in reply to Francis Fukuyama's misguided Hegelian hope, so fashionable with the neocons at the turn of the millennium, that the so-called "free world" of free markets constitutes "The End of History". Oops, dude didn't factor in market failure of climate change! Brown's essay, by contrast, opens with a remark that, 20 years later, is truer then ever (p. 3):

The pace of change in our world is speeding up, accelerating to the point where it threatens to overwhelm the management capacity of political leaders. 

state of the world I

The State of the World reports are the flagship publications of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C. Founded by Lester R. Brown, and continued by Linda Starke, Eric Assadourian, Tom Prugh, Michael Renner and others, the SotW reports are in my view the best annual overviews of, well, the state of the world. Exemplary about these overviews is their consistent aspiration to synthesis and thus to the  methodological ideal that philosophical reflection on climate change needs to emulate. The SotW summaries proceed on a synthesis of empirical data guided by common sense. Philosophy of climate arises from the synthesis of empirical data, common sense, and the wisdom of the classics. Considering this, the continuously updated empirical summaries of the environmental studies are just as important as the systems approach in sustainability science in providing philosophy of climate a material platform. In the background of the philosophical articulation of this synthesis is Arne Naess's deep-ecological total-field image--the attempt to see the big picture of the energy flows among human beings, living beings, and the commons.

A seminar in climate philosophy would accordingly benefit from the State of the World summaries, and here I would like to suggest a selection. The SotW reports appear once every year, and each contains maybe 20 individual studies (21 in 2014, 34 in 2013, 17 in 2012, 15 in 2011, 26 in 2010, etc.). From the 1990s to the present--the 2015 volume has just come out (April)--there is quite a number of papers that suggest themselves. Making a narrow selection is not easy, especially since the articles are consistently of a high research quality. The criterion I use is, once again, synthesis. What follows in part II of this post is a list of the 'total-field image' articles, the 'big-picture'-studies that rigorously reflect the series title: the successive states of the world through the years.

Beginning with 2004, the SotW reports were topically arranged with a special focus each year. The focus for 2004 was the consumer society. For 2005, it was 'redefining global security'. In 2006, the focus was China & India. This was followed by 'our urban future' in 2007, 'innovations for a sustainable economy' in 2008, 'into a warming world' in 2009, 'transforming cultures from consumerism to sustainability' in 2010, 'innovations that nourish the planet' in 2011, and 'moving toward sustainable prosperity' in 2012. In 2013, the focus was a question: 'is sustainability still possible?' In 2014, the background for this question became evident; the volume's title is the neutral 'governing for sustainability,' but as soon as one opens the book, the tone darkens. The dedication to Lester Brown begins with a quote from his 2008 Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to save civilization:

We are in a race between tipping points in nature and our political systems.

The introduction, by project directors Michael Renner and Tom Prugh, is titled "failing governance, unsustainable planet," which kind of sums it up. Governance is failing through the regulatory capture by corporate interests, which has made the consistent implementation of sustainable policies to date largely impossible, especially in Anglophone countries such as the United States. The 2014 volume introduction, by David W. Orr, begins with the apt reminder that climate change is indeed the greatest market failure the world has ever seen--a market failure that persists by regulatory capture deepening into failing governance in liberal democracies enthralled by the dogma of market worship. To Brown's simile of a race, Orr adds that of a ship in a storm:

We are like a ship sailing into a storm and needing to trim sails, batten hatches, and jettison excess cargo. But how will we decide to do comparable things in the conduct of public business? (p. xxii) ... the twenty-first century and beyond is all-hands-on-deck time for humankind (p. xxiv). 

The solution to failing governance is not so much new agencies, but the cleansing of existing agencies from the corruption and ignorance that are particularly visible on the political right:

And this will require a rigorously enforced separation between money and the conduct of the public business. The struggle to separate money from policy making and law will, in time, come to be seen rather like historic battles against feudalism, monarchy, and slavery. (p. xxiii) 

All the evidence points to Orr being right. This will be the new liberation movement. But while past liberation movements largely served the goal of justice, this one will serve the goal of existence.

(to be continued in part II)

sustainability science

Delimiting limits, in the literal sense of locating them and respecting their locations, makes sense only in a systems approach. An example is the assimilative capacity of environmental services such as the carbon cycle. For a philosophical orientation in the historic boundary violation of the Earth System that is climate change, a survey of sustainability science is indispensable. Doing such a survey is also awesome, for it discloses a new dimension of how nature works. Unfortunately for civilization, comprehending this dimensional disclosure is going to be the IQ test of this century. While systems-information at present may still sound technical and abstract, it really needs to be processed to the point that it eventually becomes intuitive, otherwise civilization will not make it.

