Ecce Homo

I am the man who 

brought you the yo-yo

     -Joe Jackson

Can't be a man 

if he doesn't smoke

the same cigarettes as me

      -Mick Jagger

Greetings

     Happy Earth Day!  (a little late).   Back in the days when Earth Day was a new idea, environmentalists could look around and see "mother nature on the run".   Their goal then was to get humans to back off, and let nature do its thing.  After all, nature had been doing so for millions of years, and it seems to have worked out.

   That was then.    Then Bill McKibben wrote "The End of Nature", and someone coined the term "anthropecene".   Nature was no longer doing its thing alone  we were "helping"..  

     What's next?  The "Eco modernist Manifesto" of course!    Below Clive Hamilton, an Australian philosopher , who incidentally wrote an excellent book "  Requiem For a Species, examine the "manifesto" and the "post environmental" movement.  something you are going to hear a lot more about, as it is a well funded, gee wiz, "technology can fix anything", type of philosophy that appeals to our optimistic  "can do" culture..   And its got a lot of money behind it.

     

           While Hamilton rightly turns away from this absurdity, he seems to fall into the arms of another absurd idea - endless growth.   He suggests we adopt the view of the IPCC  which ( though it's own technological magic - CCS ),  offers a vision of continued economic growth of 2%.     The IPCC'S version of "green growth"  may be preferable to putting all our faith in future developments in nuclear power,  but it maintains the same self contradictory goal - endless growth.    

As George Monbiot put it, here

"The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

"Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.

For a more fully developed view of degrowth see  here

             But logic rarely moves politics.   Money does.  As  Hamilton points out, the Break through Institute has strong monied  advocates. (Exxon, Koch, and the American Enterprise Institute)    The IPCC,  similarly reflect to the mainstream economic  credo " growth is not just good - it is the highest good "  .  And where is the profit in degrowth?

Once again , here' s Monbiot (I think)

Capitalism can sell many things, but it can't sell "less".

   

----

from here

The Technofix Is In: A critique of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” 

The world’s best scientists are warning that the world is warming inexorably, the oceans are becoming acidic and have turned into a “plastic soup,” and we are in the middle of the kind of mass extinction event not seen on the planet in millions of years. But don’t worry — a new breed of environmentalists has just released a manifesto declaring that, with a little faith in technology, humanity can move into a “great” new century of prosperity and universal human dignity on a thriving planet. How can this be?

For some years the California-based Breakthrough Institute has been vigorously promoting what it claims to be a new “post-environmentalism,” one highly critical of the mainstream environment movement and no longer wedded to the verities of the past.

In a much-discussed 2004 article, “The Death of Environmentalism,” the Institute’s founders, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, argued that mainstream greens had become too professionalised and insular. Caught up in Beltway politics, Big Green failed to recognize that the American political landscape had shifted well to the right. Their messages no longer cut through, and environmentalism needed a bold new vision to inspire citizens.

So far so good. But the bold new vision turned out not to be one calling for a far-reaching shake-up, but the opposite — collaborating with the same conservatives that Shellenberger and Nordhaus said had been winning the battle.

The institute maintains a determinedly optimistic view of the world, although the bright facade frequently veils a rancor directed against other environmentalists. This rancor perhaps explains some of its baffling policy stances.

The institute frequently attacks renewable energy and energy efficiency, at times with a highly tendentious use of data. For an organization concerned about spiraling greenhouse gas emissions, it’s hard to work out why the group is so dismissive, except as a way of differentiating itself from mainstream environmentalism. Conversely, it vigorously promotes nuclear power, also deploying data and arguments in a misleading way.

Nuclear power has become an obsession for the institute, a kind of signifier by which players in the environmental debate are allocated to the “good guys” box or the “bad guys” box. In a perfect example of mimesis, the dogmatic stance of some anti-nuclear campaigners is reflected back by these pro-nuclear campaigners.

Describing themselves as “ecomodernists,” those gathered around The Breakthrough Institute are not anti-science; they are after all ecomodernists. But in order to maintain their belief in a bright new future, they must find ways to temper or reinterpret the increasingly dire warnings from the world’s scientists. The preferred strategy is to scan the world for good news stories and from them create an alternative perceptual reality. (The recently launched “Bright Spots” is a similar approach.)

