Gentle Decline 11/1: Something & Stuff

Hi. This issue is full of bits and pieces, and doesn't have a coherent focus; a sort of roundup of interesting and relevant material.

I've recently created a Twitter account for Gentle Decline, which you can find at @gentledecline (I am slightly amazed the name was still available). Thus far it's links to the subscription page, some links to specific issues in the archive, and a pile of retweets of vaguely relevant material. And some cynicism about the sudden uptick of interest in climate issues in Ireland now that there're elections in the air. If that interests you, go ahead and follow.

Obviously, Twitter is one of the Internet's finest rage-producing machines, and the amount of nonsense on there is very high. Reading through the 'filter' of Gentle Decline's interest area, though (whereby I don't follow people with that account just because I know them, and leave out the gaming, SCA, author, and other irrelevant accounts), produces some odd effects. First and foremost is that it doesn't filter out all the memes and non-environmental politics; some comes back in because the people I do follow re-tweet stuff.

Second, however, is that it's still a very different experience to my own Twitter feed - I'm not seeing much of the rage-for-the-sake-of-rage stuff, which is a good start. The thing that's almost entirely missing is gender material; the treatment of and commentary on sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so forth that's so much of my experience of the medium to date. Commentary on racism, capitalism (and thereby oligarchy and classism), and religious bias remains visible. I'm not sure what to make of this - perhaps environmentalism, climate change and anthropogenic disaster are indifferent to gender, but affected by the other characteristics?

Socioeconomic class and wealth are certainly major factors in treatment of environmental issues (and as noted in the last issue, there are also corporate entities, which have wealth in plenty and don't really have class, but do have motivations and actual activity). I think it's pretty likely that the amount of environmental damage an individual is doing probably scales with wealth - more than linearly, but hopefully less than exponentially (and we have now reached the limit of my knowledge of scaling maths). Very poor people don't have vehicles with which to pollute and use public transport; very rich people have private jets and yachts and such, and this carries across to housing, food consumption, and so on. Some very rich people spend some of their mountains of money on carbon sinks, tree-planting and other offsetting, but they're a small minority, as far as I can make out. And it's been shown that income inequality is correlated with carbon dioxide output, although that's at a societal, not individual level.

(This is bringing me back toward "climate change is an output of capitalism", which I more or less covered in Issue #6, but there's no harm in voicing that again, I think. Capitalism, as one of its internal mechanisms, seeks to minimise the costs of production, and externalising some of these costs as environmental damage is an easy way to do that. More on that below.)

So are race and religion (or racism and Islamophobia, being more direct about it) also contributing to climate change? Except where they're tied in with socioeconomic factors - and they absolutely are - I can't see it. There is, however, the attitude of (white) Christianity to the environment (and change as a broad concept) to take into account. There are strains of Christianity in the US that seem not only to believe in climate change, but to embrace it as some kind of end-of-days scenario they find desirable. (There are also the people who eschew talking about climate change because it's seen as "liberal" or "not polite", for whom I have some words which are also not polite).

The end-of-days types are undoubtedly out there. There's a kind of conspiracy theory floating around that they are in positions of power in the US, and are deliberately pushing toward apocalyptic climate change as some sort of cult goal. But to be honest, I think that fails against Occam's Razor, and the simplest explanation is that the people in power in the US actually have no sincere religious beliefs, but find that a facade of Christianity is the one that gives them social excuses to increase wealth (actual as-written Christianity is a pretty different thing). And an increase in wealth is what drives them; Western society is all about that.

Unfortunately, even when we move on to dealing with the aftermath of climate change (or the continuing effects, because barring some kind of miracle technology, we're going to be dealing with the effects for thousands of years), that wealth is still going to have effects. People with money can prepare better for a post-climate-disaster world, and there's very little point in pretending otherwise. There are possible circumstances in which the benefits of having more money get wiped out, but they're sufficiently horrible that nobody really wants that. So what's someone who is not in the top 1% or top 10% to do?

Part of that is the stuff I've been addressing all along - make careful plans, gain relevant skills, commit yourself only to places that look like they'll be safer. Build buildings and infrastructure that can survive change. There will be some elements of ongoing life which benefit from the continued existence of the rich, because some of the stuff they need is systemic - the production of medicines being a prime example here.

But there are also things we can do against the overall system here, which aren't violent revolution and eating the rich (a concept to which I become less and less averse over time). The simplest thing is to vote for progressive politicians - in Ireland, preferably independents, who can get more done than those within a party system - and avoid voting for conservatives. Again in Ireland, that means putting Fine Gael, who are more and more repulsive the more I look at them (despite a recent good record on gender and LGBT issues) at the bottom of your ballot, kicking the Tories, UKIP and the almost comically awful Brexit party to the curb in the UK, and voting for Democrats in the US. Please note that I'm not saying that Fianna Fail in Ireland or the UK Labour party are _good_ or _useful_, but they are less awful (please imagine some awful grinding noises here as I say that about FF, but they're still better than FG), and in this day and age, that's what we've got to work with. If the politicians we elect are not actively supporting inequality (which is a good proxy for capitalistic excess), we may get some breathing room.

I've enough thinking - I think - to do a chunk of or all of a future issue on things we can do here and now to reduce inquality, and thereby make the coming slow disasters slightly less disastrous for the 99% of us who can't just pick the nicest, safest spot in the world and move there. But it needs to brew for a bit. So let me move on from Twitter-exposed-importance-of-class-and-wealth to some more general interest material.

Although the first one here, Venkatesh Rao's fourth world concept, isn't too far off the topic. I've been a fan of Venkat's writing for a long time, and while his interests phase in and out of sync with mine, he's very much harmonising right now. His most salient point here is:

"It is a mistake to govern under the presumption that entire populations must necessarily arrive at stable 100% first-world conditions after a transient “development” period. Modernization is the evolution of both wealth and poverty into newer technological forms."

In particular, "stable" is not going to be a thing through the 21st century. There are going to be more and more people who, in most cases through no fault of their own, but as an emergent property of climate change, come crashing down through that graph and into the weird fourth world.

Next up, an interview with David Wallace-Wells, the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (haven't read yet, but should) in which he says:

"It’s too late to avoid a 21st century that is completely transformed by the forces of climate change", but at the same time, "we have to do everything possible to make the future cooler, safer, and healthier"

And in that direction, further to last issue's thinking about subsidies as carrot, it appears that there is some evidence that the stick also works - carbon taxes would reduce emissions. So maybe I was being too nice emphasising incentive. And there are proposals out there to apply costs for climate change disaster directly to the corporate entities that contribute to them, which seems reasonable, at least until it runs into lobbying money, particularly in the US.

Finally, of interest in the area of post-apocalyptic skillset, although this is more equipment: the Chinese wheelbarrow (with thanks to Cian for the pointer to the Low-Tech Magazine site, which is superb).

Alright. It's a nice day out there, although warmth doesn't really give me a good feeling anymore, and there's other stuff I should be doing. So let me hit send on this, finish my current cup of coffee, and get back to the day job. I've had interesting conversations in email and in social media and in person with many of you lately, and I'd like that to continue - so if you have thoughts you think are relevant to what I'm doing here, get in touch. And do consider following the Twitter account @gentledecline, and recommending it to your social media neighbours by retweeting some of it once in a while. I appreciate the word being spread.