Somebody get me a cheeseburger!

That soup was so thin

You could read a magazine through it

    -Woody Guthrie

I don't want a pickle

I just want to ride my motorcycle

    -Arlo Guthrie

PSA

     Next meeting of the Joint Comitte on Carbon Reduction  5/17/2019

       350.org publishes reports on "climate recovery without economic hardship"

       

Greetings

       Perhaps you've heard that OAC, and the New Green Deal, want to take away your car and your hamburger.   Shocking!   

       The New York Times. put out a special section on why you should become a vegan, and how to do it.

Speaking of food, Bill McKibben, normally a pretty optimistic guy, suggests that we may accept the reality of climate change where it starts to affect the food supply

Here. 

'... a 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world’s highest-tech farming, found that “wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climate change.” After tripling between 1900 and 1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as temperatures increased a degree and rainfall declined by nearly a third. “The chance of that just being variable climate without the underlying factor [of climate change] is less than one in a hundred billion,” the researchers said, and it meant that despite all the expensive new technology farmers kept introducing, “they have succeeded only in standing still, not in moving forward.” Assuming the same trends continued, yields would actually start to decline inside of two decades, they reported. In June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature — which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now aiming for — could cut U.S. corn yields by 18 percent.  A four-degree increase — which is where our current trajectory will take us — would cut the crop almost in half. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, which in turn is the planet’s most widely grown crop.

Corn is vulnerable because even a week of high temperatures at the key moment can keep it from fertilizing. (“You only get one chance to pollinate a quadrillion kernels of corn,” the head of a commodity consulting firm explained.) But even the hardiest crops are susceptible. Sorghum, for instance, which is a staple for half a billion humans, is particularly hardy in dry conditions because it has big, fibrous roots that reach far down into the earth. Even it has limits, though, and they are being reached. Thirty years of data from the American Midwest show that heat waves affect the “vapor pressure deficit,” the difference between the water vapor in the sorghum leaf’s interior and that in the surrounding air. Hotter weather means the sorghum releases more moisture into the atmosphere. Warm the planet’s temperature by two degrees Celsius — which is, again, now the world’s goal — and sorghum yields drop 17 percent. Warm it five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), and yields drop almost 60 percent.

It’s hard to imagine a topic duller than sorghum yields. It’s the precise opposite of clickbait. But people have to eat; in the human game, the single most important question is probably “What’s for dinner?” And when the answer is “Not much,” things deteriorate fast. In 2010 a severe heat wave hit Russia, and it wrecked the grain harvest, which led the Kremlin to ban exports. The global price of wheat spiked, and that helped trigger the Arab Spring — Egypt at the time was the largest wheat importer on the planet. That experience set academics and insurers to work gaming out what the next food shock might look like. In 2017 one team imagined a vigorous El Niño, with the attendant floods and droughts — for a season, in their scenario, corn, and soy yields declined by 10 percent, and wheat and rice by 7 percent. The result was chaos: “quadrupled commodity prices, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences . . . Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose ten percent.”

The New York Times explains how this is already playing out in the US

"Drop a pin anywhere on a map of the United States and you’ll find disruption in the fields. Warmer temperatures are extending growing seasons in some areas and sending a host of new pests into others. Some fields are parched with drought, others so flooded that they swallow tractors.

Decades-long patterns of frost, heat and rain — never entirely predictable but once reliable enough — have broken down. In regions where the term climate change still meets with skepticism, some simply call the weather extreme or erratic. But most agree that something unusual is happening.

I find this interesting, and I recall that the original limits to growth predicted that in the end growth would occur when pollution began to limit food.

Food is pretty basic stuff.  You might think that would inspire some action.  However the recent report from the IEA shows otherwise. Basically, despite all the pledges,  investment in renewables has leveled off, while coal has increased.    Here is why

"Closer up, we see opposing trends in the world’s largest economies: the efforts and announcements of the majority of countries that are phasing out the use of coal to produce electricity are being undermined by a number of countries that are increasing the share of coal in their power mix.

This is the case particularly for major coal-producing countries such as Indonesia (58% of electricity produced from coal, 18 percentage points increase from 2010 to 2017), Turkey (33%, +7 points) and India (75%, +7 points, as shown in Figure 1, above). India is the second largest coal producer in the world after China with significant coal reserves. The development of renewables and the commissioning of more efficient coal-fired power plants in India are not sufficient to absorb the growth in electricity demand, which has averaged 7% per year since 2005.