An excellent overview is the eponymous book Sustainability Science authored by Bert de Vries, who taught as Professor of Geosciences and Chair of Global Change and Energy at the University of Utrecht until 2013 (now emeritus).  Before joining Utrecht, he worked as a senior scientist at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). This agency is a superb outfit; it provides data sets for determining the comparative carbon footprints of sovereign nations (in annual, per capita, and cumulative terms). For my studies of the American Disenlightenment and Climate Change made in USA, the Netherlands government data have been really helpful.

Sustainability Science was published by Cambridge in 2013. For teaching a seminar in climate philosophy, this hefty tome of more than half a thousand pages would be overkill. But a selection of a few sections to get a class up to speed would be quite useful. The book strikes an exemplary transdisciplinary balance. Its bulk consists of straightforward descriptions and summaries of known information. Not everything is qualitative; there is the occasional integral-differential description of the changes sustainabilty science is concerned with, but the calculus is basic and mentioned in passing. The empirical information is often put in a philosophical context, and chapters tend to end on a poetic note, as with remarks or verses by Laozi 老子, Hölderlin, or Brecht. The whole thing is cutting edge. In the present situation, such rigorous and yet holistic, empirical and yet free-spirited work on sustainability can probably only be produced by European scientists.

For a climate philosophy seminar, I'd use material from seven chapters (out of fourteen):

Chapter 2 The System Dynamics Perspective explains stocks and flows, feedback loops, and the rules of systems dynamics modeling.

Chapter 4 The Great Acceleration is about the changes in the past three centuries, with regard to population, economic activity, and social culture. It's also about the source- and sink-sides of the accelerating impacts on the natural environment. Phenomenologically intriguing is the earth systems analysis classification into regimes, syndroms, and archetypes.

Chapter 5 Sustainability contains the definitions, concerns, and indicators of sustainability. It ends with a draft of a sustainable development indicator system that is quality-of-life oriented.

Chapter 9 Land and Nature has material on ecosystems dynamics, population ecology, stability and resilience of food webs, and catastrophic ecological change.

Chapter 10 Human Population and Behavior presents details on the driving forces of population dynamics and presents a critique of the homo economicus.

Chapter 13, Non-Renewable Resources: the Industrial Economy covers availability, exploration, and extraction; eleentary resource econoimcs,and the sink side of resource chains.

Finally, chapter 14 Towards a Sustainable Economy, while not the final chapter of the book (which is about future outlooks), comes down to the structural brass-tacks of the crisis: the causes and factors of economic growth, the source and sink constraints on the economy, and the conflict between economic growth and sustainable development.

If philosophers wish to contribute to the resolution of the crisis in ways that go beyond the moral exhortations and legal advice of climate ethicists, and also beyond the methodological reviews of philosophers of science interested in climatology, then engaging with this material collected in Sustainability Science is a must. All in all, this is a wonderfully informative and clearly written text, whose chapters give the reader a great way to get started in the systems approach to the natural environment and its limits.

Together with selections from annual State of the World collections compiled by the Washington, DC, World Watch Institute, I'd use pages from this book by Bert de Vries, as the empirical platform for teaching climate philosophy.

limits and systems theory

Recently the graduate students in the Philosophy Department organized a conference on the topic "delimiting limits".

The papers of this two day event were on gender, identity, and mind, and on topics in the history of philosophy, primarily Greek, French, and German. Materially, such topics concern culture, and formally, they are inward-oriented or centered on the self. They are either centered on philosophy itself, as philosophical reflections on past philosophers; or on the self itself and epistemic derivatives, such as truth; or on self-centered topics of culture, such as on violence and identity. The papers and discussions I attended were interesting and worthwile.

While the stated topic on limits was their delimitation; that is, how to demarcate or define limits, the conference was, in effect, less on demarcation and more about deconstruction. It makes sense to challenge limits in matters of culture or in the formal relation to the self. But the same cannot be said about limits when they are not inward-directed, but outward-directed instead; when the topics are are not centered on one's self, but rather oriented on what surrounds all human selves.

The Chinese word for 'environment,' huanjing 環境, is a composite of 'loop' or 'ring' 環 and 'border' or 'boundary' 境. The first loop constituting a boundary to the self is the body, of course. The second loop, which bounds all human selves (civilization or world culture), is material nature. The boundaries between the loops are permeable. Mental and physical conditions affect one another. Likewise, civilization and nature are linked by matter- and energy-flows. Inputs from nature to civilization are resources; outputs are artifacts, waste, and emissions.