And this has led them to their most audacious declaration to date: the publication, last week, of what they are calling An Ecomodernist Manifesto, a self-consciously provocative attempt to make sense of what some scientists are calling “the Anthropocene,” or the Age of Humans. In the end, however, the manifesto’s faith in technological breakthroughs means it substitutes a kind of Californian positivity for the hard reality of climate politics. As a roadmap out of our ecological and social predicaments it leads us nowhere.

But before I go any further, first some background to understand how we got here.

Anthropocene: good or bad?

When Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term “the Anthropocene” in the year 2000, he was expressing his frustration at the inability of his fellow scientists to see that human activity has changed the Earth System, not just on its surface, but in fundamental ways. We have become so powerful, he argued, that we now rival the great forces of nature, to the point where we have disturbed the functioning of the planet as a whole.

In saying that Earth had passed out of the Holocene epoch and into the Anthropocene, Crutzen mostly expressed anxiety about the effect of carbon emissions and the unfolding catastrophe of climate change. It was global warming above all that he identified as the central process driving Earth into a new and dangerous epoch.

Yet as the scientific debate about the Anthropocene unfolded, some associated with The Breakthrough Institute began to reframe it in an unexpected way. If we live on an Earth dominated by humans, they reasoned, why not embrace our role as “the God species”? If humans have become the dominant force, why not extend our domination and turn it to the good rather than pull back?

The ecomoderns believe that human beings are not destructive creatures — and certainly not sinful ones as some greens imply — but creative, ingenious and basically well-meaning. If it is our destiny to inherit Earth, then the arrival of the Anthropocene is the fulfilment of that destiny.

One scientist close to The Breakthrough Institute, landscape ecologist Erle Ellis, began to do what no one had anticipated. He started to put the word “good” next to the word “Anthropocene.” He wrote of humanity’s transition to a higher level of planetary significance as “an amazing opportunity” and of how “we will be proud of the planet we create in the Anthropocene.”

For many, this was a jaw-dropping reframing of Anthropocene science. But for conservative environmentalists, like the influential Andrew Revkin at The New York Times, the “good Anthropocene” neatly reversed the dispiriting message of a collapsing Earth system, and so it had immediate appeal. (You can find more of Revkin’s thoughts on the Anthropocene here and here.)

There are facts and there are interpretations put on facts, and sometimes the most robust facts cannot penetrate the defensive walls of the determined optimist. Voltaire satirized Leibniz’s belief “that good ultimately will prevail in the world” in Candide (published in 1759 and subtitled l’Optimisme). But neither the harshest facts nor the sharpest satire can dissuade those determined to declare, “Well, I’m an optimist.”

In the hands of the ecomodernists, optimism isn’t used as a torch to light the way forward, but rather as a cudgel with which to beat intellectual opponents into submission — because, especially in the United States, to be less than optimistic is to be, in a way, un-American. The ecomodernists have been trying to achieve a monopoly on optimism as a way of winning the debate about how to balance human interests with the needs of wild nature. In the end, it doesn’t work, as the relentless optimism in their manifesto comes across as detached and dreamy, and blind to the hard truths of political combat.

A new manifesto

Many were aghast that people claiming to be environmentalists could so misread the science of climate change as to append “good” to “Anthropocene.” How can a happy future be conjured from the devastation that will be visited on millions of people by global warming, much of which is already locked in to the climate system?

Undeterred, and as if emboldened by the dismay, The Breakthrough Institute has now gone one better. An Ecomodernist Manifesto, signed by 18 “scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens” associated with the institute, is not satisfied with proclaiming that we can look forward to a good Anthropocene. The manifesto declares that we are entering a great Anthropocene.

What force can turn a gloomy prognosis into a golden future? The answer, of course, is technology. The manifesto’s authors are convinced that “knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.”

