Gentle Decline 1/10: Current & Currency

Hi. This issue has a slightly different focus (or maybe a slightly different direction of ramble); it's about current climate change, and what can be done to mitigate it, rather than what can be done to deal with it after the fact. Or rather, it's about what we're not doing, and how hard we're resisting doing anything about it, even in the face of all the evidence. Or rather, it's about how to change that. Maybe.

I am no saint in this regard. I do use public transport, I recycle, most of my reading is electronic, and I avoid burning coal and turf (wood is pretty ok for burning, as long as the tree is replaced). But I could recycle more, my water usage is probably terrible, and I almost certainly use more electricity than I should. However, I'm a pretty firm believer in the notion that while individual actions are useful, leaving them up to individuals is just plain not effective. In fact, there are two problems with it.

First, there's a fairly large segment of the population who won't undertake an action unless they or people they know directly benefit from it (or prevent hassle for themselves, which is a kind of benefit). There've been many labels for these people over time, but at the moment the term "conservative" is useful, both in terms of dictionary definition ("keeping things the way they are") and the political positioning. And environmentally friendly actions rarely, if ever, carry a direct personal benefit, so conservatives won't undertake them.

Second, a lot of actions - probably, in environmental terms, a large majority - are undertaken by non-individual entities; corporations, companies, and other organisations, whether they're for profit or not. Such organisations aren't conservative in the same way, but they are almost all driven by money - enough to keep going in the case of the non-profits, and as much profit as possible for the rest - no matter how forward-looking the people within them are.And an organisation will always act to perpetuate itself (which is a vague quote from someone or somewhere, but damned if I can remember where or who), which can be singularly unhelpful.

Separately, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that penalties for undesirable actions are not effective. There's a case I've read about (apparently in Freakonomics, now that I come to look it up, so take that with some salt) where a kindergarten started fining parents for turning up late to collect the kids. The result was that more parents turned up late, because now there was a clear cost attached, for which they could budget, and not the frowning kindergarten teacher's disapproval (well, there probably still was, but they could hand over money and tell themselves the matter was settled). So the conclusion is that stick is less useful than carrot (which, frankly, anyone can tell you, and the idea that the world works otherwise is a pipe dream attached to authoritarianism).

It's been demonstrated pretty well, I think, that monetary incentives work to encourage particular behaviour this way. Agricultural subsidies are a very clear example of this, and most farmers will do whatever's necessary to keep the subsidy money coming in, regardless of the actual value or sense of what's being done (about half of farm income in Ireland is subsidies now). So one would think that offering subsidies for environmentally friendly behaviour would be an easy step.

Where would the subsidy money come from? Well, sit tight, because here's a mind-blowing concept: we stop subsidising environmentally unfriendly stuff. The whole oil industry, for a start - Ireland currently hands over something in the region of half a billion a year there (see figures from 2015). The UK pays more, and the US oil subsidies are, frankly, batshit crazy. If those subsidies were taken away from those sectors, and paid instead to green industries, rewilding, carbon sequestration, reforestation, and so on, imagine what could be done.

Greta Thunberg has similar thinking, along with a large dollop of straight-up no-messing blame for government. As an aside, Thunberg reminds me of Ender's sister Valentine in Ender's Game, and it pleases me immensely that the first real example of the kind of children-bringing-clear-thinking-to-the-people that Orson Scott Card envisioned is coming from a leftist environmentalist girl in Sweden. Card, being a US conservative of a particularly repulsive bent, has a more than fair chance of hating everything she stands for.

Thunberg was applauded by the UK Parliament. But they're doing precisely fuck all to actually get things moving, because they are... you can see it coming, can't you... conservative. Actually Conservative on the part of the Tories, in as much as they're a functioning government. Time was when the Tories actually had a decent attitude to environmentalism, including (gods help us) Margaret Thatcher, who had opinions on global warming which were pretty sensible and forward-looking. The current crowd are worse than useless, because they are all about the money, and not at all about the land.