Other countries are seeking to diversify their energy mix and are increasingly using coal to produce their electricity: Malaysia (45%, +10 points), Chile (37%, +9 points), South Korea (46%, +2 points) and Japan (33%, +6 points). These countries rely on coal for several reasons: in addition to often being a cheaper source of electricity, coal limits their dependence on oil- and gas-producing countries, and in turn, limits the effect of hydrocarbon price volatility on their economies. Due to a lack of domestic fossil fuel resources, Japan is one of the largest oil-, natural gas- and coal-importing countries. Between 2011 and 2015, the share of coal in Japanese electricity production increased significantly to cope with the closure of nuclear power plants following the Fukushima disaster.

And the Keeling curve keeps on rising. Now it's last  415.   The last time co2 was this high, there were palm trees at the South Pole.  Welcome to the Pliocene

Another recent report showed that the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere (412 ppm), in the Pliocene Epoch 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, sea levels were 20 meters higher than they are right now, trees were growing at the South Pole, and average global temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees Centigrade (3°-4° C) warmer, and even 10°C warmer in some areas. NASA echoed the report’s findings.

Meanwhile, the UN keeps putting out scary reports about extinctions .  This one seems to say that even if we turned things around on climate change, we'd still have a lot of work to do to stop the sixth great extinction.

U.N. Report Finds 1 Million Species At Risk of Extinction

A landmark report finds species are being pushed to the brink of extinction at a rate ‘tens to hundreds of times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years.’

The report found that more than 40% of amphibians, 33% of coral reefs and over one-third of all marine species are threatened with extinction.

Three-quarters of land environments and two-thirds of marine environments have been “significantly” altered by humans, according to the report.

“Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” said Josef Settele, who co-chaired the assessment. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”

While the report’s findings predict a dismal future, Watson said there is still time to make a difference if work begins now. It would require a “fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals, and values,” he said.

Elizabeth Kolbert puts it like this 

"To keep nearly eight billion people fed, not to mention housed, clothed, and hooked on YouTube, humans have transformed most of the earth’s surface. Seventy-five percent of the land is “significantly altered,” the I.P.B.E.S. noted in a summary of its report, which was released last week in Paris. In addition, “66 percent of the ocean area is experiencing increasing cumulative impacts, and over 85 percent of wetlands (area) has been lost.” Approximately half the world’s coral cover is gone. In the past ten years alone, at least seventy-five million acres of “primary or recovering forest” has been destroyed.

Habitat destruction and overfishing are, for now, the main causes of biodiversity declines, according to the I.P.B.E.S., but climate change is emerging as a “direct driver” and is “increasingly exacerbating the impact of other drivers.” Its effects, the report notes, “are accelerating.” Watson wrote last week, in the Guardian, that “we cannot solve the threats of human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity in isolation. We either solve both or we solve neither.”

(With all this bad news Jared Diamond give civilization only a 50  % chance after 2050.)

One might think that the situation  is an "existential threat" to the human species   .  But its worse!   .  It could wreck the sales of sneakers!

Nike, the sports equipment maker, for instance, has become a sizable player in renewables. Among Nike’s recent deals: an agreement with Iberdrola, a large Spanish utility, to take power from a wind farm being built in Spain that will offset the electricity used in its European operations.

Noel Kinder, chief sustainability officer at Nike, explained that the company saw climate change as not only an “existential threat” to humanity but also a potential wrecker of the company’s sales of goods like shoes and sweatshirts. Focusing the company’s resources to strike a blow against this problem makes sense on many levels. If extreme weather and pollution increases, he explained, “people can’t do sports, and they can’t buy our products 

Kevin Drum offers his assessment in his "super abridged green new deal.". 

"T

The problem itself is obvious enough: people generally don’t like to sacrifice now in order to avoid some kind of disaster later. The urge that prompts us to eat a cookie even though it will eventually make us fat is the exact same one that prompts fossil-fuel companies to deny global warming even though it will eventually put all their refineries underwater. We call the former “hyperbolic discounting” and the latter “free market capitalism,” but it’s all the same thing.

See BBC: How Brain Biases Prevent Climate Actions 

His suggestion is pretty straightforward.    Live simply.

