Climate Change – RUPTURE.CAPITAL

The announcement that US President’s Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has got the backing of pro-business, coal-mining owner Democratic Senator Manchin has been greeted with a wave of optimism that the US target of cutting carbon emissions in half before the end of this decade (or 40% compared with 2005 levels), can be met. “This bill will really turbocharge that transition to clean energy, it will transform markets where already solar PV, wind and batteries are in many cases cheaper than incumbent fossil fuels,” said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy at Energy Innovation, an open source research body. “Increasingly I’m more optimistic that keeping the temperature rise under 2C (3.6F) is more reachable. 1.5C is a stretch goal at this point.”

The bill will cut US emissions by between 31% and 44% below 2005 levels by 2030, according to Rhodium Group, a non-partisan research firm. A separate analysis by Energy Innovation, another research house, has found a similar reduction, of between 37% and 41% this decade.

But will it do the trick of saving the planet? First, the IRA has to get through Congress and even after a huge watering down of the bill to accommodate Manchin, there is still no certainty that it will get past a Republican opposition. As it is, the bill actually allows for an expansion of oil and gas drilling in national parks and land as a sop to Manchin. There may be yet more concessions to the fossil fuel lobby.

Then there are actual measures proposed in the IRA. “This is a massive turning point,” argues Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This bill includes so much, it comprises nearly $370bn in climate and clean energy investments. That’s truly historic. Overall, the IRA is a huge opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.” But is it? Much of the bill is really tax credits to companies to invest in clean energy projects as well as a rebate of up to $7,500 for Americans who want to buy new electric vehicles. There is $9bn to retrofit houses to make them more energy efficient, tax credits for heat pumps and rooftop solar and a $27bn “clean energy technology accelerator” to help deploy new renewable technology. A further $60bn would go towards environmental justice projects and there is a new program to reduce leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling. Much of this is not direct public investment in climate projects but incentives to the private sector to do the right thing. The capitalist sector is being left to deliver on these targets.

And that’s the US. Elsewhere in the world, investment in meeting the already very modest target of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C by 2030 is looking way too little. Indeed, the opposite is happening. For example, because of the threatened loss of energy in Europe from blocked Russian imports, the EU parliament has voted to designate gas and nuclear as sustainable! The need for energy to heat homes and fuel industry and transport after the Ukraine crisis has come into conflict with the aim to save the planet. The irony is that a global recession would reduce the demand for fossil fuel energy globally and so help reduce the impact on the planet.

And then there is the war itself. The military sector globally is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in economies. And yet Nato’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg promised the alliance’s Madrid summit recently that there would be a nearly eightfold expansion in forces on high alert to 300,000. And member countries are also hiking defence spending to at least 2 per cent of GDP , “which is increasingly considered a floor, not a ceiling”. Russia’s military spending in 2021 hit $66bn, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But even then, the US was spending $801bn a year and other Nato members about $363bn. NATO will be outspending Russia’s military by about 10 to one in the region, notes Dan Plesch of SOAS, University of London.

What the war and sky-high energy prices have brought home is that carbon pricing is no answer to controlling global warming. In effect, we’ve now got a global carbon tax, inflicting real hardship on people around the world without necessarily doing much to speed the transition from carbon.

I have argued against this ‘market solution’ in previous posts. Instead we need a global plan of public investment into things society does need, like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, ecological remediation, public health, quality schools and other currently unmet needs. And it could equalize development the world over by shifting resources out of useless and harmful production in the North and into developing the South, building basic infrastructure, sanitation systems, public schools, health care. At the same time, a global plan could aim to provide equivalent jobs for workers displaced by the retrenchment or closure of unnecessary or harmful industries. None of those outcomes are offered by the IRA.

The other counter to the optimism now again coming forth on abating climate change and global warming is the risk of what is called in statistics a ‘fat tail’ in the probability of where global temperatures are likely to reach in the next few decades. The IPCC tends to look at the most probable outcome ie say a 2.5C increase by 2050. That’s bad enough. But there is still a reasonable probability that it could be much worse. Last year’s IPCC report suggested that if atmospheric CO doubles from pre-industrial levels – something the planet is halfway towards – then there is a roughly an 18% chance that temperatures will rise beyond 4.5°C. What would be the impact of that ‘fat tail’ coming through?