Interesting about these outward-oriented or non-self-centered topics is that their kinds of limits are in an altogether different category. They are limits with a capital "L". The limits are of a material type; they are biological, chemical, or physical. They are not as flexible. They can be pushed a little bit, but not as far as culture-related limits, and in contrast to boundaries of personal, gender, and cultural identity, their structural lawfulness is not negotiable.

Right and wrong are turned upside down, too. Nietzsche rightly argues that it is an excellent idea to push cultural limits, as those of morality, identification,and convention. Naess is also right to make a similar point with the deep-ecological aspiration towards a Greater Self, quite literally an expansion of identification-limits. But as climatologists and environmental economists have been telling us, it is not an excellent idea to transgress material limits; in fact, doing just that is what has made civilization unsustainable. So the normative relation is the opposite: environmental limits deserve respect, and violate them is evil.

However, all of this makes sense only if the backdrop is a systems approach to the loops and limits of the environment. A good way to start is again with the civilization-nature boundaries. Think of them in structural and dynamic terms. Start with inputs, such as resource consumption. Instead of looking at resource consumption in terms of bulk, consider it as a material flow, specifically as the rate of flow. This works best with biotic resources. Ask yourself: what is the rate of the resource's renewal? What is the rate of the resource's recovery or exploitation? Does the exploitation rate exceed the renewal rate? If so, then the exploitation is unsustainable.

Even more compelling are environmental services. Here relate input and output. Take the carbon cycle and consider its assimilative rate, which is partly determined by carbon sinks such as oceans and forests. Compare this to the global carbon emissions rate per year. The following are rhetorical questions, of course, since we know the answers: does the assimilative capacity keep pace with emissions? Or is it being outpaced by the rate of emissions? If the latter, then with regard to this specific service, civilization is in overshoot.

The wonderfully profound aspect of these structures is that they are fixed. There is very little that's fluid here. For the most part such limits are physically absolute and geographically universal. The biophysical planetary environment houses global civilization just like the body envelops the spirit. And there is very little one can do about pushing the boundaries of the body. Yes, one can make an effort to stay healthy, of course, and take good care of oneself and one another but all such effort are again defined by physical constraints. Bodies are finite, and their biological parameters are fixed.

Delimiting these parameters, in the deconstructive-transgressive sense the word was used in the conference, is usually not a good idea. For the safe of collective flourishing, it's better (and safer) to stick to the original sense of delimitation: locate the limits and give their found location respect.

teaching climate philosophy

Teaching climate philosophy is a bit different from teaching climate- or environmental ethics. One could teach the latter two straight from a textbook with a set of readings. In environmental ethics, one could describe a sequence of positions and theories in animal ethics, biocentric ethics, the land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, and first nations perspectives. With some variations, this seems to be one standard template for course packages in environmental ethics.

In climate ethics, one could use some of the newer anthologies such as Climate Ethics, ed. by Gardiner, Caney, Jamieson, and Shue (Oxford 2010) or The Ethics of Global Climate Change edited by Arnold (Cambridge 2011). This could be supplemented with introductions such as Northcott's A Moral Climate: the Ethics of Global Warming (Orbis 2009) or Garvey's pioneering The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World (Continuum 2008).

On a more advanced level, say for a graduate seminar, one could use Gardiner's monograph A Perfect Moral Storm: the Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (2011). On a more basic level, his edited Climate Ethics (2010) works nicely because of its clear topical structure. An overview (a reprint of the excellent 2004 Ethics paper) is followed by several texts laying out "the nature of the problem," (with an excerpt from the Stern Report, among others), a set of papers on "global justice and future generations" (with classics by Parfit et al.), a set of papers on "policy responses to climate change" (with essays by Singer et al.), and a concluding pair of essays on "individual responsibility". This last part, which is a bit thin, could be paired the superb chapter on "responsibility" in Garvey (2008), and voilà, there's your course on climate ethics.

But climate philosophy is more complex. Its inquiry is not primarily ethical; instead it has a collective-existential orientation, comparing different cultural responses to the ecocrisis.  Instead of the straightforward legalistic-analytic approach in climate ethics, its methodology is critical, by engaging with the structural economic drivers of the overshoot (which are never questioned in analytic climate ethics). Its methodology is also synthetic (instead of merely analytic), by engaging with the systems-dimension of sustainability, which, to my mind, is an environmental game changer.

