In the wake of last week’s post, I’d meant to plunge
straight into the next part of this sequence of posts and talk about the
unraveling of American politics. Still, it’s worth remembering that the
twilight of America’s global empire is merely an incident in the greater
trajectory of the end of the industrial age, and part of that greater
trajectory may just have come into sight over the last week.
Some background might be in order. For several years now, it
has been possible for ships to sail from the northern Atlantic to the northern
Pacific via the Arctic Ocean in late summer and early autumn. In the great days
of European maritime exploration, any number of expeditions wrecked themselves
in Arctic ice in futile attempts to find the fabled Northwest Passage; now, for
the first time in recorded history, it’s a routine trip for a freighter, and as
often as not the route is blue water all the way without an ice floe in sight.
(Somehow global warming denialists never get around to talking about this.)
Last autumn, though, crew members aboard several ships reported seeing, for the
first time, patches of sea that appeared to be bubbling, and initial tests
indicated that the bubbles were methane.
This was a source of some concern, since methane is a far more powerful
greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, there’s a great deal of it trapped in
formerly frozen sediments in the Arctic, and the risk of massive methane
releases from the polar regions has played a substantial role in the last
decade or so of discussions of the risks of global warming.
Word of the bubbling ocean up north got briefly into the
media, and provoked a fascinating response. The New York Times, for example,
published a story that mentioned the reports,and then insisted in strident
terms that reputable scientists had proven that the methane plumes were
perfectly normal, part of the Arctic Ocean’s slow response to the warming that
followed the end of the last ice age. This same “nothing to see here, move
along” attitude duly appeared elsewhere in the
media. What makes this fascinating is that the New York Times, not that
many years earlier, carried bucketloads of stories about the threat of climate
change, including stories that warned about the risk that the thawing out of
the Arctic might release plumes of methane into the atmosphere.
Weirdly, this same reversal seems to have guided the
response – or more precisely the nonresponse – of the climate change activist
community to these same reports. It
might seem reasonable to expect that global warming activists would have leapt
on these initial reports as ammunition for their cause; when initial estimates
suggested that global warming would melt the glaciers of the Himalayas and
deprive India of much of its water supply, certainly, a great deal was made of
those claims. Still, that’s not what happened. Instead, a great many people who
a few years ago were busily talking about the terrible risk of methane releases
from the Arctic suddenly found something else to discuss once those methane
releases stopped being a purely theoretical possibility.
Fast forward to this spring. After yet another unseasonably
warm Arctic winter, Russian scientists are busy studying the methane releases
reported last fall, and initial reports – well, let’s understate things
considerably and call them “rather troubling.” Areas of open water up to a
kilometer across are fizzing with methane, a condition that one experienced Arctic researcher, Dr.
Igor Semiletov, described as completely unprecedented. Another team of
researchers, flying a plane with methane sensors over the disintegrating ice cap, has
tracked plumes of methane rising into the atmosphere wherever the ice is
broken. The amounts detected, they comment, are significant enough to affect
global climate.
Is this unsettling news being splashed around by the same
mainstream media that, only a few years ago, were somberly warning about the
risks of global climate change, and trumpeted from the rooftops by climate change
activists as proof that their warnings were justified? Not that I’ve heard. In
fact, according to recent media reports, James Lovelock – creator of the Gaia
hypothesis and author of books painting worst-case global warming scenarios in
spectacularly lurid terms – has just announced that, well, actually, he
overstated things dramatically, so did other climate activists such as Al Gore,
and global warming actually won’t be as bad as all that.
In order to make sense of this curious reversal, it’s going
to be necessary to take a hard look at some of the less creditable dimensions
of the climate change movement. I should say first that as far as I can tell,
the great majority of ordinary people who got involved in the climate change
movement were guided by the most sincere and sensible motives. Dumping billions
of tons of fossil carbon into the atmosphere was a dumb idea all along;
pretending that all that carbon could be dumped there without disrupting the
subtle and complex balance of the world’s climate was even dumber; and the
response to those paired stupidities included a great deal that was
praiseworthy.