Well, just on GDP terms, one study shows that “a persistent increase in average global temperature by 0.04 °C per year, in the absence of mitigation policies, reduces world real GDP per capita by more than 7 percent by 2100. On the other hand, abiding by the Paris Agreement goals, thereby limiting the temperature increase to 0.01 °C per annum, reduces the loss substantially to about 1 percent.” The estimated losses would increase to 13 percent globally if country-specific variability of climate conditions were to rise commensurate with current annual temperature increases of 0.04 °C.

But that’s just the loss of GDP. The point is that if global temperatures were to reach above the optimistic 1.5C or 2.0C increase and beyond, the impact on the planet is exponential not gradual. “There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said lead author Dr Luke Kemp from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, (https://www.cser.ac.uk/). Then what one study has called ‘the four horsemen of the climate apocalypse’ will appear, namely “famine and malnutrition, extreme weather, conflict, and vector-borne diseases.” The ‘fat tail’ of probability would deliver rising temperatures that pose a major threat to global food supply, with increasing probabilities of “breadbasket failures” as the world’s most agriculturally productive areas suffer collective meltdowns. Hotter and more extreme weather could also create conditions for new disease outbreaks as habitats for both people and wildlife shift and shrink.

The modelling in this study concluded that areas of extreme heat (i.e. an annual average temperature of over 29 °C), could cover two billion people by 2070. These areas are not only some of the most densely populated, but also some of the most politically fragile. “Average annual temperatures of 29 degrees currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast,” said co-author Chi Xu of Nanjing University. “By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens. There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects,” he said.

The IRA may make some small inroads into emissions reduction in the US, if fully implemented (and as I say, there are serious doubts about that). But globally, there is little sign that global warming can be stopped at the Paris target; more likely global temperatures will rise above a 2C increase and beyond, as governments struggle to reconcile the need for energy at reasonable prices and reducing emissions (unless a major global slump solves the contradiction for a while). The four horsemen of the climate apocalypse are on the horizon.

The current economic system is at the heart of the climate breakdown, argues Herman Daly, a leading expert in the field of ecological economics who for many decades has been at the forefront of the struggle to redirect economics toward environmental sustainability. For his contributions to economics and the environment, Daly has received numerous prestigious awards, including Sweden’s Honorary Right Livelihood Award, the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences, the Leontief Prize for contributions to economic thought, and the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic. In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Daly — who is now professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and who once served as a senior economist at the World Bank — explains why the current economic system is destroying the environment and outlines the policy steps that the world must take in order to achieve a sustainable future.

C.J. Polychroniou: You have been arguing for many years now that the present economic system, formed around the principles of neoclassical economics, ignores planetary limits and, as such, it is destroying the fabric of the ecology on Earth and posing an existential threat to humanity. However, it is only rather recently that this message has been making inroads into the wider public due to the increasing awareness of the link between fossil fuels and the climate crisis. Can you briefly describe the way the current economic system impacts on the global ecosystem and is responsible for the climate crisis?

Herman Daly: Today’s economy impacts our environment in the same way that a size 12 foot impacts a size 10 shoe — it stretches the shoe out of shape while painfully squeezing the foot. The ecological-economic term for this is “overshoot,” consisting of excessive takeover of land capable of supporting the capture of the current flow of solar energy by photosynthesis, and excessive drawdown of fossil fuels (the stored stock of the solar energy of Paleolithic summers), as well as other mineral deposits. It is these physical resources that human labor transforms into the psychic experience of the enjoyment of life, and into physical waste. The rate of transformation is excessive if it exceeds the rate of regeneration of renewable resources, the absorptive capacity of the environment for wastes, or the rate of improvement of resource-saving technologies.