So I'd suggest the following sequence of topics for a seminar on climate philosophy: (1) introductory overview of sustainability science & climatology; (2) milestones in environmental ethics: the land ethic, ecofeminism, and deep ecology; (3) the new normativity of climate ethics; (4) questioning the capitalistic foundation: the four spikes, economic growth, and market failures; and (5) deconstructing normalcy: American disenlightenment vs. global alternatives, and (6) reconceptualizing progress: the fork in the road of the SRES scenarios, and civil evolution. To avoid that the discussion goes all over the place, the six topics are centered around a shared conceptual gravity well. This is the premise of climate philosophy that civilization's clash with planetary boundaries changes everything. The central topic is how to deal with limits that are absolute. And the central demand is to think outside the box.

climate philosophy platform

(Redrafted from 2014)

Philosophical reflection on climate change and the ecocrisis assumes three guises.  The oldest and broadest is environmental ethics.  Environmental ethics concerns questions of right and wrong about the human relationship to the natural environment. Climate change matters to environmental ethics as part of a larger whole, as expression and symptom of the ecocrisis.  Environmental ethics deals with its topic by applying mainstream ethical theory.  Yet it resists reduction to a normative application.  It is also a foundational extension of traditional, continental, and comparative approaches, namely those that concern the meaning of life, the interplay of humans and world, and the problem of culture.  Analytic and continental philosophers work in environmental ethics side by side; continental approaches seem to dominate.

The second type of philosophical reflection is climate ethics.  Its first publications are about twenty-five years old and hit its stride less than ten years ago.  Its roots go back to philosophy of law rather than to environmental ethics, and generally to analytic philosophy rather than continetal philosophy. The theoretical apparatus of the mainstream of this research program, or its analytic majority, has strong connections to British moral philosophy.  With regard to its subject, climate ethics is the opposite of environmental ethics.  Climate change matters as the context of the ecocrisis for environmental ethics, but the ecocrisis matters as the context of climate change for climate ethics.  If environmental ethicists are philosophers who reason like naturalists, then climate ethicists will be philosophers who think like lawyers and arbiters.

The third and newest type is climate philosophy. That's my stick, and I've published on this for the past five, six years. It's close to environmental ethics and climate ethics but also different from either. In one sense it is broader than either of them, because in climate philosophy questions of ethics take a backseat to questions of existence. Questions of existence are the four classic questions formulated by Kant (in Critique of Pure Reason and in Logic): What do or can we know? What should we do? What may we hope? And what does or shall it mean to be human? They shift the focus of climate-arelated inquiry to culture, its social structures, its ideological outlook, and its economic design. The focus is trained towards the future, in particular with regard to the socioeconomic shift (which I call civil evolution) implied by a successful re-adaptation to planetary boundaries and environmental services, such as the carbon cycle.

In another sense climate philosophy is more specific than either environmental ethics or climate ethics, but this may have to do with the fact that climate philosophy is a niche pursuit. (Things have a way of broadening out when research programs expand.) The specific feature is that it proceeds from the premise that conventional ways of reasoning are historically implicated in having brough the crisis about; that they are part of the problem, and unlikely to be part of the solution. In other words, the premise is that climate change signals an environmental threshold crossing that will usher in a paradigm shift. The normal ways aren't working anymore, and there's a reason why this is so. To philosophers, this constitutes an opportunity--and imposes a responsibility--to think outside the box.

New Posts Coming Soon!

climate reality check

Dust clouds from parched Australia are hit by rain over the sea

A new climate events post is at the Blistered Orb's data bank.
The information keeps hardening.  The weirding weather aligns with the simulations.  Global warming keeps pace with the bleakest scenarios.  Emissions growth puts us on track for a 4-5C temp rise by century's end.  In 2012, the U.S. has seen the hottest year ever, a record 2C above the past century's yearly averages.

Policywise, nothing is happening.  Obama dared to mention "climate change" in his State of the Union address, which made Republicans gasp with shock and Liberals cream their pants.  What audacity!  No decision-maker realizes that the climate crisis is dictating the terms of a cultural paradigm shift.  Folks here still think they can keep going as usual, with only slight adjustments.

The South Florida Tar Pit is so deeply in denial of climate reality that state politicians would never even think about discussing how to copy Japan's Hayabusa Shinkansen or Taiwan's city subway system, no; in fact they do not even think about adding on public bus lines.  Instead, around our neighborhood, the City of Tampa just added new highway lanes to deal with SUV congestion.  And while Governor Christ chips away at schools and universities, Senator Rubio declared last week that climate change "is not a proven fact".  One day, in the not-so-far-off future, the American Disenlightenment will be studied by teams of anthropologists, historians, and psychiatrists.  Be a witness of the present!

the accelerating melt II

(Continued from November post.)

Greenland photograph J E Waider via Colossal

 

Getting to this predictive clarity did not happen overnight.  The stages of knowledge are visible in the step-by-step understanding of the Arctic melt.  Go back forty years: when reviewing the technical literature from 1965 to 1979, T. C. Peterson (2008) counted seven predictions of global cooling and forty-two papers that predicted global warming, with a majority expecting higher temperatures through rising CO2 concentrations.  A majority vote is not a consensus, and so the 1975 National Research Council Report played it safe: 

We do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine ... it does not seem possible to predict climate. 