For those who believe we must embrace low-emissions technology (i.e. all of us who recognize the reality of anthropogenic climate change) the manifesto is oddly selective, dismissing many large-scale renewable energy technologies (especially wind power and biomass), and taking a skeptical view of solar energy’s potential.

And so the manifesto returns to the ecomoderns’ peculiar obsession: only nuclear power can give us climate stabilization. But, the authors concede, the nuclear industry is flat on its face in most places, so we must wait for the next generation of nuclear fission (or even fusion!) plants, before which opposition will surely melt away. In the meantime, we will need to build more hydroelectric dams and construct “fossil fuel plants with carbon capture and storage” technology.

Here the ability to set aside science is on full display. The manifesto does not say how long we will need to wait for the next generation of nuclear plants, or how much of the global carbon budget will be used up while we cool our heels. Perhaps it might take 20 years for the first plants to be built, and 40 before they are making a large dent in global emissions. By then the planet will be, in Christine Lagard’s arresting phrase, “roasted, toasted, fried and grilled,” and there will be no way to rescue the situation.

If we must wait a long time for the solution, the standby of carbon capture and storage is almost as speculative. Even “clean coal’s” boosters accept that the technology will not be cutting global emissions significantly for two or three decades.

Those who signed the manifesto must “know” all this, so their stance can only be described as a form of denial or at least evasion, one that selectively permits certain facts through the optimo-filter while blocking or downplaying others.

Politics gone missing

The ecomoderns’ techno-fetishism is possible only because they don’t think about politics. It is true that thinking about the politics of climate change is depressing. For those who “embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future,” the easiest path is to ignore the messy world of politics and focus one’s gaze on humankind’s amazing technological achievements.

And so in the manifesto, which tells a story of how we got here and where we should go, there is no mention of the forces, national and international, that have given us rising carbon dioxide concentrations, acidifying oceans and all the rest. We look in vain to find reference to the proven power of corporations and lobbyists to stop environmental laws, or to the total victory of money politics in the United States, now entrenched after Citizens United. Exxon and organized denialism do not appear even between the lines.

For the ecomoderns, the story of the past and the story of the future revolve around one thing: “Meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge.” It’s an entire historiography in which the human relationship to the natural world depends essentially on human ingenuity and entrepreneurship. It is not kings, presidents, proletarians or generals who make history — but rather scientists, inventors and engineers, and it is they who will save us.

It’s a Silicon Valley view of the world, one of heroic inventors like Steve Jobs, who disrupt the old and bring in the new to improve our lives. This position is a defense of the status quo and is the same one argued by those who have resisted all climate protection legislation that would disrupt the structure of power, not least in the coal lobby’s appeal to the pipe dream of “clean coal.”

If you believe that solving the climate change problem “is fundamentally a technological challenge,” then we are in this mess not because of the power of the fossil fuel lobby, not because of the influence of the campaign of denial, not because of money politics, not because persuading consumers to accept a price on carbon seems too hard, and not because getting international cooperation has been fraught. No, we are in this mess because technology has not evolved quickly enough to avoid it.

Yet no one involved in the climate change debate can be unaware that the technologies to sharply reduce global emissions have been available for a long time. Nor can they be unaware that for at least 15 years every study of the economics of transforming the energy economies of nations like the United States shows that the cost to GDP would extremely small. An exhaustive assessment in the latest IPCC report has been summarized like this:

Ambitious climate protection would cost only 0.06 percentage points of growth each year. This means that instead of a growth rate of about 2 percent per year, we would see a growth rate of 1.94 percent per year. Thus economic growth would merely continue at a slightly slower pace.

The roadblock to climate mitigation has never been technological. Nor has it been economic. It has been political. The ecomoderns’ claim that we must wait for new technologies to make serious mitigation possible is not merely untrue, it is irresponsible.

The technofix is in

An Ecomodernist Manifesto does not offer a new way out of the climate morass, but only a warmed-over version of the old-fashioned American technofix. Politics has gone AWOL in it. The only place politics intrudes is where the manifesto bewails social and institutional obstacles to the further spread of nuclear power. So it is the greens who bring politics to the climate debate! This is not an accidental slip, for The Breakthrough Institute gives the impression of being motivated less by the vision of a great future on a human-regulated Earth than by animosity towards other environmentalists.