Our current excessive rate of transformation of resources into wastes, the “metabolic throughput,” is driven by the excessive scale of population times the excessive scale of per capita resource consumption, relative to the finite and entropically constrained biosphere in which we live. Climate change is only one symptom of overshoot, although the major one. Other symptoms of overshoot include biodiversity loss, disruption of the biosphere with novel substances (tetraethyl lead, endocrine disruptors, radioactive materials, etc.) with which the biosphere has had no evolutionary experience, plus increasing inequality and poverty, sometimes resulting in violence.

In spite of all the evidence about the catastrophic effects of burning fossil fuels on the climate, the world systematically continues to emit carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Why is it so hard to come up with a reasonable policy that limits significantly the use of fossil fuels?

Because fossil fuels concentrate so much energy in such a small and convenient form compared to alternatives. Also, fossil fuels are collected from underground, and unlike the energy alternatives of wood or fodder for draft animals, do not compete with agricultural land surface for human food. Given the enormous stocks of fossil fuels, we were able for many years to live off of past accumulated “capital” rather than current solar “income.” This enabled the excessive scale of the human economy, the overshoot that is now coming to a forced end thanks to the combined costs of depletion and pollution that we could ignore in the empty world before we filled it with goods, “bads” and people.

Today’s economy impacts our environment in the same way that a size 12 foot impacts a size 10 shoe — it stretches the shoe out of shape while painfully squeezing the foot.

We could and should transition to renewable resources, but that will require a reduction in the scale of the human economy to a smaller level that could be maintained more or less in a steady state. Renewable resources become nonrenewable if exploited beyond sustainable yield. Growthist values would have to be replaced by an ethic of sufficiency, sharing and qualitative development rather than quantitative growth. The fossil fuel industry strenuously resists this change in an effort to hold on to their enormous resource rents and monopoly profits. Transition to renewable energy should be encouraged, but there is a lot of unfounded optimism that renewables will be cheap and plentiful enough to replace fossil fuels without a reduction in the scale of the economy, or even in its rate of growth. The need to reduce the human scale is primary. Short of that, we can and should increase allocative efficiency by internalizing external costs, and improve distributive fairness by redistribution. But unless we also reduce the scale of the macroeconomy to a sustainable level, we will just be making the best of an ever-worsening situation, given that growth itself has become uneconomic.

The scale of the economy is the product of population times per capita resource consumption. A lot of ideological ink is wasted arguing over whether it is population increase or per capita consumption increase that is responsible for excessive scale. That is a bit like arguing whether it is length or width that most determines the area of a rectangle. In my lifetime, world population has quadrupled (from 2 to 8 billion), while [highly variable and unequal] per capita consumption has grown even more, perhaps nine-fold depending on how measured. Neither factor can be neglected.

You have introduced the concept of uneconomic growth to indicate that “growth is uneconomic when it increases environmental and social costs by more than it increases production benefits.” Indeed, you have rejected the idea that economic growth is a good measure of human well-being, and, in contrast, you call for a transition to a steady-state economy.

Growth was economic when the world was empty of us and our stuff. Now it is full, and further growth of our economy into the finite biosphere causes increasing marginal costs of preempted life support services in order to satisfy decreasing marginal benefits of trivial consumption that has to be aggressively advertised to be sold. Growth in rich countries now costs more than it is worth, it is uneconomic, even while growth in poor countries remains economic until they have reached a similar level of sufficiency. The poor cannot attain sufficiency unless the rich make ecological room for them.

First, what are the policies suggested by steady-state economics? Second, is a steady-state economy a green economy? And, third, how does a steady-state economy balance conservation with growing human needs?

Ten policies for moving toward a steady-state economy are listed below. Many could be adopted independently and gradually, although they cohere in the sense that some compensate for the shortcomings of others. Of course, the question of the desired level of steady-state economy is crucial, and local, regional and global ecological limits must be considered in fashioning effective policies. Ten is an arbitrary number in order to be specific and focused. The reader is invited to add, subtract or consolidate.

We could and should transition to renewable resources, but that will require a reduction in the scale of the human economy to a smaller level that could be maintained more or less in a steady state.

