Shall I compare thee to climate change?
Here's the paradox: if the scientists are right, we're living through the biggest thing that's happened since human civilization emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly, though we know about it, we don't know about it. It hasn't registered in our gut; it isn't part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas? Compare it to, say, the horror of AIDS in the last two decades, which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect. I mean, when people someday look back on our moment, the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they'll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us.
Why is that? Well, some of the reasons are obvious. It's way too big, for one. When something is happening everywhere all at once, it threatens constantly to become backdrop, context, instead of event. And in this case, since the context is the natural world that more and more of us have forgotten how to read, the changes seem small. At my latitude, spring comes a week earlier than it did in 1970. The ice on the lake melts, and the snow in the fields; and the fields commence to drying out, which has real implications later in the season. That's an almost inconceivably huge change in a basic physical system over a short stretch of time -- but not quite big enough to be noticeable, unless you're paying attention with, say, the vigilance of a farmer. In a society that has more prison inmates than farmers, that's unlikely.
Conversely, when global warming does attempt to show its teeth, the immediate event is usually overdramatic, so vast that the event itself grabs all the attention, leaving none behind for the motive cause. Four hurricanes sweep across Florida in a summer, which is just the kind of result computer modeling says is becoming more likely. But who has time for computer modeling and carbon when there is Storm Surge and Blown-Over Mobile Home and Waiting in Line for Ice, all of which are a lot easier to take pictures of?
And the dramatis personae are deficient as well, being us. Too many villains can mar a plot as easily as too few, and "starring everyone with a car" is a large cast indeed. We don't much want to be told that we're the problem, primarily because it implies we would have to change some of our ways. In a consumer society, those habits constitute a large part of our identity, not to mention our net worth; once you've got your plasma screen installed in the rec room of the 3,500-square-foot house, this is an epic you can do without.
Especially since there's no real chance of a happy ending. We can do better, or we can certainly do much worse -- but we've already pushed the carbon concentration past the point where the atmosphere can easily heal itself. So far we've increased the world's temperature about one degree Fahrenheit; the best guess is we've stoked the fires enough that another two degrees are essentially inevitable. Past that, what we do now matters deeply. But the difference between miserable and catastrophic is not a compelling dramatic device.
The two large-scale attempts to achieve mythic status for climate change thus far -- the movie The Day After Tomorrow and Michael Crichton's State of Fear -- prove most of these rules. To dramatize the first story, the producers postulated a series of physically bizarre and silly events: global warming somehow leads to a kind of flash-freezing, with supercyclonic storms ripping chilled air from the stratosphere and forcing it down on midtown Manhattan. Oh, and watch out for the wolf escaped from the zoo. Crichton, meanwhile, postulates enviro-spawned tsunamis and cannibal kings in order to prove the whole thing a fable.
In the face of all this, how to proceed? If we can't turn to creative artists, then to documentarians. Their impulse is to gather more evidence so that people will listen and do something; hence the photographers descending on Tuvalu to watch for rising waves and the writers heading north to interview the Inuit. It's all remarkable stuff -- the news that communities in the far north were hearing thunder for the first time in their histories shook me. But it's also news about people who, almost by definition, are marginal to those of us in the developed world. The question is how to unsettle the audience.
The possibility exists, I think -- in part because events get steadily more obvious. The Western European heat wave that killed tens of thousands in the summer of 2003 is a good example. Its toll was horrifying precisely because they were not Ghanaians or Bengalis, people who we have become used to blithely and guiltily reading about dying by the thousands. These were people who could easily have been us, with magazine subscriptions and cable TV and the expectation that nature was not going to do them in -- that they'd progressed to a point where they were beyond nature's real reach.
Not only that, but the deaths illustrated another crucial point. The breakdown in human community, the rise of a kind of hyperindividualism perfectly symbolized by the automobile, was both the motive and immediate cause of many of the fatalities. Old people baked to death in their apartments because the temperature got higher than it had ever gotten before (and barely cooled at night); and they baked to death in their apartments because the social structure that always protected each of us from such events had broken down. I mean, nobody was checking up on them. It's hard to imagine more symbolic casualties, and easy to imagine the play, the novel, that should keep that fortnight near the front of our minds.
But what emotions should the playwright play with -- fear? guilt? Sure, but not only those. For me, a kind of wistfulness has always been at the core of my reaction to global warming, a sense that as a species we're finally and irrevocably managing to crowd out everything else, smudge our fingerprints on every frame of the book of life. There seems to me no more telling turn in our civilization, at least since the apple in Eden (a crisis that gave rise to more great art than anything in the Western tradition). But there also needs to be hope as well -- visions of what it might feel like to live on a planet where somehow we use this moment as an opportunity to confront our consumer society, use it to begin the process of rebuilding community. They don't have to be romantic visions, though a little romance wouldn't hurt.