Equally, as far as I can tell, the great majority of
scientists whose efforts have helped to prove the reality of anthropogenic climate
change have produced honest and competent research, and even the minority that
hasn’t met this standard rarely managed to rise, or rather sink, to the levels
of cherrypicking, obfuscation, and outright fiction routinely found in climate
change denialist literature. That being said, there’s more going on in the
world of climate change activism than the honest concern of citizens and the
honest labor of researchers, and it’s past time to examine the reasons why the
climate change movement got so large and accomplished so little. In the
process, we’ll be touching on issues that bear directly on the broader theme
I’ve been developing in the last few months, because the rise and fall of
climate change activism over the last decade or so has an uncomfortably great
deal to do with the mechanisms of empire and the balance of power in a strained
and fraying global political system.
Until the end of the 1990s, climate change was simply one
more captive issue in the internal politics of industrial nations. The
political role of captive issues, and the captive constituencies that
correspond to them, is too rarely discussed these days. In the United States,
for example, environmental protection is one of the captive issues of the
Democratic Party; that party mouths slogans about the environment, and even
though those slogans are rarely if ever followed up by concrete policies,
environmentalists are expected to vote Democratic, since the Republicans are
supposed to be so much worse, and willingly play the part of bogeyman. The Republican party, in turn, works the same
good cop-bad cop routine on its own captive constituencies, such as gun owners
and Christian fundamentalists, and count on the Democrats to act out the
bogeyman’s role in turn. It’s an ingenious system for neutralizing potential
protest, and it plays a major role in maintaining business as usual in the
world’s democratic societies.
After the year 2000, though, global climate change got
coopted on a grander scale, as the rise of a handful of nonwestern nations to
great power status put growing pressure on the United States and its allies.
China is the most widely recognized of these, but India and Brazil are also
emerging powers; meanwhile Russia, which was briefly subjected to an
Anglo-American wealth pump after the collapse of Communism and nearly got bled
dry, managed to extract itself in the late 1990s and has been clawing its way back
to great power status since then. Faced
with these rising or resurgent powers – the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China)
nations, as they were called – the United States and its inner circle of allies
have tried a number of gambits to keep them in their former places.
Historically speaking, war is the usual method for settling
such issues, but that isn’t a useful option this time around. Even if nuclear weapons weren’t an issue, and
of course they are, I suspect too many people in the Pentagon still remember
what happened the last time the US military went head to head with the People’s
Liberation Army. (Readers who have no idea what I’m talking about will want to
read up on the Korean War.) That left trade policy as the next logical line of
defense, and so the late 1990s saw a series of attempts by the US and its
allies to use global free trade treaties to put the rest of the world at a
permanent economic disadvantage. That effort ran into solid resistance at the
1999 World Trade Organization ministerial talks in Seattle, and collapsed
completely four years later.
Those of my readers who remember how the WTO talks at Cancun
in 2003 crashed and burned may have experienced deja vu when the climate talks
at Copenhagen in 2009 did exactly the same thing. The resemblance is not
accidental. In the years leading up to the Copenhagen climate talks, the US and
its allies argued that it was necessary to replace the Kyoto protocols of 1997
– which mostly restricted carbon emissions from the industrial nations – with a
new set that would apply to industrializing countries as well. This was fair
enough in the abstract, but the devil was in the details: in this case, the
quotas that would place China, India, and other industrializing nations at a
permanent disadvantage, and grandfather in the much higher per capita carbon
emissions of the United States, Europe and Japan.
Environmental rhetoric has been used for such purposes often
enough in the past. One of my college ecology textbooks, copyright 1981,
mentions ruefully that attempts to pressure Third World nations into enacting
strict environmental protections had come to be recognized by those nations as
simply one more round of attempts to keep them in a state of permanent economic
dependence. While there was more going on than this – the environmental
movement in general, like the climate change activist movement in particular,
has always included a large number of idealists with the purest of motives –
it’s a safe bet that the Third World nations were broadly correct in their
assessment, as none of the industrial nations that exerted the pressure ever
proposed, let’s say, to forbid their own nationals from exporting
environmentally destructive products to the Third World.