Predictably, the manifesto has been greeted with enthusiasm by various purveyors of climate science denial, like the National Review, the Fraser Institute and, in Australia, the Murdoch media’s chief promoter of climate denial and denigrator of renewables (the Australian’s Graham Lloyd.)

We cannot be held responsible for the supporters our ideas attract. Yet in pursuit of its bold new vision, The Breakthrough Institute has allied itself with some unsavory characters, like the American Enterprise Institute which has been active in promoting climate science denial and has been partly funded by Exxon and the Koch Brothers. Is this the “post-partisan politics” foreshadowed by “The Death of Environmentalism”? If so, it’s a tarnished vision and reflects The Breakthrough Institute’s self-defeating policy of cozying up to environmentalism’s natural enemies and alienating its most stalwart friends.

Disagreement within the broad coalition that is the environment movement is not only inevitable, but desirable, and that includes disputing the pros and cons of nuclear power. But one thing we all ought to agree on is the basic science of climate change, and any reasonable reading rules out a rosy view of what the Anthropocene holds in store for us.

Clive Hamilton is the author of Earthmasters: The dawn of the age of climate engineering (Yale University Press) and Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change (Earthscan), among other books. He is professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.

"Some people say not to worry about the air

Some people don't know shit about the...
Air..."

-Talking Heads

Oooh ohh,  the damage done

-Neil Young

Greetings

    Here' s an interesting piece from the Nation's blog.    It shows with great clarity, how our leaders, including such luminaries as Paul Krugman,  are unable or unwilling to accept what is going on , and accept  the required remedy.  

     As the author points out, we are past the point where we could have an " evolutionary" change, merely shutting down coal plants, and continuing to burn oil and gas.    This might have been a possible path years ago.   Now that we have burned up over half of the carbon budget things have changed

"If even the smartest writers, who obviously get the reality of climate change, don’t acknowledge what “facing up” to it would actually mean—essentially, global emissions peaking by 2020 and then plummeting to near zero by 2050, leaving something like 80 percent of fossil-fuel reserves untapped—then where are the truth tellers? What does “facing up” really look like?"

see more below

    Of course, it should be no surprise that opinion leaders like Krugman don't want to see the facts.  None of us do, including many environmental leaders. !    I recently read an interesting article on the psychology and  climate change.  The article suggested that when confronted with a difficult truth, we may resort to a number of psychological tricks to avoid the pain.  Denial is well known.   Another is called " displacement". Which might be considered a form of scapegoating.   One way to do that is to focus solely on the energy supply , and ignore demand.  It is easy to blame oil companies and utilities, but hard to modify  our own behavior

"A second way to psychologically deal with global warming is by displacement.  Those who deal with the issue in this manner agree with the science but place the blame associated with the problem on something other than themselves, such as those who don’t agree with the science.  Environmentalists typically fall into this category.  Most environmentalists would say they recycle, use energy efficient vehicles and use energy efficient home devices.  They may also be a member of an environmental group or groups.

The problem with the displacement approach is that generally those in the group have relatively high incomes and there is a strong correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and income "

He also takes a poke at McKibben's  (supply side) argument that we could easily move to an all renewable economy - "Just look at Germany"

"An April 25, 2013 article by Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone magazine made that argument.  Here is what he stated in his article:

“With each passing month, something else weakens the industry’s (fossil fuels) hand: the steady rise of renewable energy, a technology that’s gone from pie-in-the-sky to panel-on-the-roof in remarkably short order.  In the few countries where governments have really gotten behind renewables, the results are staggering: There were days last spring (that would have been spring 2012) when Germany (pale, northern Germany) managed to generate half its power from solar panels.  Even in this country, much of the generating capacity added last year came from renewables.  A December study from the University of Delaware showed that by 2030 we could affordably power the nation 99.9 percent of the time on renewable energy.  In other words, logic, physics and technology work against the fossil-fuel industry.  For the moment, it has the political power it needs – but political power shifts perhaps more easily than physics.”