We are all actors in this drama, more of us at every moment. The great subplot of these few years involves the introduction of Indians and Chinese as principal players, a fascinating confrontation between old privilege and new assertion. It may well be that because no one stands outside the scene, no one has the distance to make art from it. But we've got to try. Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action. Otherwise, the only role left to us -- noble, but also enraging in its impotence -- is simply to pay witness. The world is never going to be, in human time, more intact than it is at this moment. Therefore it falls to those of us alive now to watch and record its flora, its fauna, its rains, its snow, its ice, its peoples. To document the buzzing, glorious, cruel, mysterious planet we were born onto, before in our carelessness we leave it far less sweet.
Time rushes on, in ways that humans have never before contemplated. That famous picture of the earth from outer space that Apollo beamed back in the late 1960s --already that's not the world we inhabit; its poles are melting, its oceans rising. We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?
Bill McKibben says time is running out on climate delays
Is Bill McKibben right to be angry with Obama?
Mr. President: Time to quit fibbing and spinning
Comments
View as Flat
Environmentman Posted 11:57 pm
21 Apr 2005
So McKibben wants society to acknowledge climate change or some other environmental issue the way America recognizes the hit Sunday evening television show, 'Desparate Housewives.' Ambivalence is the problem Bill. We clearly recognize ourselves on the show. When we look in the green mirror, we do not recognize ourselves. We might talk a big game in public, but the 'Environmental Confessions' comments revealed our true selves.
The big time green groups are the perfect example. They are K Street, Wall Street, multibilliondollar behemoths, but promote a simplified way of living that would eliminate most of our modern conveniences. This hypocrisy or schizophrenia is also reflected in Cameron Diaz's new MTV show called 'Trippin' where super successful and rich movie stars 'trip' on the simple lives of so-called Third World countries. They use jets, helicopters and SUVs to get to these remote locations so that they can 'poop' in the wild and declare the virtues of simple living. But ask them to give away all of their money and actually live this way and they would bolt. Why don't the rich just take the direct route to helping the poor by just giving them ALL of their money? Because Americans value wealth above all other considerations -- including the environment.
So Bill, that is why Earth Day 35 goes virtually unnoticed. It makes us feel like we should be on the Jerry Springer Show, or at least Doctor Phil. Now there is a thought for you: How about the Dr. Bill Show?
Permalink
mariposa Posted 11:28 am
22 Apr 2005
mariposa
Permalink
johnmcc793 Posted 11:45 pm
24 Apr 2005
The challenge to you is simply to read James Lovelock's view on nuclear power as the solution to global warming and share your thoughts on his statement. Your opinion is greatly valued among environmentalists and we could all benefit from hearing your take on Dr. Lovelock's own "Imagine That".
Of course, there is no 'solution' but many complementary and some not complimentary steps, policies and actions that collectively can diminish the global warning threat. To ignore any option, out of fear or ignorance, is to deny our children the tools they will need to survive the chaos we have brought to them.
James Lovelock: Nuclear power is the only green
solution
We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger.
Published in The Independent - 24 May 2004
Sir David King, the Government's chief scientist, was far-sighted to say that global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism. He may even have underestimated, because, since he spoke, new evidence of climate change suggests it could be even more serious, and the greatest danger that civilisation has faced so far.
Most of us are aware of some degree of warming; winters are warmer and spring comes earlier. But in the Arctic, warming is more than twice as great as here in Europe and in summertime, torrents of melt water now plunge from Greenland's kilometre-high glaciers. The complete dissolution of Greenland's icy mountains will take time, but by then the sea will have risen seven metres, enough to make uninhabitable all of the low lying coastal cities of the world, including London, Venice, Calcutta, New York and Tokyo. Even a two metre rise is enough to put most of southern Florida under water.
The floating ice of the Arctic Ocean is even more vulnerable to warming; in 30 years, its white reflecting ice, the area of the US, may become dark sea that absorbs the warmth of summer sunlight, and further hastens the end of the Greenland ice. The North Pole, goal of so many explorers, will then be no more than a point on the ocean surface.
Not only the Arctic is changing; climatologists warn a four-degree rise in temperature is enough to eliminate the vast Amazon forests in a catastrophe for their people, their biodiversity, and for the world, which would lose one of its great natural air conditioners.
The scientists who form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2001 that global temperature would rise between two and six degrees Celsius by 2100. Their grim forecast was made perceptible by last summer's excessive heat; and according to Swiss meteorologists, the Europe-wide hot spell that killed over 20,000 was wholly different from any previous heat wave. The odds against it being a mere deviation from the norm were 300,000 to one. It was a warning of worse to come.