"Let me put this in concrete terms. If you truly believe that climate change will broil the planet in the next 50 years or so, the very least you should do is immediately get rid of your car and adopt a vegan diet. How many of you have done that? How many of you have even considered it? Virtually none of you.² And like I said, that’s just a start. If you’re really serious, you should also toss out your air conditioning; only heat your house if temps are down in the 40s; never travel anywhere by plane; buy local food, and install rooftop solar. I’m going to let you keep your too-big house, but only because I’m a nice guy.

One pill

 makes  you small

     -Jefferson Airplane

We've been so busy, keeping up with the Jones's

Four car garage and were still building on

  -Waylon Jennings (Luckenbach Texas)

Greetings

       

       I always enjoy reading Eric Lindberg.  He is what i would call a thoughtful, hopefull, realist.  He's been doing a series of pieces about the Transition Movement, trying to come up with a model that has real staying power,  rather than some effort to deal with this or that crisis .   His latest is to use a sort of Earth Religion model, noting that churches, like political parties (and corporations) have long lives. And if the associated humans are inspired by the philosophies, they will be willing to work for long term goals , which may never be achieved during their lifetimes .  See. Here

       One part of that struck me was his description of the the appropriate  long term goal.  Is it "green growth", or "sustainable growth"?   It is not.  In fact, Lindberg says,  only radical simplicity can deal with the damage that has been done and continues to be done.  Green growth provides only "improved means towards an unimproved end"

"To put it a bit too glibly, Transition says that since the only way to keep your Netflix up-and-running is, in fact, to blow the tops of mountains, create underground earthquakes and poison our groundwater, or cover every acre of the Earth’s surface with wind turbines and solar panels, then we’d better re-evaluate our values and choose a way of life that allows us to live safely within the Earth’s biological and ecological limits, even if that means we end up living a lot more like Ecuadorian peasants or the Amish than middle-class Americans who manage global complexity from our glimmering offices.  If we have to relinquish our Netflix and smart phones, our European vacations and air-conditioned homes, so be it.  Humanity has managed just fine without any of these throughout most of its history, a history we are taught to view with dismay and pity according to an educational perspective that is aimed at maintaining the beliefs and practices necessary for industrial progress and expansion.

He goes to explain in more detail.

"The goal of environmentalism is of course to “save the Earth” or “save Humanity.”  These are not bad goals, per se, but in the hands of liberal environmentalists they are misguided in a number of ways.  The most critical error is the almost-never-questioned belief that saving humanity or the Earth actually means preserving our high-energy way of life, hopefully without destroying our common home’s current ecological balance in the process.  This will be done, we are told, by trading in our coal-powered electrical generation for wind and solar, while swapping-out our internal combustion engines for the electric ones we might plug into our new carbon-free energy system.  Add in some Silicon Valley wizardry, and (so the story goes) we can make this all operate at a level of efficiency that will presumably also help us manage forests, stop soil erosion, preserve biodiversity and habitat, while we continue to grow the economy so that free-market democracy (one without any rationing or reinstitution of virtues such as temperance or moderation) can continue on its merry way, offering us a future that looks like the present, only in real-time higher resolution.

'I can’t help but wonder whether I should laugh or cry when I hear or read about the so-called people’s climate march or about most[ii] environmental protesters in general — the sort who might follow the increasingly misguided (and misleading) false prophecy of the likes of Bill McKibben, Al Gore, or Leonardo Di Caprio.  For at root, they are in effect protesting one form of energy collection and delivery in favor of a different one.  It is presented as a great struggle over values and vision, though it is not.  If there is faith at stake in the prevailing struggle (and I believe there is) it is a fully shared faith in progress struggling only over esoteric theological details, practical differences between fossil fuels and renewable energy notwithstanding.  True each side draws upon differing versions of capitalism and Liberal democracy and some (not entirely unimportant) symbolic and aesthetic differences. And it is also true that many environmentalists love and cherish nature in some way or another and would like to see it preserved.  But unquestioned in mainstream environmental movements are the more fundamental values surrounding the quest for mastery and domination over the Earth’s natural systems; the pursuit of comfort, entertainment, and novelty; the securing of safety and convenience in the face of all the ravages of time and, ultimately, death.  All we see are slightly differing versions of salvation through conquest and mastery.