In the 1970s, the anthropogenic fate of the planet was still in doubt.  Too little was known about the future of the Arctic to make any clear forecasts.  This changed with the FAR or First Assessment Report, titled Climate Change: the IPCC Scientific Assessment, eds. J. T. Houghton et al.  During the 1980s, the 1970s majority had hardened into a consensus.  The FAR, published in 1990 by Cambridge, begins as follows (p. xi):

We are certain of the following: there is a natural greenhouse effect which already keeps the Earth warmer than it would otherwise be.  Emissions resulting from human activities ... will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in additional warming of the Earth's surface.

Experts understood the etiology but knew the consequences only in outline.  On the Arctic there was nothing concrete except the prediction that (p. xxiii),

Surface air will warm faster over land than over oceans, and a minimum of warming will occur around Antarctica and in the northern North Atlantic region.

This turned out to be two thirds right: yes, there has been more warming over land than over water, and yes again, there hasn't been much warming in Antarctica, relatively speaking; but no, the northern North Atlantic region--the Arctic--has warmed up way faster than any other place on the planet.  There had not been a "minimum of warming" up north.  Rather, what happened since then, compared to other regions, has been a maximum of warming.  Five years later, at any rate, the predictions sharpened again a notch.  The authors of the SAR or Climate Change 1995: IPCC Second Assessment Report state on p. 5-6 (section 2.10), 

All model simulations ... show ... a maximum surface warming in high northern latitudes in winter, little surface warming over the Arctic in summer; an enhanced global mean hydrological cycle, and increased precipitation and soil moisture in high latitudes in winter.

So the difference between winter and summer warming in the Arctic came into view then, but not yet the fact that even the Arctic summer temperatures would see surreal heat spikes.  On p. 30 (section 'cryosphere'), the SAR authors write,  "Models project that between one-third and one-half of existing mountain glacier mass could disappear over the next 100 years" and "Reduced sea-ice extent and thickness ... may increase navigability in the Arctic Ocean."  Knowledge had evolved to the forecast that it will get warmer in the Arctic, sea ice will thin, and glaciers will shrink.  Precisely when this would play out was still unclear. 

In the TAR, the Climate Change 2001: IPCC Third Assessment Report, more details emerged. In  the "Technical Summary of the Working Group I report" in Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, J. T. Houghton, Y. Ding et al, eds. (Cambridge 2001), we find the following statement (p. 73-74, section F.8):

Glaciers and ice caps will continue their widespread retreat during the 21st century and Northern Hemisphere snow cover and sea ice are projected to decrease further ... The Antarctic ice sheet is likely to gain mass because of greater precipitation, while the Greenland ice sheet is likely to lose mass because the increase in runoff will exceed the precipitation increase.

This is almost the same as in the SAR, but with two differences: spatially, experts could now differentiate among sections within the polar regions (Greenland in the Arctic; on p. 74 follows a discussion on the future of the West Antarctic ice sheet in Antarctica), and temporally, the changes were now predicted to unfold in the next hundred years.  Half a decade later, in the AR4, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007, the fate of the Arctic sea ice at last came into view.  The Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, R. K. Pachauri and A. Reisinger, eds., includes the following statement (p. 46, section 3.2.2.):

Snow cover area is projected to contract. Widespread increases in thaw depth are projected over most permafrost regions.Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarcticunder all SRES  scenarios. In some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century.

The "latter part" of this century would be sometime between 2050 and 2100; by 2007, the specter of a complete polar summer melt well inside this century began to loom.  Again fast forward six years, and compare this to the leaked draft of AR5, the "Technical Summary" (99 pp.) of the IPCC WGI [Working Group 1] Fifth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2013 The Physical Science Basis, to be published September 2013.  On p. 42 (section 5.3.1.6), the accelerating melt is in plain view:

It is very likely that there will be continued near-term loss of sea ice in the Arctic, decreases of snow cover, and reductions of permafrost at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere ... Based on an assessment of a subset of models that more closely reproduce recent observed trends, a nearly ice-free Arctic in late summer before 2050 is a very distinct possibility, even though later dates cannot be excluded.