What makes global warming so serious and so urgent is that the great Earth system, Gaia, is trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback. Extra heat from any source, whether from greenhouse gases, the disappearance of Arctic ice or the Amazon forest, is amplified, and its effects are more than additive. It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm, and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited. When that happens, little time is left to put out the fire before it consumes the house. Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act.
So what should we do? We can just continue to enjoy a warmer 21st century while it lasts, and make cosmetic attempts, such as the Kyoto Treaty, to hide the political embarrassment of global warming, and this is what I fear will happen in much of the world. When, in the 18th century, only one billion people lived on Earth, their impact was small enough for it not to matter what energy source they used.
But with six billion, and growing, few options remain; we can not continue drawing energy from fossil fuels and there is no chance that the renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide enough energy and in time. If we had 50 years or more we might make these our main sources. But we do not have 50 years; the Earth is already so disabled by the insidious poison of greenhouse gases that even if we stop all fossil fuel burning immediately, the consequences of what we have already done will last for 1,000 years. Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our descendants and for civilisation.
Worse still, if we burn crops grown for fuel this could hasten our decline. Agriculture already uses too much of the land needed by the Earth to regulate its climate and chemistry. A car consumes 10 to 30 times as much carbon as its driver; imagine the extra farmland required to feed the appetite of cars.
By all means, let us use the small input from renewables sensibly, but only one immediately available source does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy. True, burning natural gas instead of coal or oil releases only half as much carbon dioxide, but unburnt gas is 25 times as potent a greenhouse agent as is carbon dioxide. Even a small leakage would neutralise the advantage of gas.
The prospects are grim, and even if we act successfully in amelioration, there will still be hard times, as in war, that will stretch our grandchildren to the limit. We are tough and it would take more than the climate catastrophe to eliminate all breeding pairs of humans; what is at risk is civilisation. As individual animals we are not so special, and in some ways are like a planetary disease, but through civilisation we redeem ourselves and become a precious asset for the Earth; not least because through our eyes the Earth has seen herself in all her glory.
There is a chance we may be saved by an unexpected event such as a series of volcanic eruptions severe enough to block out sunlight and so cool the Earth. But only losers would bet their lives on such poor odds. Whatever doubts there are about future climates, there are no doubts that greenhouse gases and temperatures both are rising.
We have stayed in ignorance for many reasons; important among them is the denial of climate change in the US where governments have failed to give their climate scientists the support they needed. The Green lobbies, which should have given priority to global warming, seem more concerned about threats to people than with threats to the Earth, not noticing that we are part of the Earth and wholly dependent upon its well being. It may take a disaster worse than last summer's European deaths to wake us up.
Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen.
If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global warming, we may die even sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer.
I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the world in the quality of its Earth and climate scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and prefers to listen to the Greens. But I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.
Even if they were right about its dangers, and they are not, its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear - the one safe, available, energy source - now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.
James Lovelock is an independent scientist, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis which considers the Earth as a self-regulating organism, and a member of EFN - the association of Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy - http://www.ecolo.org
Source: The Independent - May 24th -2004
Permalink
Storm Dragon Posted 11:01 am
27 Apr 2005
Permalink
johnmcc793 Posted 10:56 pm
27 Apr 2005
Yes, vehicles and transport account for a significant amount of climate-focing gaseous emissions. But to say that new nuclear power will not help much is ignoring the readily available facts. Use the information resources so readily available to educate us if you are going to take the time to reply to comments on Gist. And, nuclear powered cars might one day be resurrected battery powered vehicles recharged by power flowing from pebble-bed reactors.
For example, with little effort, I came upon a citation that should set the record a bit straighter on the emissions offsets nulcear reactors around the world represent.
Go to http://www.fas.org/faspir/2001/v54n5/nuclear.htm and read the Federation of American Scientsts paper by Dr. Harold Feiveson, a Princeton research analyst working with Dr. Frank VonHippel on reducing the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation.
In his words, in the section titled "The Long Term Challenge - Nuclear Power and Global Warming":
"At present, nuclear power worldwide generates approximately 2200 billion kwh per year. Were this amount of electricity generated instead by coal plants, an additional quantity of carbon dioxide containing 550 million metric tons of carbon would be emitted to the atmosphere each year. This is about 8.5% of total carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion (6500 million tons per year). The comparable amount of carbon avoided by virtue of nuclear power in thte U.S. is 155 million tons". By the way, global nuclear electric power generation represents about56% of total (all energy sources) US electric power generated in 2004.
StormDragon, displacing 8.5% of global carbon emissions is nothing to sneeze at.