Developing Cap-Auction-Trade systems for basic resources (especially fossil fuels): Set caps for basic natural resources according to three key rules: (1) renewable resources should not be depleted faster than they regenerate; (2) nonrenewable resources should not be depleted faster than renewable substitutes are developed; and (3) wastes from all resource use should not be returned to the ecosystem faster than they can be absorbed and reconstituted by natural systems. This approach achieves sustainable scale and market efficiency, avoids the Jevons rebound effect whereby increased resource efficiency induces greater use of the resource, and raises auction revenue for progressive redistribution.
Tax shifting: Shift the tax base from “value added” (labor and capital) to that to which value is added, namely natural resource throughput, which has become the limiting factor. Such taxes will raise the price of the limiting factor, improving allocative efficiency and inducing resource-saving technology, as well as providing government revenue.
Limiting the range of inequality: Establish minimum and maximum income limits, maintaining differences large enough to preserve incentives, but small enough to suppress the plutocratic tendencies of market economies which have become extreme. Also remove rival goods and services from the open-access commons (e.g., atmospheric waste absorption) and tax them for the public benefit, while freeing non-rival goods (e.g., knowledge and information) from the artificial scarcity needed to make them fit the price system. That is, stop treating the scarce as if it were free, and stop treating the free as if it were scarce.
Reforming the banking sector: Move from a fractional reserve banking system to 100 percent reserve requirements on demand deposits. Money would no longer be mainly interest-bearing debt created by private banks, but non-interest-bearing government debt issued by the Treasury. Every dollar loaned for investment would be a dollar previously saved by someone else, restoring the classical balance between investment and abstinence from consumption, and dampening boom and bust cycles, as well as inflationary tendencies.
Managing international trade for the public good: Move from free trade and free capital mobility to balanced and regulated international trade. While the interdependence of national economies is inevitable, their integration into one global economy is not. Free trade undercuts domestic cost-internalization policies, while also encouraging cheap-labor policies, leading to a competitive race to the bottom by underpricing resources and labor. Free capital mobility also invalidates the basic comparative advantage argument for free trade in goods.
Expanding leisure time: Reduce conventional work time in favor of part-time work, personal work and leisure, thereby embracing well-being as a core metric of prosperity while reducing the drive for limitless production. From a welfare perspective, in our current society the freedom to choose between the basic alternatives of work time and leisure time is highly restricted, while the freedom to choose between a thousand brands of breakfast cereal is guaranteed.
Stabilizing population: Strive toward a balance in which births plus in-migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants, and in which every birth is a wanted birth, and every immigrant has legal documentation.
Reforming national accounts: Separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account so that throughput growth can be stopped when rising marginal costs equal falling marginal benefits and further growth becomes uneconomic. Accurately measuring costs and benefits is difficult, but even inaccurate measures and comparisons makes a lot more sense than simply conflating them under the rubric of “economic activity.”
Restoring full employment: Restore the U.S. Full Employment Act of 1945 and its equivalent in other nations in order to make full employment once again the end, and economic growth the temporary means. Un/under-employment is the price we pay for growth from automation, off-shoring, deregulated trade and a cheap-labor immigration policy. Under steady-state conditions, productivity improvements would lead to expanded leisure time rather than unemployment.
Advancing just global governance: Seek world community as a federation of national communities, not the dissolution of nations into a single “world without borders.” Globalization by free trade, free capital mobility and [mass crisis-driven] migration dissolves national community, leaving nothing to federate. Such globalization is individualism writ large — a post-national corporate feudalism in a global commons. Instead, strengthen the original Bretton Woods vision of interdependent national economies, and resist the World Trade Organization vision of a single integrated global economy. Respect the principle of subsidiarity: although climate change and arms control require global institutions, basic law enforcement and infrastructure maintenance remain local issues. Focus our limited capacity for global cooperation on what truly demands it.

What practical steps need to be taken to make the transition to a steady-state economy, and what role do you see activism play in helping us make the transition to a sustainable future?