        This view is supported by this piece by Jason Hickel, which I think lays out the problem with the green growth argument  in the context of climate change   Those who support green growth argue that the trick is to reduce "carbon intensity ", that is the a mount of carbon per unit of GDP.  And carbon intensity has and will go down as we use more efficient devices, such as EVS , and more low carbon energy sources.  Carbon intensity is falling, at a rate 1.9%.    When you compare this rate with the over all growth rate of 3%, you can see that it is swimming against the tide (although estimated carbon emission numbers are flat ).   More importantly though, even if even if carbon intensity were equal to GDP growth, there is no actual reduction in carbon.  Compare it to the reductions needed of 8-10%, it barely moves the needle .  Se also Carbon intensity needs to fall at 6% each yr (Vox).  Although Hickel doesn't speak in terms of returning to a peasant lifestyle, he admits that the no growth option is a "hard pill to swallow"  He argues that maybe we won't have to actually get rid of stuff, just stop buying more.

    

        Of course it is important to remember that  climate change isn't the only concern .  It is merely one symptom.   Here's an interesting column from Geoge Monbiot, who argues that climate change is not the worlds most most pressing environmental problem.  Its only number 3. He ranks first , the "systematic ecological collapse" caused by industrial fishing.  Second , he puts the erasure of non-human life on land due to industrial farming.   For instance the drop in insect populations..     see Here   (H/t Sara D).

"The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.

"Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

           see also this recent UN report on pollinators.

         For the bigger picture, its useful to turn to Elizabeth Kolbert who wrote the book, The sixth Extinction which won the 2015 Pulizer Prize.   Here is her presentation at the Johnathon Schell memorial lecture.  (described by Dave Roberts as  "bracing and free of false-hope homilies".     Here is an interesting interview she did with Dave Roberts.   Its a free ranging discussion going from science to ethics.

  Will humans also, go extinct?  She's not sure.

 "But while we’ve increased our numbers, it has been at the expense of other things. We are simply consuming other species. We are consuming a tremendous amount of the primary productivity of the oceans, for example, just emptying them out.

And so there’s two questions really, it seems to me. One is will humanity make it through this basically unrestrained growth, both in terms of numbers and in how much we as individuals consume? And meanwhile, what happens to everything else?

The answer is not necessarily the same. I mean, humanity has found that it can reproduce and consume at a very rapid rate and, depending on how you look at it, the world continues apace — though obviously many people are not doing well, many people are.

But most other species are not doing too well.

She concludes the interview in this way.

David Roberts

One thing I always appreciated about your writing is your tragic imagination. I feel like lots of folks in the climate discussion lack that. [When author David Wallace-Wells wrote a story on the tragic potential of climate change, he was roundly scolded by the climate positivity police.]

Elizabeth Kolbert

I really appreciate that. Thank you.

David Roberts

American culture, in particular, lacks a tragic imagination — an ability to imagine that things can go horribly wrong.

Elizabeth Kolbert

I completely agree with you. That’s the only way we can explain what’s going on right now.

A couple years ago, we lived in Rome for a year. In Rome, you are surrounded by the ruins of a civilization. You don’t have the same our-best-days-are-ahead-of-us nonsense.

                So, we can only hope that some sort of Earth religion, or new philosophy will become dominant, before things get too bad.   Others argue that such a philosophy may occur, but only after  some sort of economic crash.  For an interesting "post crash" approach,, em-phasizing a sort of "gift economy", I would recommend a look at Lean Logic -A Dictionary of the Future and How to survive it.  Or the shorter and more readable Surviving the Future.

             In the shorter term,  it appears that simplicity is the only way out, as this piece by Ted trainer explains

Wishin' and hopin'

Last night I a wonderful dream about you
Hope that it will come true
      - The Majors

Only trouble is
Gee wiz
I'm dreaming my life away
     - Everly Brothers

Greetings

       Well the Paris extravaganza is over.  Time to celebrate?  A historic agreement ?

  Here's a good analysis from Brad Plummer at Vox 

Dr James Hanson doesn't seem too impressed.  He calls it a fraud.

Kevin Anderson gives is 4 out of ten.  See also here.  Anderson notes that it is weaker than Copenhagen.  One of the problems is that the agreement uses the word "should instead of "shall.  This terminology  was insisted on by the US, as "shall" would be a deal breaker.

