Gentle Decline 1/15: Repetition and Retrenching

Hi. I want to be a bit more up-front and clear about the purpose of the information I'm gathering and discussing, because a few people seem to think I'm running an environmental interest newsletter here. I'm not. It is my firm belief that we have already passed a point of no return in environmental terms, that the current set of governments and corporations won't do much, if anything, about their emissions and effects, and that the climate is going to be completely buggered up worldwide in the short, medium, and long terms. This newsletter is about how we can best get by in the world that results, without doing unwarranted harm to other people.

Certainly, part of that survival includes slowing down the mad crashing course toward 4C rises in global average temperatures. But it's only slowing down. I do not believe it's possible to reverse course; there is too much momentum in our species-wide approach to economics, and possibly even in the actual physical processes already under way. I do have an interest in the ways in which that momentum is discussed and examined by the media and the people around me, because I think that at some point, it's going to become as culturally important a thing as the Cold War was for the people who were conscious of that. I wasn't conscious among those people, being virtually cut off from day-to-day media as a child, and spending a lot of my time reading books that were not set in this world, or that were published before World War II. Indeed, it was something of a surprise to me that there was an economic depression in Ireland in the 80s; in my own personal episode of shifting baseline syndrome, I thought that was just how the world was.

(This issue turns out to be largely links, and me commenting on them. There is no clearer topic than media coverage and reception of climate disaster for this one, and that's kind of fuzzy in places.)

Speaking of media coverage, though, here's a thing: Six Florida newsrooms cooperating to cover climate change stories. Obviously, given that it's low and flat, Florida is going to feel - already is feeling - the impact of climate disaster rather sooner than other places, and this is a recognition of that reality on the ground. Since Florida is also the preferred destination of American retirees, which pushes it toward conservatism, in the small-c sense, and toward voting for the Republicans, which are no longer the same thing there. So an increased awareness of something that party still largely denies the reality of should be an interesting tension there. This is, however, still coverage of the sky falling, rather than any information about what to with the pieces of fallen sky if none of them land on you, or even how to avoid pieces of sky landing on you.

Similarly, there's coverage of how storm surges could now reach Baton Rouge in Louisiana. If, like me, you have no idea of the geography of Louisiana (and there's existing commentary about how New Orleans has a map nobody would invent), there are diagrams. The upshot is that a lot of places which have hitherto been inland enough to avoid the effects of hurricane-driven storm surges are no longer safe in that regard.

And on the other hand, there is some blithering panic to be had. I mean, the basic facts in the article are correct, and the overall conclusions are solid, but there's not going to be any huge erosion of human rights or the rule of law in the medium term, any more than there was from the 20th century's various wars and disasters (while conceding that there was and will be some). Some very unpleasant things will happen, and it is equally unpleasantly certain that a number of people will die, but all of this will happen gradually, governments - being composed almost solely of rich people (see the actual offended-ness of US conservatives over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' recent work as a bartender) - will move to safer places, law enforcement will move with them, and things will go on.

For a more sensible approach, we can look to the superb Arkady Martine, and her thinking on city planning. She's a science fiction writer, and I recommend her books highly, but she's also and more relevantly here a newly qualified city planner who is intending to make a career in climate-resilient cities.

Part of my ongoing interest in climate disaster is because of my own physiological responses to extremes of weather. I don't handle heat well, and I've found that the single most useful thing I can do as temperatures pass 24C is to go to sleep. I'll wake up of my own accord once temperatures drop back down, and be capable and functioning again, as opposed to the state of ill-tempered non-brain-using confusion I end up in for hours if I try to continue doing stuff. 24C used to be a pretty hot day in Ireland; it now occurs regularly in summer. But I'm slowly refining my understanding of these traits in myself as well - direct sunlight makes it worse very quickly. Ferocious hydration (6 litres or more a day) makes it happen a bit less. Cold on the back of my neck will get me through hot periods better than anything short of sleep. And high temperatures on their own don't affect me as much in late August and into the autumn, such that I think the angle of the light or the length of the day have effects. I suspect this means I'm actually a plant. At time of writing, though, it's the start of November, and my brain is back online properly.

