Earning Optimism in 2024, Part I

No predictions here, but a (hopefully) clear-eyed assessment of where we stand

COP28: Supreme Political Theatre. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

We’re in for a wild ride.

2023 was the hottest ever recorded. It’s natural to think that “it’s that El Nino thing, just an anomaly,” but I won’t be surprised if 2024 matches or tops last year for heat waves. I’m looking out my window at a snowless Toronto, and while we’ve had brown Christmases before, it’s becoming the norm rather than the exception. If you go further north, the temperatures are utterly unprecedented, and the rapid warming of the permafrost is releasing cataclysmic amounts of methane, a process that will accelerate if the AMOC Atlantic current continues to collapse. I doubt I’ll see many more white Christmases in my lifetime.

Politically, things are crazy too. It’s an election year in the States, coinciding with two major wars and political turmoil everywhere. A new kind of political system, anocracy or semi-authoritarianism, is spreading. Expect this to be the year when deepfake propaganda comes into its own.

Resource overshoot continues; even in the absence of global warming, we’d be staring down the barrel of a global mass extinction.

The chattering classes are talking about AI and robots coming for everybody’s job within five years. The process has already started in some industries; but I remember that in 1997 the most respected futurists and business analysts made exactly the same predictions about nanotechnology. In cases like these, it’s simply not possible to know how things will play out.

And what else? I’m sure I’ve forgotten something; there are plastics and ‘forever chemicals’ that make even rainwater unsafe everywhere in the world; COP28 was a disaster; and so on. It’s hard to be optimistic in this situation.

This is why I don’t advocate that we be optimistic. I say we have to earn optimism. Optimism isn’t an attitude, at least not anymore; it’s the product of hard work. Therefore the question is, what are we going to do in 2024 to earn it?

Industry Drives Politics

By now, it’s clear what intergovernmental climate-change conferences are for. “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and COP28 did what its predecessors have largely done: it punted the problem down the road. This is mostly (but not entirely) because the conference was playing with a loaded deck: as CBC and many other news outlets have reported, 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists registered for the conference this year. In a supreme act of unintentional irony, on Dec. 5, 63 countries signed a pledge to reduce emissions due to cooling—air conditioning and suchlike. At the end of the hottest year in human history, COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber, the event’s host, denied that global warming is connected to fossil fuel use, and also denied that he agreed to host the event specifically to make new oil deals.

Seriously, this stuff writes itself. What’s clear is that politics and big money have hijacked every attempt at a global political response to global warming. (We used to call it ‘global warming,’ and then were told to adopt the more nuanced term ‘climate change’—but after this past year, I’m going back to the old term. It’s really what’s happening.) The problem with the spectacular piece of political theatre that was COP28 is that nobody on Earth can still pretend that its results don’t affect them. My own country, Canada, lost an amount of forest equal in size to Greece last year because of warming-related forest fires. Similar catastrophes are happening worldwide, and it’s not going to stop. 2024 will be as bad as 2023, or worse. The Arctic will keep feeling the worst effects, but the most vulnerable populations live in countries where the daytime temperature is starting to regularly pass the level where humans can survive.

There are clear regulatory steps that must be taken. Countries have got to stop subsidizing fossil fuels to the tune of $7 trillion/year. Carbon pollution has to be aggressively taxed. Coal has to be banned, period, and a moratorium placed on any oil field developments that would take us beyond the global carbon ‘budget.’ (Exceeding that budget means we blow any chance to fix the problem.) These steps are all necessary, and yet they are also, apparently, impossible. At least, that’s how events like COP28 make it seem.

…But Technology Drives Industry

Solar power and wind are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity nearly everywhere. Where coal plants are still operating, it’s because of sunk costs, long-term contracts that can’t be easily broken, and subsidies intended to support jobs in other sectors, such as mining. These can only be temporary measures because renewables are just going to keep getting cheaper; we’re nowhere near the top of the S-curve of technological development there. (Even the argument that renewables can’t provide baseload electricity is no longer true; Eavor is installing next-gen geothermal in places where it was previously thought to be impossible.) The price of batteries fell by 40% in 2023 alone and there’s no reason to think that trend won’t continue. At least three car companies are promising to bring $25,000 electric cars to the market by 2025, and they’ll keep getting cheaper. Meanwhile, the charging infrastructure is becoming ubiquitous.

Although the total amount of CO2 we’re emitting is still rising, growth in emissions has plateaued and hopefully will start to come down. Meanwhile, we are learning how to be carbon-negative; new startups are rolling out cheap accelerated weathering and crop waste sequestration programs. The advantage of these systems over grandiose carbon-sucking machinery is that they don’t involve building anything new; they just require a slight behavior change. I remember as a kid when the sky over Brandon would turn gray from smoke as the farmers burned their crop residues. Instead of doing that, why not just bail the stalks, ship them out to sea, and dump them in carefully selected deep anoxic pockets of the ocean? Or, convert them to biochar. —Or, do both? These are practical interventions. Potentially, billions of tonnes of carbon can be sequestered this way.