Here's an interesting analysis from "New Internationalist" which suggests four evaluation criteria

"To meet the People’s Test, the Paris deal would need to do the following four things:

1. Catalyze immediate, urgent and drastic emission reductions;

2. Provide adequate support for transformation; 

3. Deliver justice for impacted people; 

4. Focus on genuine, effective action rather than false solutions;

Does the deal pass the test? The 15,000 people who took to the Paris streets today to condemn the agreement clearly didn’t think so.

-----

On the other hand, most mainstream folk try to  "keep on the sunny side", by calling it a "good first step", recognizing that the agreement doesn't do much,  and expressing hope for better things in the future.   Even if the agreement was enforceable-  which it isn't  - the "commitments" would still allow temperatures

 to rise about 3 degrees above pre industrial levels.

    So, hopeful people say maybe it will set the stage for future actions.   Things like -  new "voluntary limits" to be agreed to later,   a market based revolution in energy production turning away from FF's.  or new technology to pull CO2 out of the air.

-----

Which view you take may depend more on your general attitude than anything else..

Maybe Elizabeth Kolbert put it best ( from here)

"Elizabeth Kolbert - author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History - sums it up.  In one clip from Racing Extinction linked at the Rolling Stone article, she says in a voice of weary resignation, “We have these prehistoric brains, and we have this god-like technology…and when you bring them together, the result is not necessarily a happy one”.

Talking Like a Crazy Person

Crazy
I'm crazy for feeling so lonely
I'm crazy
Crazy for feeling so blue

           -Patsy Kline

I'm going off the rails

on a crazy train

       -Ozzy Osbourne

Greetings

  Here's an interesting interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction.  (see below)    One point she makes is that no one bothers to deny that we're in the midst of the sixth great extinction.   Species are going at a rate 1000 times faster than normal.   And no one bothers to deny that it's human caused.  

      Why not?   Perhaps, unlike Climate Change,  there's not much of a groundswell to take any action to address it.   Killing off everything else on the planet isn't worth stopping.    (As if nature, the biosphere, was something "out there" , whose demise, although sad,   is of no real concern).

     For those of you interested in the details, the World Wildife Fund publishes the Living Planet Report.  The 2014 issue is now out.  Here's the highlights:

     "The report writers, based on data kept by the Zoological Society of London, studied 10,380 populations of 3,038 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles from 1970 to 2010. Over these four decades, the average decline of these vertebrate species was 52 per cent – all in less than two human generations."

        How does this happen?   Here's one way of looking at it , from Paul Chefurka -  We think  the only species that matter are us, and our "resources" - i.e. livestock.     Everything else is expendable.

"Human societies, which have now coalesced into the global super-organism of techno-industrial civilization, are complex adaptive systems. As such they can be described in terms of their feedback loops: negative, stabilizing loops that keep the system from disintegrating; and positive, amplifying loops that keep it growing.

As the system grows, its primary positive feedback loop requires more energy, more energy efficiency, more resources,....

"Resources" in this assessment are all the things that can be used to promote system growth, whether those things are animal, vegetable or mineral, human or non-human. Anything that can't be used to facilitate growth is not a resource, and is either ignored or eliminated by the system. Domestic animals and other humans are understood to be resources, wild animals are not.

And here's a nice chart which shows the results of this program:

 
"I used three data sources to develop the chart: a paper by world-respected ecological scientist Vaclav Smil, called “Harvesting the Biosphere”, linked below; world population estimates from the Wikipedia article of the same name; and the UN’s Medium Fertility variant for the human population in 2050 (9.6 billion). "...I estimated the carrying capacity in this case as being about the same as the world’s wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE, with the assumption that the unassisted carrying capacity of the world would have been fully utilized at that point. I estimated the wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE as being somewhat less than the combined wild and domestic animal biomass in 1900, per Smil. I made it lower in order to account for the technological intensification of farming already well under way by that time.

  

   Kolbert  is often asked what her prescription would be to improve things.  She says

"My book lays out issues on a very, very large scale. What are the drivers of extinction today? I could actually have chosen different ones, but I chose ones that are the major drivers of extinction, and they are really big forces at work. Climate change, habitat loss, moving species around the world ... for me to propose a way to stop any one of these, I would sound like a crazy person. That’s not going to happen. I don’t do that. I just say, this is what’s happening, this is what’s driving these extinction rates, and I leave it to people to draw their own conclusions about what we could or should be doing. 