Unless the IPCC folks revise the draft again (which is unlikely given the record melts in the past few years), the prediction draws the specter of an ice-free Arctic from the later half into the earlier half of this century.  In sum, then, as troubling as these successive scenarios evidently are, they represent a stunning advance in knowledge.  Humankind has become capable of predicting the planetary future, and as the step-by-step progression of predictions since the 1970s illustrates, the future is coming into view in ever sharper outline.  Two considerations, in conclusion, should be kept in mind.  The one is that that the IPCC assessment methodology favors conservative projections (cf. Scherer at Climate Central Dec 2012, and Brysse/Oreskes in Glob Envir Change Nov 2012).  And the other, finally, is that some researchers expect an ice-free Arctic even earlier, not as a 'distinct possibility' but as the most probable outcomes, before 2050 (Stroeve, Geoph Res Let May 2007), before 2040 (Allison, Univ NSW CCRC 2009), or before 2020 (e.g. Wadhams, POPG Cambridge 2012).

the accelerating melt I

Adam Gibbs photograph via Colossal Nov 2012

The collision with biospherical limits points to the inspiring paradox of the climate crisis: it forces us to grow up.  As the Earth's limits are pushing civilization to a new adaptation, whose social core will be sustainability and degrowth, the crisis turns into an evolutionary opportunity.  Just think: unless we go bust, which I don't believe, the greenest nations will soon harbor the most successful societies.

Before the crisis, science concerned itself with the past and the present.  The future was accessible only in narrow and context-invariant senses, as in the decay of radioactive elements or the movements of planets on their orbital paths.  Through the crisis, the future in all of its contextual complexity, the future of life, for generations to come, has become an object of rigorous study.  The outcome of the crisis is that we can predict things now.  Climate change lets humanity look deep into tomorrow's probability-cone and see the fateful forks looming within.

It is natural to ward these prospects off, to feel overwhelmed by the flood of facts as "too much information".  But the irony of denial is that it invites a Darwin Award.  If civilization followed a regressive Republican path, the track of denial, the global temperature rise would reduce carrying capacity to the point of dieback.  G. P. Peters et al. note in Nature Climate Change that,

observed emission trends are in line with ... the highest temperature projections in the scenarios, with a mean temperature increase of 4.2-5 C in 2100. 

Peters adds that the Representative Concentration Pathways used in the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report are even more compelling than the old emission scenarios of the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES, 2000), because now "mitigation efforts consistent with long-term policy objectives are included among the pathways."

What choosing the regressive path means is detailed by H. J. Schnellnhuber and his colleagues at PIK in the recent World Bank report Turn down the Heat.  One detail (p. 61) shall suffice: for U.S. corn, soy, and cotton production, 

yields are projected to decrease by 63 to 82 percent.

But there's an alternative: if civilization chose a progressive path, we would be able to stay within the +2 C boundary and our children would be fine. This path is progressive in the classical sense, as a path along Kantian, Marxist, and Deep Ecological coordinates; it seems it would have to be so, because it is unclear how one will manage to keep within the safe boundary any differently.  The best-case scenario of the IPCC, the SRES B1 storyline in the Fourth Assessment Report, describes the way stations along the progressive path: 

A convergent world ... with rapid change ... toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity ... the introduction of clean and resource-efficient technologies [and an] emphasis ... on global solutions. 

The choice is each society's own to make.  This choice between progress and regress used to be a matter of social justice, a decision between protecting the vulnerable and favoring the privileged.  But accelerating climate change makes this a choice between civil evolution and winning a Darwin Award.

(Part II to be posted Dec 31)

the american climate silence

superstorm Sandy NASA pic via Colossal

Want to know more? Check it out at climatesilence.org.

Studying the cultural dimension of climate change puts you in a strange spot.  On the one hand, one studies something that's bad.  The root-cause of climate change is a disconnect from reality.  Anthropogenic climate change has thus a cultural dimension, and it consists in a willful collective maladaptation to biospherical structures.  This maladaptation is noticeable in nearly all cultures on the planet at present, but it is worst in the United States--the greatest national per capita GHG emitter with the least climate policy on the planet. This turns us into the greatest jerks in the history of civilization, into thieves stealing the future from the world's children.  And that's bad.

On the other hand, when studying this cultural dimension, I try to connect the dots into status reports of the present with their historical roots and their prospective branches.  Which means I make up stuff--and claim this making-up-of-stuff as a rational and methodological right in Philosophy, for Philosophy is not and never should be reducible to Science.  The risk, though, one runs with such imaginative dot-connecting is that one's sketches are not only sketchy (which is perfectly good, and which is what they're actually supposed to be), but also flat-out wrong (not so good).  In light of the climate crisis, I maintain that one can, No, one should speak of an American Disenlightenment, and that it deserves to be studied just as we study the European Enlightenment of the 18th century.  But since the 21st century is ongoing, its events are fluid; things may happen that might just turn US climate denial into a fleeting aberration.  That would be good from the perspective of world civilization and Mother Nature, but, frankly, it would be bad for me.  Because I study it.

