At the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco, Brad Werner, a geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego, presented a talk titled Is Earth F**ked? (full title: Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism). He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that earth-human systems are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the are we f**ked question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied , More or less. ~How Science is Telling us All to Revolt, Naomi Naomi Klein. There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it resistance - movements of people or groups of people who adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture, including environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups. (ibid) Werner wasnt exactly calling for those things, he was merely observing that mass uprisings of people - along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street - represent the likeliest source of friction to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. He says that past social movements have had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, if were thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but really a geophysics problem. Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings, including financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and be arrested if necessary, because climate change is not only the crisis of your lives - it is also the crisis of our species existence. A glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenlands melting ice sheet, confessed, I couldnt maintain my self-respect if I didnt go, Box said at the time, adding that just voting doesnt seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also. What Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isnt saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm - through mass-movement counter-pressure - is humanitys best shot at avoiding catastrophe. A small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems - particularly the climate system - is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity. Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britains top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2° Celsius, a target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe; but he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast. Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies - all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned - that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else. He and a colleague inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target - an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 - has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has no scientific basis. Thats because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and a half decades into the future - rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately - there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2° carbon budget and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century. To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year - and they need to start right now. Furthermore, this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbonpricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. A 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times. If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted). In order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony. Some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations scientists. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werners computer model, this is the friction needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the antibodies rising up to fight the planets spiking fever. Read the article in full at Reader Supported News.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 12:08:13 +0000
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