Good policies based on sound scientific and moral understanding are necessary but not sufficient. Passionate activism in support of the policies is also necessary, but insufficient. We need both — both mind and spirit, both intellectual understanding and moral inspiration — if we are to sustain with justice the miraculous world we have inherited, and which is now under very serious threat of self-destruction.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

White nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone.

“Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction?” asks a new analysis. “At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic.”

As climate change worsens, desert cities like Phoenix must adapt, or face a mass exodus

86 years ago, a heat wave battered the United States. This is what happened

Welcome to the Anthropocene – The Age of Human Die-Offs

Mark Brody

Wed, 07/27/2022 – 23:59

Overcoming such a global phalanx of oil-industry defenders will require far more political muscle than the environmental camp has yet been able to muster.

What we learn when we compare mining concessions in Ecuador and the United States.

This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last month, during a slow-moving heat wave that smothered much of the United States, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment reported at least 2,000 cattle had died from heat stress. In 2021, as the Pacific Northwest sweltered under a heat dome, more than 650,000 farm animals perished in British Columbia alone. And in 2015, a deadly heat wave in India killed more than 17 million chickens.

Hot, humid conditions can lead to massive heat casualties in animals—in livestock as well as wild animals. These events will become more extensive, longer lasting and more damaging as the world warms, potentially threatening economies and ecosystems. While many studies have demonstrated the impact of individual events or gradual trends in heat stress on livestock, there is a Panglossian tendency among many working in livestock agriculture to believe in a nearly infinite capacity for modern agricultural practices and breeding to overcome heat-stress induced challenges.

Much of the warming that has occurred in places like the United States or Europe can be dealt with through breeding in key traits from variants from warm countries like India or North Africa. But as high heat conditions travel beyond the upper ranges of temperatures recently experienced (over the past few thousand years) in North Africa, India, or South America, there will limited genetic diversity to draw upon to prepare for these conditions. There are temperature ceilings that humans and mammals (and many other animals) cannot survive, if breached. What those limits are, and what happens when they are crossed, will have profound implications for agriculture and biodiversity in a warming world.

In 2010, Steven Sherwood and I published a paper introducing wet-bulb temperature, a measure of moist heat stress, as a way of conceptualizing a 35 degree Celsius upper limit for survivability. Today very small regions cross this threshold for brief intervals. But with every degree of global warming, maximal wet-bulb temperatures will increase by nearly 1 degree Celsius. With enough warming more and more of the world will begin to cross this critical moist heat stress threshold. This critical survivable wet-bulb temperature concept has since spread well beyond its initial scope and its application to human health appears nearly daily in newspapers and even in science fiction.

Unfortunately, this limit was always understood to be an upper limit for perfectly hydrated, perfectly sweating people living in the shade exposed to a strong wind. Real humans do not behave this way all the time, if ever, and the real-world wet-bulb limit is in all likelihood substantially lower.

All mammals—indeed all endotherms, or warm-blooded animals, to a greater or lesser degree—are subject to similar temperature-humidity limits. Much of the best data exists for livestock so extra attention is due there, but moist heat stress is an equal opportunity killer, and the welfare of entire species and ecosystems need to be considered. And unlike many humans or even some livestock animals cared for by humans, wildlife does not have access to technologies like air conditioning to use to adapt to extraordinary temperatures.

When Sherwood and I began work on this topic we were inspired by records of past “greenhouse” climates over the past 90 million years, in which temperatures and humidity were mostly much higher than they are today. At a conference in which I was presenting these paleoclimate records, Sherwood asked, “Given that there is substantial evidence that the world used to be much hotter, is there a thermal limit that applies to all warm-blooded animals which might have been crossed in the past? If so, could it be crossed in the future, causing mass extinctions?”

The standard mammal has a maximum sustainable internal body temperature of about 37 to 38 degrees Celsius, as long as one is measuring the temperature of blood entering certain critical areas, such as near the base of the brain. All placental mammals have roughly that same maximum internal temperature, which is indicative of that temperature being shared among mammals with a common ancestor. Internal temperatures can be lower, but not higher without causing injury and death. Indeed substantial evidence exists for placental mammals having that same internal body temperature for tens of millions of years or more.

