Friday, April 25, 2008

tenv Avoiding Zugzwang

Poverty of Environmentalism, III

By John Taylor; 2008 Apr 25, 16 Jalal, 165 BE

 

On Tuesday Tomaso and I took a walk along Hamilton's mountain brow, enjoying the panorama of a city I left ten years ago. When we moved away the air over the city was noticeably cleaner. You could see Toronto across the lake on a clear day like it was on Tuesday. Not anymore, the air is visibly worse. In ten years Toronto has disappeared! This shook me. I am the sort of person who is the first to be dragged under by bad air. A whiff from a smoker walking by is enough to provoke a migraine attack. I am a walking, talking canary-in-a-coal-mine, except this is an outdoor coal mine.

 

Shaken and stirred, I have been feverishly going over the solutions suggested in the final chapters of Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change." The author's website lays them out succinctly in, "11 Realistic Ways You Can Help Reduce Global Warming," at:

 

<http://www.theweathermakers.org/globalwarming/>

 

These are good ideas. But note the final suggestion, to put pressure on your political representative. In other words, keep the status quo and put all your hopes for survival in present institutions.

 

What kind of an intellectual world are we living in? Clouded as the air is, our thinking is worse. One question agitates me as I read Flannery,

 

"This is a thinker who is obviously one of the most qualified and intelligent observers of the state of our planet, yet why does he veer toward but then shy away from the only, the obvious, the unavoidable solution, world government?"

 

Surely the prospect of an answer to our suicidal mess should be enticing. It should be the holy grail in the eyes of an environmentalist, but no, the one chapter where he cannot avoid talking world-level solutions he calls, "2084; The Carbon Dictatorship?" In his sticky brain the terms "world government" and "dictatorship" cannot be torn apart. They are synonyms, co-dependents, one cannot exist without the other.

 

Why? Oh God, why?

 

Flannery starts this chapter well, but making the point that it looks like the human race will soon have to pay for massive geo-engineering projects to reverse climate destabilization. The alternative, he recognizes, is unthinkable. The first of three possibilities for the future is,

 

"Our response to limiting emissions is too slow or unco-ordinated to avert great climate shifts, which destroy Earth's life support systems and destabilise our global civilisation. As a result humans are thrust into a protracted Dark Age far more mordant than any that has gone before, for the most destructive weapons ever devised will still exist, while the means to regulate their use, and to make peace, will have been swept away. These changes could commence as soon as 2050." (Weather Makers, p. 291)

 

So in sum, there is no turning back. Doing nothing about climate change is not an option since even choosing to act sporadically may lead to a post-apocalypse Mad Max scenario, only with road warriors armed with nuclear bombs. Flannery then reluctantly posits two other choices. One is Utopian, prompt action followed by complete victory, without any structural change,

 

"Humanity acts promptly on individual, national and corporate levels to reduce emissions, and so avoids serious climatic consequences. Based on current trends, we will need to have commenced significant decarbonising of our electricity grids by around 2030, and to have substantially decarbonised transport systems by 2050. If we are successful, by 2150 or thereabouts greenhouse gas levels will have dropped to the point where Gaia can once again control Earth's thermostat."

 

Weather Makers was written only a couple of years ago but even in this short time an avalanche of evidence has come in; it now seems extremely unlikely that climate redemption will be that quick and easy. Famine, the first of the three horsemen of the apocalypse, has already crossed the finish line; how long war and pestilence will follow is moot. So, what about Flannery's third possibility?

 

"Emissions are reduced sufficiently to avoid outright disaster, but with serious damage to Earth's ecosystems results. With world climate on a knife-edge, Crutzen's vision of internationally agreed geo-engineering projects becomes mandatory. Civilisation will hover on the brink for decades or centuries, during which period the carbon cycle will need to be strictly controlled, by large and small geo-engineering projects alike. Under this final scenario humans would have no choice but to establish an Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control, something that could easily grow from the Kyoto Protocol."

 

Why the "no choice but to establish..."? Why is world regulation of the environment such a scary last resort? As Flannery then points out, there are over thirty greenhouse gases that have to be regulated on an international level. Carbon dioxide and methane are just the first two in line. Yet here even the world's greatest climate expert and most public advocate of climate control gives the impression that he is reluctant. He only contemplates us edging backwards into an Earth Climate Commission.

 

I will continue with this and the next chapter in this solution section of Flannery's Weather Makers in the next essay in this series. But before we end, let us look back at what is moving this series.

 

When you arrive at the Badi blog a slide show runs through a couple of dozen digital snapshots; in one I am lying on the carpet on my back with a newspaper article spread across my face. Marie took that photograph last year, but even today I feel weighed down by the headline, which as I recall says something like "Bush stalls climate talks." When I first unearthed the clipping in my files I did a double take when I saw the date. It is not a new headline, it is over seventeen years old. The delaying Bush was Bush senior. I should have realized it could not be current. Nobody on the world stage is so naive anymore as to bother with talks among nations. They were scuppered a decade ago, before they came near Kyoto. Nobody seriously expects nations, rich or poor, to act when corporations, not "sovereign" nations, set the agenda, and an anonymous elite sets the corporate agenda.

 

The Presidents Bush are not the only ones stalling, for it is the thesis of this series, The Poverty of Environmentalism, that environmentalists are doing it just as well. They are spinning their wheels in a rut, digging deeper the harder they try. Because of a poorly framed problem they got stuck early on in a repeating time loop, like in the film "Groundhog Day," their thinking frozen in a permanent repeat cycle while nature deteriorates at an accelerating pace.

 

If we refuse to even consider solving a world problem at a world level, what is to become of us?

 

One word describes such a situation perfectly: Zugzwang. Zugzwang is a German chess term meaning literally "move compulsion," referring to a position usually in the end game where a player has to make a move, but every possible move leads to defeat. According to the rules of chess, you have to make a move. True, in the real world we have the option of doing nothing. But we have to realize that doing nothing is a move too. As long as we continue thinking like we are, Zugzwang will tighten like a noose and we will be hanging over the abyss.

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