The early autumn has featured a large number of Gentle-Decline-relevant articles in various media. The one that's top of mind right now is one from the Irish Times, basically echoing a lot of the points I've made here. I want to quote one bit, though, because it's so stupid it made me laugh.

Apparently residents in Clontarf, a prosperous suburb in North Dublin:

"successfully argued for the lowering of a recently built flood defence sea wall, at a cost of half a million euro to Dublin City Council, to restore their view"

This article is of course directly after an Taoiseach got up on his hind legs and proclaimed that climate change won't be so bad because we'll have milder winters. I have opinions about his thinking here, but mostly it descends into cursing politicians and considering lifting my self-imposed ban on hexing people into ashes. He did later perform a half-hearted retraction of his words, an I-suppose-you-could-interpret-what-I-said-that-way non-apology. I don't expect anything better from him.

Between a dry summer and a wet August, bread prices are set to rise in the UK (and probably across Europe; pasta too). And that's before any Brexit-related prices changes (assuming it ever happens). This is the kind of stuff that caused riots and revolutions in Europe in times past; bread is one half of bread and circuses. And that's in addition to 19 million acres not being planted with any crops in the US because the weather simply didn't allow it. That's about 5% of arable land in the US, give or take a bit depending on your definitions. And the UN is issuing warnings about global food supplies.To be bluntly honest, even I'm a bit shocked by the speed at which this is coming in. Putting potatoes in the back garden is starting to look pretty good again, and I didn't think that would be a necessity for a few more years.

Some people - I've had conversations with some of them reading this - reckon that technology will save us (ignoring my sarcasm, that's a really good article otherwise). I don't believe that it will. Technology relies on fossil fuels, on rare earths, on hard-to-mine metals, and so on. And on infrastructure.

Speaking of which: The Internet, which you might think wouldn't be much affected by the climate crisis, will actually have some considerable difficulty. And the flooding that hit the crops in the US Midwest also has a huge cumulative effect on infrastructure, and so does heat.

But we already know that straight-up heat is going to be a problem anyway. And a couple of months after that was written, there's record-breaking cold about to happen across a wide swathe of the US.

It does hearten me, in a sort of grim way, to see that there are other people concluding that the world is going to change, and that we're going to have to deal with that. I don't much like that they're not really finding any better solutions than I am. I should not be in the forefront of thinking on this stuff, and I'm still hoping to find that some responsible and sensible country like Switzerland or Finland has an actual plan that the rest of us can adopt.

Next issue, I'm hoping to get back to talking about ways to handle things. I'm going to do more thinking about food crises, in particular, and see if I can think of something that isn't just stockpiling in the short term and horticulture in the medium. I am starting to think things about communal living, too, because reproducing the work necessary to do that small-scale farming at the level of our current modern thinking of "household" isn't efficient; the economies of scale of growing things are such that the work of one person - with appropriate support at specific times of the year - can probably provide a lot of the food for eight or ten. This doesn't necessitate living in one big building, or other ideas of the commune, but it probably does involve the formation of small cooperatives, or similar arrangements. I'm good at the basic ideas of them, but I tend to assume good faith and good will, and having some mechanism and arrangements in place to handle things when those fail is likely a necessary thing. More on that when I actually get some of my thinking sorted out, and look into successes and failures in those areas in the past. If you've thinking or direction on this, please hit reply and tell me about it.

It's a cold November evening, and there was a short burst of sleet earlier, following a week of ongoing rain, such that many fields on North Kildare's clay soil are waterlogged where they're not flooded, and I'm going to hit send. This issue has been brought to you by Raspberry Coke Zero, which I am going to miss when civilisation breaks down, a replacement for the creaky old laptop that was limiting my output considerably, and a snoring cat in a radiator adjacent cat-bed.