Since I follow energy issues closely, I was a bit skeptical of his statement which suggests that a sizeable percentage of Germany’s energy now comes from renewable sources.  I decided to look at data from the U.S. Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration (U.S.DOE/EIA) concerning German energy consumption.  Based upon EIA data, Germany obtained 83.1% of its total energy from fossil fuels in 2012, essentially the same as in 2011. 

The change in percent fossil fuel consumption in Germany over the last decade has been relatively minor.  In 2002 Germany obtained 85.2% of its energy from fossil fuels and in 2007 it obtained 84.5%.   For comparison purposes, the U.S. obtained 82.1% of its energy from fossil fuels in 2012.  The energy transition in Germany isn’t nearly as dramatic as Bill McKibben suggests."

---------------

http://www.thenation.com/blog/177705/climate-truth-tellers-honor-roll-2013#

It’s the closing weeks of 2013 and The Boston Globe, the recently acquired real estate of proud Red Sox owner John W. Henry, still publishes climate denial on its Opinion page. This puts Mr. Henry in fine company, so to speak, as shown in an important new study of the climate-denial funding machine from Drexel University’s Robert J. Brulle and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Of course, Henry’s funding of his op-ed page can’t be compared with the billion-dollar ocean of right-wing anti-science money. But still.

If it’s hard to accept—at this late date, given what we know about the imminent threat ofcatastrophic warming—that one of America’s great newspapers still runs columns denying the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, consider for a moment some of the other forms that denial still takes, many of them far more subtle and yet, perhaps, no less dangerous.

Indeed, you find them in places you’d least expect, such as Harvard’s Massachusetts Hall. AsTim DeChristopher put it in a guest post on this blog in October, when Harvard President Drew Faust issued her public statement rejecting students’ call for fossil-fuel divestment, she revealed, not outright denial of climate science, but a failure to acknowledge what the situation requires. Here’s DeChristopher:

[Faust] touts all the great research on climate change that is done at Harvard, but she ignores the fact that the fossil fuel industry actively works to suppress or distort every one of those efforts. To seriously suggest that any research will solve the climate crisis while we continue to allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain a stranglehold on our democracy is profoundly naive. Faust never admits whether or not she agrees with the basic science of the carbon budget, which is the foundation of the understanding that the current reserves of the fossil fuel industry cannot be burned without condemning us to an unlivable future. If she accepts the science, she should explain how her plan of cooperation will convince the industry to leave those assets in the ground.

But here’s the truly scary thing: Drew Faust is utterly conventional in her failure to connect climate science with our political and economic realities. And I’m not talking about conservatives here. Remarkably, you see it across a broad swath of the center-left and left, from mainstream to radical, where climate is too often completely absent from any analysis—whether it’s Peter Beinart, to take just one example, in one of the year’s most talked-aboutpieces, arguing that millennials are giving rise to a “new new left,” while leaving out of his generational analysis the existential threat looming over today’s young people; or whether it’sJacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara, whose recent “Letter to The Nation From a Young Radical” described a “Next Left” that’s apparently oblivious to climate science. (To be fair, Jacobin has published some searching essays on climate and left politics by Alyssa Battistoni, with another forthcoming in January.)

Even as well-informed a writer as Paul Krugman, reviewing William Nordhaus’s The Climate Casino in The New York Review of Books, seems unable to admit the full magnitude of the climate threat. “Facing up to global warming,” he writes, “would involve virtually eliminating our use of coal except to the extent that CO2 can be recaptured after consumption; it would involve somewhat reducing our use of other fossil fuels…” Wait. What? It’s not clear how Krugman imagines us avoiding the worst-case scenarios—and stabilizing global average temperature at the internationally agreed-upon target of two degrees C—while only “somewhat reducing” our use of oil and gas in the coming decades. (It’s hard to believe Krugman is unaware of analyses like UK climate scientist Kevin Anderson’s, spelled out inthis classic post by Grist’s David Roberts.) But then, he also notes that Nordhaus believes the acceptable warming limit can be raised to 4C, if the near-term costs of emissions reductions are too high—without ever telling readers that a 4C planet, as the World Bank reported last year, is likely beyond adaptation. In other words, he fails to note that Nordhaus is talking blithely about civilizational catastrophe within the lifetimes of today’s children.