The stakes at Copenhagen, in other words, were rather
different from those discussed in the media, and the outcome could have been
predicted from the debacle six years earlier at Cancun. When it became clear to
the major players that the United States and its allies were not going to get
what they wanted, the entire process fell apart, leaving China to seize the
initiative and offer a face-saving compromise that committed neither bloc to
any limits that matter. Afterwards,
since climate change had failed to keep the BRIC nations at bay, the US dropped
the issue like a hot rock; the financial hangover of the housing bubble made
climate change lose its appeal to the Democratic Party; and activists suddenly
discovered that what they thought was a rising groundswell of support was
simply the result of being temporarily funded and used for somebody else’s
political advantage.
Claims that large-scale methane releases from the warming
Arctic would send the planet’s climate spinning out of control played a
significant role in both the domestic and the international rhetoric of climate
change during the time the movement was coopted, and got dropped along with the
movement once it was no longer useful. The same claims, though, also played a
broader role in mobilizing citizen activism and scientific concern, and the
reasons why nobody outside the corridors of power is talking about the methane
plumes deserves some attention as well.
What’s at work here is the basic structure of contemporary
activism itself. Pick nearly any issue
that inspires activism nowadays, and you’ll find that it fits into a strict and
stereotyped narrative. It centers on something bad that’s going to get much
worse if nothing is done, and the “much worse” generally ends up described in
ever more luridly apocalyptic terms as the movement proceeds. Victory for the movement, in turn, is defined
for all practical purposes as preventing the worst case scenarios the movement
itself offers up; high-level abstractions such as “peace” and “justice” get a
lot of play, but it’s very rare for there to be any kind of meaningful vision
of a goal to be sought, much less a pragmatic plan for getting there. Opposing the bad, for all practical purposes,
replaces seeking the good.
Those of my readers who followed the discussion of the
tactics of magic in last autumn’s Archdruid Report will
doubtless be able to think of several good reasons why this approach is
problematic, but there’s another dimension to the problem. In contemporary activism, the worst case
scenarios that play so large a part in the rhetoric are there to pressure
people into supporting the movement. In climate change activism, certainly,
that was the case.
Read James Lovelock’s more recent and strident books, or any
of the good-sized bookshelf of parallel literature, and you’ll find the claim
that failing to support the climate change movement amounts to dooming the
planet to a hothouse future in which, by 2100, the sole surviving human beings
are a few “breeding pairs” – that’s Lovelock’s phrase – huddled around the tropical
shores of the Arctic Ocean, with catastrophic methane releases from the Arctic
regions among the driving forces behind that lurid scenario. It’s a compelling
image, but once methane plumes actually start boiling up through the waters of
the Arctic Ocean, you’ve just lost your rationale for further activism – or,
really, for anything else short of jumping off the nearest bridge.
That’s the dilemma in which the news from the Arctic has
landed climate activists. Having by and large bought into the idea that once
the methane starts rising, it’s all over, they have very few options left. It’s
a self-created dilemma, though, because methane releases aren’t a new thing in
the planet’s history. If it’s true that, as George Santayana said, those who
forget their history are condemned to repeat it, it’s equally true that those
who forget their paleoecology are condemned not to notice that they’re
repeating it – and in this case, as in many others, a good basic knowledge of
what happened the last time large scale methane releases coincided with a
period of planetary warming.
That wasn’t that long ago, as it happened. The end of the
last ice age saw sharp increases in methane concentrations in the atmosphere,
the rapid melting of continental glaciers, and a steep rise in global
temperature that peaked around 6,000 years ago at levels considerably higher
than they are today. A controversial theory, the “clathrate gun” hypothesis,
argues that the warming was triggered by massive methane releases from the
oceans. Whether or not that was the
major factor, ice cores from Greenland document rising levels of methane in the
air around the same time as the stunningly sudden global warming – an increase
of more than 15°F in global
average temperatures in less than a decade – that triggered the final collapse
of the great ice sheets.