My intention is not to denegrate your comment. I only want to implore you and other contributors to do some good research before communicating your thoughts with the rest of us 'hungry to learn' environmental advocates.
Facts are worth repeating-even if they do not bolster our opinion of how things should be. Our childrens' future is riding on how carefully we debate the cliate change abatement options available to us and to them. Take another shot at your comment and please lets keep the discussion open and illuminating.
John
Permalink
zotlynn Posted 1:00 am
05 May 2005
http://www.viridiandesign.org/
http://www.viridiandesign.org/About.htm
Ogle individual projects and contest archives and lots of links, many of which are rich in what headline art is poor in. Viridian isn't afraid of industrial design (where most artists actually work), and like any good art and design movement and certain online sources of environmental news, it doesn't take itself too seriously: you might find amazement or a chuckle.
Zot Lynn Szurgot
p.s. The place for the non-art discussion on nuclear Co2 offsets:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/5/3/134735/5295
Permalink
Chris Fiset Posted 7:01 am
17 Jun 2005
William Irwin Thompson has written that with the advent of the internet, Joyce's "Here comes everybody" is now happening. Thompson also suggests that the age of the solo genius artist has given way to creative collaboration, and that this is where meaning is most relevant. Maybe the question is not if there will be relevant art, but what specific forms it must now take to break through all the noise that now clogs the electronic noosphere.
Robinson Jeffers, Terence McKenna and others suggest that with the advent of technology and the acceleration of events, we have collectively become the leading art event par excellence, in all the freakishness of current events. How does the imagination speak to this? More specifically, how does the collective speak to itself beyond the noise of media or pre-fab ideology?
Does the acceleration of current events, along with all the variables that we now confront, preclude the stable environment needed to engage in traditional forms of art as we have in the past?
Would relevant art consist in something like harnessing the internet to allow the collective communication with a simultaneity that we currently find in multi-player videogames? Could that technology get transferred to serious contemporary questions that require a form of collective thinking we cannot yet imagine? Or are we just confined to collectively enacting ourselves in "artful" relation to each other without a truly relevant means of imaginative reflection?
Thompson also suggests that the music video is the designated art form of our time, but that MTV of course commercialized it from the get go. Thompson suggests that we re-envision the music video along the lines of the Koyaanisqatsi triology, but take it to another level or two, to explore systems in nature from the cell to the galaxy, and recapitulating the scale of history in sweeping electronic sound, which might jump-start the imagination of the masses enough to make a difference.
Ken Wilber echo's Thompson in this regard when he suggests that "The Matrix" trilogy is the leading myth of our time. In the recently issued "Ultimate Matrix Collection" boxed DVD set, Wilber and Cornel West offer six hours of running commentary on the trilogy, hauling it back out from the trash can delivered to it by so many movie critics to suggest there is much more to be found than meets the eye. So here we've got the Wachowski's exhausting technology in every conceivable way to portray the vitality of the human imagination, and then collaborating with Wilber and West to create dyanmic commentary on that whole trippy mess. Maybe this is one example of how art can come up to batt in a very heavy time as our own.
Finally, Cornel West, in "Democracy Matters," reminds us that hip-hop has become a global phenomenon by which unseen voices can be heard. Maybe much of the relevant art in our time is to be found among certain conscious voices in this regard, among them Gift of Gab, DJ Spooky, Blue Scholars, etc. Hip-Hop as opera, perhaps? Where do white folks look for art these days, and is perhaps our uninspected racism (of which I have plenty) in part informing this question about relevant art? Van Jones with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights insists in a recent article in "Yes!" Magazine that our "new environmentalism actually could lead to what I call 'eco-apartheid.' Under 'eco-apartheid,' you would have an affluent place like Marin Country, CA, with cooler, solar everything -- bio this and organic that -- while nearby Oakland would still be struggling to get the last century's toxic jobs and polluting industries."
Van insists that environmentalism, to be truly meaningful, must not be another suburban-minded replay of covert racism as we have known it and enacted it, as art or otherwise.
Permalink
jrmartin Posted 2:54 am
24 Aug 2005
down sides, to say the very least. Not least of which is that we can't handle the waste. But there is also not an infinite supply of fissable material for the reactors. All in all, nukes are not a good thing.
So ... What is a good thing? A good thing would be to use far less energy, unless that energy is truly renewable -- such as solar and wind. But even then, we should learn how to do the most with the least.
One of the best ideas out there is called "access by proximity" -- a term which I believe was probably coined by the ecocity guru, Richard Register. Access by proximity drastically reduces automobile dependency and use. So, let's not make electric cars and fuel them with nukes, okay? Let's use our intelligence and create intelligent human habitats which are in harmony with nature's own ways.
Permalink