If even the smartest writers, who obviously get the reality of climate change, don’t acknowledge what “facing up” to it would actually mean—essentially, global emissions peaking by 2020 and then plummeting to near zero by 2050, leaving something like 80 percent of fossil-fuel reserves untapped—then where are the truth tellers? What does “facing up” really look like?

Well, here’s one example—and my pick for 2013’s climate truth-teller of the year award.

Back in October, in “How science is telling us all to revolt” in The New Statesman, Naomi Klein highlighted “a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems—particularly the climate system—is leading them to…transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions.” Foremost among them is the aforementioned Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of Britain’s leading climate scientists. “In recent years,” Klein writes,

Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous… Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies—all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned—that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else….

what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

Anderson and Bows, Klein notes, have “laid down something of a gauntlet” for fellow scientists, essentially arguing, as Klein puts it, that “in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research.” She quotes Anderson, who wrote this past August:

Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” [his emphasis].

(On December 10-11, the Tyndall Centre hosted a conference on “radical emissions reduction,” at which Anderson and Klein spoke.)

Now, ask yourself what our national conversation on climate would sound like—including (no,especially) on the left—if this kind of brutal honesty broke through with any regularity.

For one thing, it might sound a lot more like Bill McKibben’s latest piece in Rolling Stone,“Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story,” in which McKibben writes:

If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.

As McKibben points out, “All this new carbon drilling, digging and burning the White House has approved will add up to enough to negate the administration’s actual achievements” on climate.

Or, at least among activists on the left, an honest conversation might sound a bit like Occupy organizer and Wildfire Project founder Yotam Marom’s must-read essay “Confessions of a climate change denier” (Waging Nonviolence and openDemocracy.net), a heartfelt and provocative call to fellow activists who have tended to see climate as an issue separate from their own work. “It wasn’t until I was out organizing on New York City’s outer beaches after Hurricane Sandy,” he writes at the outset, “that I understood my sluggishness on climate justice was nothing short of climate change denial.”

Then again—though this may be far too much to ask—it might sound like James Hansen, recently retired as NASA’s top climate scientist, and seventeen co-authors, who just this month released a major study concluding that warming of 2 degrees C—that internationally agreed-upon limit—would itself set in motion “disastrous consequences” beyond humanity’s control. Instead, Hansen and his co-authors write, we should do everything we can to stay as close as possible to 1 degree C—which means our global carbon “budget” should actually be half of what the international community committed to at Copenhagen (i.e., half the budget on which Kevin Anderson’s already grim analysis is based). It may sound unreasonable. But as Hansen et al. write, “There is still opportunity for humanity to exercise free will.”

But maybe, in the end, truth-telling might also sound at least a little like these parting words from Dave Roberts of Grist, in his farewell post at the end of August, as he prepared to take a year off, exhausted from writing about climate and needing to unplug entirely. (I’m glad Dave had the wisdom to pull back and take care of himself, but his absence has been the most conspicuous feature of the climate conversation these last few months of 2013.) “It looks like things are going to get bad, possibly really bad, even within my children’s lifetimes,” he wrote in August. “The decisions we’re making today will reverberate for centuries, and so far we’re blowing it.” But he went on, “Though it may seem odd, I find comfort in chaos theory.…”

The outcome of the climate crisis depends not just on physical forces but on human beings, complex economic, social, and technological systems, and complex systems are nonlinear….

History unfolds along the lines of what Stephen Jay Gould called “punctuated equilibrium.” Things can appear stable for years and years while tensions gather beneath the surface, hairline fractures develop, and the whole system becomes highly sensitive to small perturbations. (The butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane, etc.)….

We don’t know when history might unlock the door, so we have no choice but to keep pushing on it.

Indeed. And I’d only add: we need a lot more of us out there pushing—and pushing a whole lot harder.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/177705/climate-truth-tellers-honor-roll-2013#