The first point to grasp from this is that methane releases
aren’t the end of the world. Our ancestors got through the last rounds of it
without any sign of massive dieoff, and it’s been argued that the nearly
worldwide legends of a great flood may embody a dim folk memory of the vast
postglacial floods that took place as the ice melted and the seas rose. For
that matter, during most of Earth’s history, the planet has been much hotter
than it is now; only a few tens of millions of years ago – yes, that’s
practically an eyeblink in deep time – crocodiles sunned themselves on the
subtropical shores of Canada’s north coast, at a time when Canada was nearly as
close to the North Pole as it is today.
Thus Lovelock’s extreme scenario deserves the label of “alarmist” that
he himself put on it in the interview cited above.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that a methane spike in
the Arctic can simply be ignored. Since the dim folk memories that might be
embodied in flood legends are the only records we’ve got for the human
experience of abrupt global warming, we simply don’t know how fast the
temperature shift might affect, for example, the already unstable Greenland ice
sheet, which contains enough water to raise sea level worldwide by around 30
feet. Some theoretical models argue that
Greenland’s ice will melt slowly, while others argue that water pooling beneath
the ice could cause huge sections of it to slide off into the sea in short
order, filling the North Atlantic first with icebergs, then with meltwater.
Which model is correct? Only Gaia knows,
and she ain’t telling.
Equally, we don’t know whether the melting of the Greenland
ice sheet will make nearby continental shelves unstable, as it did the last
time around, and reproduce the same set of conditions that caused gargantuan
tsunamis at the end of the last ice age. There’s abundant evidence for these;
one of them, according to recent research, flooded the North Sea and carved the English Channel in a single day around 8000
years ago; we don’t know how soon those might become a factor around the
Atlantic basin, or even if they will. It’s unsettling to realize that we may
have no way of finding out until the first one hits.
All that’s certain at this point is that something
potentially very troubling is happening in Arctic waters, and the possibility that it might have
destructive consequences on a local, regional, or continental scale can’t be
ruled out. Panic is the least useful response I can think of, so I’ll say this
very quietly: if the news from Arctic waters in the months and years to come
suggests that things are moving in the wrong direction, and those of my readers
who live close to the shores of the northern Atlantic basin happen to have the
opportunity to move inland or to higher ground, it might not be unreasonable to
do so.
****************
On a different topic, the folks at Scarlet Imprint tell me that they’ve still got a few remaining unsold copies
of the handbound deluxe "Black Gold" edition of my book The
Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil. I know it’s a
chunk of money, but there’s something to be said for a book crafted to
standards high enough that it’ll still be readable long after industrial
civilization has faded into memory. If that interests you, might be worth
considering.
****************
End of the World of the Week #19
Nostradamus, who’s featured in the last two weekly Ends of
the World here, has also had a remarkable track record for inspiring false
prophecies in others – and I’m not just thinking of the cheap tabloids that trot out newly manufactured
prophecies with his name on them every few months. Many Nostradamus researchers
have embarrassed themselves once they moved from trying to force-fit quatrains
onto the past, and attempted to use the French prophet’s writings to anticipate
the future.
One example is Henry C. Roberts, whose The Complete
Prophecies of Nostradamus saw print in 1994. After careful study of
the quatrains, Roberts came to believe that Nostradamus had infallibly
predicted a dramatic event in the near future: the election of Edward Kennedy
as president of the United States. (You’ll find this prediction on pages 210
and 218 of Roberts’ book.) Any chance
Roberts might have had at a reputation for infallibility went away when Kennedy
died in 2009, having never gotten closer to the White House than a failed 1980
run for the Democratic nomination.
Oddly enough, a failed Nostradamus prophecy concerning
Edward Kennedy also featured in pop musician Al Stewart’s 1973 piece Nostradamus:
In the new lands of America three brothers now shall come to
power
Two alone are born to rule but all must die before their
hour
It’s not hard to figure out who’s being discussed, but
Edward Kennedy died at the age of 77.
—story from Apocalypse Not