------

http://host.madison.com/entertainment/arts_and_theatre/books/exploring-another-extinction/article_4ac63798-dc52-5229-bc97-1c4ea2085472.html

Exploring another extinction

New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s upcoming lecture at UW-Madison, “The Sixth Extinction: The Legacy of the Anthropocene?” is billed in a rather apocalyptic way:

“Over the last half billion years, there have been five major mass extinction events. We are currently bringing about the sixth. This will be the legacy of the Anthropocene, and it will determine the future of life on this planet, for all intents and purposes, forever.”

Kolbert’s book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” released earlier this year, explores the recent disappearances of species in the context of a larger extinction, one triggered by humankind. Her talk is part of a larger event at UW-Madison, “The Anthropocene Slam: A Cabinet of Curiosities,” a three-day event sponsored by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

Kolbert was reached by Skype at her home in Rome, where she explained the meaning of Anthropocene (a geological term with a questionable start date of sometime between the inception of farming about 8,000 years ago and the 1950s), among other things.
Q: What’s the evidence that we’re in the middle of another extinction?
A: The obvious evidence is that extinction rates are very high. Paleontologists have this concept of “background extinction rate,” and there are different ways to measure it. Literally you measure it by going to the fossil record and seeing how long a species tends to last. If you look at our extinction rates in our own moment, and there was just a paper on this, they’re about 1,000 times higher than they should be. So that’s a very elevated rate of extinction. Now, whether that brings us to a mass extinction, which is defined by a very, very significant proportion of the world’s species dying off, that depends obviously on how long you have those elevated extinction rates.
Q: Is there any chance that evolution will save the day? That the world will adapt and adjust to us?
A: I think there are two time frames in which to answer that. The first is, if you have very elevated extinction rates, evolution is just not fast enough. You would not assume that because things are dying out faster than normal that they’re speciating faster than normal. We don’t have any evidence of that. Evolution has its own time scale, which is dependent on reproductive rates. If you’re an animal that reproduces only every 20 or 30 years, there’s a limit to how fast you can evolve. In the short term or the medium term, I don’t think there’s much chance of evolution keeping up.

In the very long term, when you look at the mass extinctions of the past, yes, eventually. Those empty ecological niches get filled and diversity ramps back up again. In the fossil record, that tends to take millions of years. We’re talking about a long time. A mass extinction is not something where we can just hope for the best. It doesn’t work that way.
Q: What can we do?
A: My book lays out issues on a very, very large scale. What are the drivers of extinction today? I could actually have chosen different ones, but I chose ones that are the major drivers of extinction, and they are really big forces at work. Climate change, habitat loss, moving species around the world ... for me to propose a way to stop any one of these, I would sound like a crazy person. That’s not going to happen. I don’t do that. I just say, this is what’s happening, this is what’s driving these extinction rates, and I leave it to people to draw their own conclusions about what we could or should be doing. All of these things are very much tied up with the way we live today, with globalization and modernity and industrialization. The idea that we’re going to suddenly undo those things — unfortunately, I don’t think that’s in the cards. How this is going to play out is the question of our time, really.
Q: So what do you say to people who deny this?
A: It’s an interesting thing. You have global warming deniers, but you don’t really have habitat fragmentation deniers, or invasive species deniers. You really don’t have extinction deniers. You can argue that that’s because people don’t really care about other species. They really don’t even get worked up about that. You don’t get a lot of pushback when you say that extinction rates are really high today. I don’t think that’s debatable.
Q: Is there any happy note to end on?
A: People ask me why I wrote this book if I don’t lay out a prescription for what we should do. I make the point that I think it’s quite important that we realize what we’re doing, what’s going on. That’s the only way to even begin to think about how we might ameliorate this situation. I do want to say there are loads of things we could be doing. It’s just that there’s nothing we could do that would be easy. So, there are tons of things to do. The first thing we could do is very dramatically reduce our carbon emissions, which we could do, but we would have to choose to do that.
Q: Any final thoughts?
A: The Anthropocene is a really important concept that has a lot of appeal even to people who are not geologists because it brings home that we have become the dominant force on the planet. I think it’s great that Madison is doing this conference because this is an idea that deserves to be very widely discussed. The ramifications of it need to be explored, and not just by a bunch of geologists

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