Which brings me around to the point of this issue: voting. There are European elections coming up, and local elections in Ireland (as opposed to national). I don't like one-issue voting, but in this era, I think that if we don't chase the single issue of sensible environmental policies - including moving subsidies, and otherwise incentivising environmentally friendly actions - then we're being really, genuinely short-sighted.

Sadly, the Irish Green Party are not much use. They're vague, hand-wavy on almost all topics but their core, and I don't respect any of them as lawmakers or negotiators. But they're the best of a bad lot, so they're going to be going at the top of my ballot, followed by the rest in order of environmental sensibility. I strongly suggest that you consider doing similarly in that election, if you're in Ireland, or in the next one you have, wherever you may be. A rising tide of support for environmental issues - and usefully, the new voters who've come of age in the last few years are fairly strongly on that side - will push the existing parties toward dealing with those issues too.

Doorstep canvassing is a thing in Ireland - I don't know how much it happens elsewhere. So I'm going to be lining up some questions about environmental issues in order to ram the point home a little more. I'll also write some letters (necessary because many Irish politicians ignore online commentary at an absolutely criminal level as a matter of policy, emails from constituents included). One of the questions I'll be asking will be about the recent wave of tree- and hedgerow-cutting in Ireland, which appears to be coming from one single insurance company (with the railway company getting in on it as well.) When I was in my teens, the practice of tying iron bars - old crowbars being ideal - along branches to discourage cutting machines was well known and frequently practiced, and I feel that might make a comeback. Another question will be about rewilding, which I'm more and more coming to think is a solution to some of the environmental issues we're facing, and how they're going to promote that. I expect some blank looks.

(Sadly, the only doorstep canvassers I've ever met in reality were from Sinn Fein, with whom I'm not engaging due to their terrorist background, and the then-independent Catherine Murphy, who's generally doing good work and doesn't need hassle from me. But I can hope.)

This party political broadcast has been brought to you by the alright-enough-of-this-bullshit position.

While we're on current issues, the New York Times has had some very good environmental coverage lately. First up, a semi-interactive piece about food choices and their environmental effects. As this is still at the individual level, I'm sceptical of its overall effect, but incremental change is a thing too. I feel like food companies are a little more sensitive to consumer opinion than others, though, so it's possible that individual movements away from beef and lamb and toward more plant foods (by which I mean actual plants, not processed meat substitute nonsense) would have a knock-on effect on the industry.

Another piece on what dendrochronology can tell us about climate history has some excellent stuff, and draws attention to the movements in the jet stream, which have been responsible in large part for Ireland's weird weather over the last decade or so (cold winters, snow, hot summers, storm trains). There's a bit in it, too, which gives me cold shudders, wherein one of the labs has

"[A] slice of the bristlecone pine that was cut down in the 1960s by a graduate student named Donald Rusk Currey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It wasn’t until after he felled the tree and counted the rings that he realized, to his horror, that he had, with permission from the United States Forest Service, unceremoniously sawed down the oldest known tree in the world."

I'm pretty sure I've had nightmares like that.

And then a really excellent piece on the effects in the here and now that climate change is having on crops grown for food in the US. In some ways, that's more germane to the ongoing how-to-deal-with mission of this newsletter, but it's pretty useful to have to show actual, current, on-the-ground changes to the remaining doubters we encounter.

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to note that Indonesia is moving its capital because Jakarta is sinking. I'll keeping an eye on this as it rolls through (which will probably take some effort as it drops out of the news cycle; while I could point at news sources in India and China, I couldn't name one in Indonesia), but I don't think it's going to be anything we can look at as an example of how to handle climate change - I am moderately confident that it'll be a logistical and humanitarian disaster, even if everyone there does the best they can. But it'd be worse if they didn't move it, which is kind of what we're here about.

It's a rainy day in May, and since we've already had frost this month, climate change is close to the surface. If you think more people should know about all this, let them know that Gentle Decline exists at https://tinyletter.com/gentledecline.