Birds are a slightly different story. It is now widely understood that birds are avian dinosaurs and are derived from an endothermic avian dinosaur lineage. Their maximum sustainable internal body temperatures are significantly higher (approximately 43 degrees Celsius), likely a necessary legacy of the hot, humid Mesozoic conditions in which they evolved.

The common maximum internal temperature is about 38 degrees Celsius for placental mammals or 43 degrees Celsius for birds, and these are shared across the vast majority of genera and species within these groups, which strongly suggests that these are immutable limits on human time scales. In other words, this is not something that human beings or other animals can rapidly evolve out of as conditions warrant. The mass death events in recent history described above are great examples of this.

Indeed, most species today have experienced strong evolutionary pressure to adapt to cooler “icehouse” conditions during the prevailing glacial-interglacial cycles of the past 3 million years. The last time climate was as warm as it will be in the next 50 to 100 years was 3 million years ago during the “warm” Pliocene climate. Warming projected for moderate emissions scenarios going beyond 2100 brings temperatures into a range not seen since the Miocene (23 to 25 million years ago). There is a real danger that in the near future, temperatures and corresponding humidity will increase to such a degree that wet-bulb levels extend beyond the range seen for at least 3 million years, or perhaps 15 million years.

There is good news though. In climate model simulations it requires substantial warming (more than 6 degrees Celsius) to create zones deadly to endothermic mammals and birds over substantial areas. That is not likely to happen even by the year 2300 in the most likely carbon emissions scenarios. With 3 degrees Celsius of global warming, which current research indicates is the most likely future, most of the world’s terrestrial biosphere will avoid crossing the 35 degrees Celsius wet-bulb limit for significant periods of time.

The bad news is, as previously mentioned, the 35 degree Celsius wet-bulb is an upper limit for mammals, not a lower survivability limit, meaning that in reality the limit may be reached sooner, with less global warming. Lower limits on wet-bulb temperature might be as low as 31 degrees Celsius for humans and other mammals. But in this lower range, wet-bulb may not be a useful or reliable metric, and less-idealized and more case-specific calibrated metrics are likely to be of more use. These include the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, a measure of heat stress in direct sunlight, or the Universal Thermal Climate Index, which accounts for ambient temperature as well as humidity, wind, and radiation, in the case of humans; or the temperature–humidity index in the case of animals.

Food systems involving livestock do not fare well in simulations with 3 degrees Celsius of global warming when using these livestock-specific metrics calibrated on modern animal tolerances. In the United States, just 3 degrees Celsius of warming conditions in simulations tend to be hotter—when humidity is factored in—than heat waves in North Africa today. These heat waves of the future could devastate US livestock yields, if they don’t kill the animals outright. Much more work needs to be done to understand how mammals and birds will fare globally, but most especially in tropical and subtropical regions. As noted above, animals there are already tolerant of high heat conditions, but they also have the least recent history with warmer and wetter than modern conditions and may therefore have a diminished capacity to adapt to warmer conditions.

With 1 degree Celsius of global warming already locked in, and several more that appear to be guaranteed by current policies, over the next century scientists will see just how much adaptability and genetic phenotypic plasticity there is. This raises the question of the degree to which humans can and should interfere to help this process along via more selective breeding or genetic modification.

As animals are moved by global warming outside of the environmental envelope that has encompassed them for literally millions of years, it is quite possible they will not have the ability to adapt. The best solution of course would be to avoid this experiment entirely. That is within the realm of feasibility. Limiting warming to less than 3 degrees Celsius by slashing the use of fossil fuels substantially reduces the area of the planet subject to dangerous moist heat stress conditions.

One may rely on either natural or man-made refugia, or, in other words, moving populations of endotherms either uphill or away from hot humid regions, or building giant air-conditioned enclosures, in order to allow animals to continue to survive. But, if humans are in the position of doing this in a big way, that already presumes the fight to preserve the major ecosystems that make our world beautiful has been lost. For the sake of all the animals, including us, I hope we choose a saner path.

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