My "Amerigenic Climate Change--an Indictment of Normalcy" is in a 2012 textbook, B Williston's Environmental Ethics for Canadians, published by Oxford in Toronto, and there I stick my neck out by claiming American mainstream culture is different from the rest of the world on four counts: first, it's really religious, in an evangelist worship of the baby Jesus way; second, it's really capitalist, in a  corporations-are-people-too worship of the Adam Smith way; third, it's really individualist, in a liberty-and-independence-and-screw-you-too worship of the Ayn Rand way; and fourth, it's also really skepticist, in an if-it-doesn't-stare-me-in-the-face-it-must-be-false worship of the David Hume way.  Years ago I came up with this idea, the American square of flawed cognition, and I've kept working with it.

So imagine my relief at seeing the Romney-Ryan ticket.  This is the perfect embodiment of the Disenlightenment: the one a former sidewalk-evangelist, who as a kid accosted people in France telling them to lay off coffee and wine for the sake of Jesus, and who was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and moved up in the Adam Smith world with the skills of Gordon Gecko in Wallstreet and the rage of Richard Gere in Pretty Woman--and the other a hard-rocking, iron-pumping fan of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.  And both of them dismiss climate change like David Hume once dismissed causal powers.

It gets better.  The other camp in the 2012 US presidential race, the Obama-Biden ticket, and the only one that is not in climate denial and that represents at least the faintest of hopes that the US will eventually catch up with other developed nations on the planet and implement a climate policy, has also been silent about climate change throughout the election.  This is so amazing that words almost fail me.  Yes, of course it's bad, but at the same time, it is a boost to "Indictment of Normalcy". Whew.

All the chapters, including the notes on contributors and the introduction, for Global Ethics and Climate Change, are now at Continuum/Taylor & Francis.  Rewriting an essay this month on Anton Amo, the Black Wolffian in the German Enlightenment, for the Wiredu-volume made me think more about the heuristic potential of African Sagacity for this century's Civil Evolution.  Amo's ontological concept of the interactive and energetic fleshfield (honam in Akan) is the key.  Amo rocks.  Work on The Philosophy of Climate proceeds apace.  The next post should be about the Climate Acceleration.  Until then.

welcome to the tipping point

9 Sep 2012 IARC-JAXA graph screenshot

And welcome back. Fall term has started, after a summer that was personally one of the happiest in my life, but that signifies to all of us an extremely troubling phase transition.  Old records are toppling left and right.  Everything is now happening much faster than expected.

On August 28, George Monbiot summed up this summer's events:

What we are seeing, here and now, is the transformation of the atmospheric physics of this planet.  Three weeks before the likely minimum, the melting of Arctic sea ice has already broken the record set in 2007.  The daily rate of loss is now 50% higher than it was that year. ... In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that 'in some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century.'  These were the most extreme forecasts in the panel's range.  Some scientists now forecast that the disappearance of Arctic sea-ice in late summer could occur in this decade or the next.

On August 31, John Atcheson counted the weather records:

Arctic sea ice hits lowest extent ever measured (and it's still melting) ... Hottest winter, spring, summer, year, decade ever measured ... Most extensive drought in fifty years, and getting worse ... Worst floods in recorded history ... Hottest seas in eons ... Most acidic oceans ever measured ... Most greenhouse gases released in a single year ... Highest sea levels since the Pleistocene ... Most permafrost melted (with record releases of methane) ever measured ... Massive crop failures and record high food prices ... Most severe weather events ever recorded.

But climate change coincides with the American Disenlightenment:

Meanwhile, in Tampa, the fossil fuel funded Republican Party is doubling down on climate denial, pushing greater use of oil, coal and gas, and trying to gut programs designed to save energy and use more renewables.  In short, they're working diligently to hasten our demise.

So what is the outlook?

Imagine a world where vast regions of an acidic ocean are dominated by jellyfish.  A world where tuna, salmon, halibut, swordfish, crabs, shellfish, shrimp and the rest of the seafood we take for granted--the primary source of protein for more than a billion people--is virtually gone.  ... The land?  An unending series of drought, flood, fire and famine.  Throw in some disease, a little social chaos--with as many as a billion climate change refuges desperately swarming the planet by 2050. ... Ports will have to be abandoned.  The richer countries might get away with extraordinarily expensive dikes, levies, and pumps for a while, but eventually even they'll have to be abandoned. ... International trade will become difficult and unreliable. 

