Stopgap Climate Change Efforts

 

We are so far from achieving any semblance of a unified global effort to halt, much less reverse, the ravages of climate change. Too many people unwilling to take personal steps, governments prioritizing “economic” growth over what it takes to stop the devastation, rogue nations (like Brazil and the United States) simply opting out of the process and embracing blame over solutions. Nature is escalating culling the human herd that caused this environmental catastrophe. COVID is just one step.

As floods, mega-storms, coastal erosion, droughts and severe wildfires rage, there appears to be a blind eye turned to the trillions and trillions of dollars, millions of lives lost or becoming health impaired, and the vast multiple of measurable damage above and beyond the aggregate value of economic displacement (with concomitant economic opportunities) that might be inflicted on the incumbent holders of the earth’s wealth. It’s really those economic elites who have led the resistance, when they could have benefitted economically by leading the solution.

Our own US legal system, basic state and federal corporate and tax law, is an example of this environmental anomaly. Corporate officers and directors have one overriding duty, as long as they are otherwise legally compliant: the economic betterment of shareholders and no one else. Every decision, even to donate to charities, stop polluting or pay employees a fair wage, has to be justified in terms of how that choice would ultimately create economic value to shareholders. The environment, the community, the employees and the nation as a whole are not stakeholders in American corporations. Other nations have expanded that list of stakeholders. We have not.

The way to sell this lackadaisical approach to the masses is in terms of “inconvenience,” higher consumer costs (“we’ll just pass it on to you”) and job loss. We have so embedded the notion that success is based on hard dollar growth – there are no globally accepted comparative standards of quality of life or health, just GDP and employment numbers – that any decision that might transition our metrics to something else are almost an impossible sell. This flies in the face of the huge costs to taxpayers and victims of natural disasters and permanent climate change. The desertification of agricultural lands. The spread of insect-born disease. The decimation caused by wildfires, floods and unprecedented mega-storms. The displacement of millions of environmental migrants. The resulting wars and battles over the remaining pockets of natural resources.

“Job loss” should be just “job transition.” High costs can be mitigated with a smaller footprint. Here’s a simple visual example. Remember how much space CD or record collections used to consume? How big television sets used to be? If you are old enough. Simply, we can live better with less. Economic costs cannot accurately be measured by just GDP and employment statistics, since we are all paying dramatically more (hard dollars) for health and ecological damage that simply is not reflected in existing metrics. We react to what we measure. So we need to measure real costs and real damage. Our policymaking is driven by those corporate interests, at the expense of everyone else. “A new analysis by the RAND Corporation examines what rising inequality has cost Americans in lost income—and the results are stunning.

“A full-time worker whose taxable income is at the median—with half the population making more and half making less—now pulls in about $50,000 a year. Yet had the fruits of the nation’s economic output been shared over the past 45 years as broadly as they were from the end of World War II until the early 1970s, that worker would instead be making $92,000 to $102,000. (The exact figures vary slightly depending on how inflation is calculated.)… The findings, which land amid a global pandemic, help to illuminate the paradoxes of an economy in which so-called essential workers are struggling to make ends meet while the rich keep getting richer.” Rick Wartzman, FastCompany.com, September 14^th.

In the meantime, we continue to deal with the symptoms, and not the disease. We are reactive, not proactive. Like this example motivated by the super-devastating California wildfires. “If you zoom in on a new map of California, you’ll start to see that the fields of green that represent the forest are actually made up of individual green points, and each point represents a real, individual tree. The tool, called the California Forest Observatory, uses AI and satellite images to create an ultradetailed view of the state’s forests—aiding work to prevent the type of catastrophic megafires that the state is experiencing now.

“Scientists at Salo Sciences, a startup that works on technology for natural climate solutions, began creating the tool after interviewing dozens of experts in California about the state’s challenges with wildfires: They need more detailed, up-to-date information about the forests so they can better predict how fast and in what direction fires will spread, and remove the most hazardous fuels. Even the rough satellite maps that exist now are often three years out of date, making it hard for agencies to plan their work.

“The new tool will be updated annually after the fire season ends, if not more often. Firefighters can use the tool to predict how current fires may spread as they’re burning. But just as critically, the state can also use the map to plan forest management to prevent future megafires. ‘What we really found was California more than anything has a vegetation and fuel load problem,’ says David Marvin, cofounder and CEO of Salo Sciences. ‘This has occurred because, for the last century, we’ve been suppressing wildfire, and we’ve gotten really good at doing so. CalFire, the state fire agency, puts out something like 96% of fires, and we have thousands of them every year.’” Adele Peters, FastCompany.com.

Peters also discusses this rather bizarre thought about containing the explosion of intense hurricanes and typhoons: “Climate change is making hurricanes more violent, and one of the reasons is that warmer oceans make storms gain more speed: A one-degree rise in the surface temperature of the water can increase wind speed as much as 20 miles an hour. But what if technology could cool the water down? Could it help prevent catastrophes?

“That’s the theory behind the still-unproven tech from a Norwegian startup called OceanTherm. In hurricane season, ships would deploy large pipes with holes deep under water, where the water is colder, and then pump in air, which would push cold water bubbles up to the surface. As a storm passed over the cooler water, the change in temperature could prevent a more intense storm.” Lots of ideas. Reactive, stopgap band aids when we all know that so much more is necessary.

I’m Peter Dekom, and you really don’t have to wonder why Millennials and younger are terrified of the climate damaged environment of their future; they are beginning to question the very notion of whether “growth” is either good or even a metric for success.