Bill McKibben wrote several updates this summer as well.  Widely read, deservedly so, has been his Rolling Stone essay Global Warming's Terrifying New Math in July.  His August RS essay The Arctic Ice Crisis zeros in on the tipping point in Greenland:

Fresh snow bounces back 84 percent of the light that hits it; warm, rounded crystals can reflect as little as 70 percent.  Slushy snow saturated by water--which gives it a gray cast, or even a bluish tint--reflects as little as 60 percent.  Add dust or soot, and the albedo drops below 40 percent. ... Satellite data has shown a steady darkening of Greenland's albedo, from a July average of 74 percent when the century began to about 68 percent last year.  And then came this summer: Without warning, the line on the albedo chart dropped deep into uncharted territory.  At certain altitudes, the ice sheet in Greenland was suddenly four percent less reflective--in a single season ... The heat accumulating in the ice sheet year after warm, sunny year was suddenly making it far easier to melt the surface.  What's more, in a vicious feedback loop, soot from the wildfires raging in Colorado and Siberia--themselves spurred by climate change--may be helping to darken the surface of the ice.  [Byrd Polar Research Center scientist Jason Box] had conservatively predicted that it might take up to a decade before the surface of Greenland's ice sheet melted all at once.  That it actually happened in just a few weeks only underscores how consistently cautious ice scientists have been in forecasting the threat posed by global warming.  Now, however, that caution is being replaced by well-founded alarm.

McKibben's A Summer of Extremes Signifies the New Normal, at Environment 360, points to James Hansen's new findings (in PNAS):

There's always been extreme heat, [Hansen] showed--but the one-degree increase in global temperature we've seen so far has been enough to shift the bell curve sharply to the left.  In the old summer, the one most of us grew up in, 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the surface area of the planet was dealing with 'extreme heat anomalies' at any given moment.  Now it was approaching 10 percent.

I used to sign off posts with a link to One Hundred Months.  After publication of the AR-4 (2007), a consensus emerged that action within a decade is vital, because there is a good chance that unmitigated climate change would be irreversible by 2017 or thereabouts.  The Guardian started running the One Hundred Months blog, and the climate clock was set.  In 100 Months: Technical Note, Victoria Johnson and Andrew Simms write:

We calculate that 100 months from 1 August 2008, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will begin to exceed a point whereby it is no longer likely we will be able to avert potentially irreversible climate change.  'Likely' in this context refers to the definition of risk used by the IPCC to mean that, at that particular level of GHG concentration, there is only a 66-90 per cent change of global average surface temperatures stabilizing at 2 C above pre-industrial levels.  Once this concentration is exceeded, it becomes more and more likely that we will overshoot a 2 C level of warming.  This is the maximum acceptable level of temperature rise agreed by the European Union and others as necessary to retain reasonable confidence of preventing uncontrollable and ultimately catastrophic warming.  We also believe this calculation to be conservative.

Indeed.  For policy action, crossing this threshold means that from then on out climate policies would be reactive only; the window for proactive policy initiatives will have closed then.  It also means that the policy goals will shift from sustainability and mitigation (unattainable beyond the threshold) to adaptation and resilience, which, of course, are polite words for damage control and managed decline.  Now the clock ticks at fifty-one months. 

The problem is that Johnson and Simms coordinate the countdown with the likelihood of averting irreversible change.  But what does "averting irreversible change" mean?  Does it mean we can undo the changes that have already occurred?  Does anyone seriously believe we can still reverse the summer sea ice trend? It seems wildly implausible to assume things can still be turned around.  Does it mean we can prevent more changes from occurring?  But that seems improbable too, since positive feedback loops are already at it: the thaw feeds on itself because of the dropping albedo caused by the thaw; and GHG concentrations soar higher because CH4 outgassing has started on the Arctic landmasses from the warming permafrost.  We are not fifty-one months away from the point of no return.  We have already entered the new climate regime.  We cannot go back to the way things used to be.  And while we can presumably still slow things down, we cannot prevent more changes from occurring either.  Welcome to the tipping point.

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Edging into "severe," "exceptional" drought

The Climate Philosophy Newsletter 5 (2011/2012) is done.  You can find it at the ISEE website and at the climate phil quick link on the homepage of USF Philosophy.  To say that the past twelve months have seen a tick-up in research is an understatement.  This year's bibliography is three times as long as last year's and boasts creative approaches I had never seen before.  The emerging reality of climate change is affecting ever larger areas in Philosophy, as it well should.  Watching this gives you this odd sense of witnessing a historic intellectual transformation in the making.  On a personal level, keeping track of all this excellent work done by colleagues helps me to clarify the profiles of analytic Climate Ethics, Climate Virtue Ethics, and synthetic Climate Philosophy.  It also helps me with the continued redesign of Ecosophy, as a climate-centric (neither 'anthro' nor 'bio') interrogation of being-in-the-world as an existential and civil evolution along the absolute limit.