So 2024 should be the year we promote, support, and fund such initiatives. We have to start an aggressive drawdown right now, and the best way to do that is to price carbon and pay farmers and others who already can sequester it, to do so.

Yet it seems futile to initiate carbon-negative programs before we kick the fossil fuel habit. Shouldn’t we be treating the cause, not the symptom?

Normalizing Carbon Sequestration

Fossil fuel companies don’t care about carbon capture or sequestration; actually, they’re in favour of it because in their minds, removing the existing CO2 just permits them to emit more. Until very recently, this fact made a decisive argument for governments to address emissions first, because if the symptoms are easy to treat then there’s no motivation to cure the disease—even if that disease will eventually kill us.

This stopped being a good argument the day that renewables became cheaper than fossil fuels. When already-completed, subsidized coal plants become more costly to run than building new unsubsidized solar, it’s no longer relevant whether coal’s carbon emissions can be captured. Even if we eliminate all the CO2 in the atmosphere today, coal still goes away because it’s just too expensive. And that means we have no reason not to go all-in on removing atmospheric CO2; we’re losing trillions per year economically, and the ecological devastation from the temperature changes is huge. So this year, let’s start removing that excess carbon.

I’m personally involved in such an initiative and will talk more about it soon.

Speaking of personal involvement, what can you do about all this?

I see a kind of recipe for personal carbon neutrality assembling itself in online forums. It goes like this:

• If you own your own house, eliminate all your gas-powered appliances, replace eg. your furnace with a heat pump.

• Use e-bikes and public transit as much as possible. Commute less, ideally not at all. If you need a car, buy an electric.

• Stop using single-use plastics and in general, reduce waste.

• Cut back drastically on your consumption of red meat and dairy products. Eat a Mediterranean diet.

I’m sure you can come up with other actions we can take. All of these are great if you can do them, but you and I are not personally as big a part of the problem as mining, industry, trucking, and municipal and regional electricity generation. What COP28 has shown us is that confronting these rich and powerful sectors head-on won’t work. Remember that adage, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win?” Renewables won because they were ignored and laughed at by the fossil fuel industry just long enough for them to become an unstoppable juggernaut. Don’t run at the polluters, go around them.

In much of North America, the most effective personal action you can take is probably not to march in the streets against Big Oil, but rather organize and lobby to change suburban zoning laws. This is because we invest gargantuan amounts of material (asphalt and metal), real estate (roads and parking lots), energy, and effort to create unsustainable car-only suburbs. The average American has to drive 7 miles to access services like shopping, doctor’s offices, libraries, and schools. The idea of the 15-minute city is that you should be able to access all of these things on foot, or by bike. The reason you probably can’t is that your neighbourhood’s zoning laws don’t permit corner stores and restaurants.

But they could.

Wild Card Opportunities

A strange confluence of events and technological developments has brought us to a place where many of us no longer have to commute to work. COVID lockdown, widely available broadband Internet, Zoom, ChatGPT, and the rise of e-bikes and scooters due to radically improved batteries, all occurring together in one historical moment, make possible a re-imaging of the city. And the city—its concrete and asphalt transportation infrastructure in particular—is the main customer of Big Oil. Not you, and not me. Not even industry, because much of that exists to support the urban infrastructure.

Rather than going to battle against the dragon of Big Oil, we as individuals can instead work to build an environment for ourselves where we can have what we want while doing less and using less. In the urban environment, this means lobbying for sidewalks, bike lanes, multi-use living units, and the ability of services and small shops to open anywhere in the neighbourhood.

Sure, other things are going to happen—fleets of self-driving shared cars will make personal car ownership largely unnecessary. There’ll be delivery robots, and so on. But the transportation innovation that so far has done the most to reduce CO2 emissions globally is the e-bike. While everybody’s eyes were on Tesla, dozens of companies around the world quietly created a different revolution. The reason the e-bike is so powerful is that it is the technological enabler for the 15-minute city. It replaces the need for a car in most day-to-day scenarios. It’s the perfect example of technology as legislation—and an immense force multiplier for positive change when combined with the smartphone, the laptop, and high-speed internet access. It snuck up on the transportation sector using the same misdirection effect that worked for renewables: all eyes were on something else, allowing a new disruptive technology to steal a march on the incumbent.

This year, look for other examples of the misdirection effect that will enable us to go around the forces of predatory delay, rather than wasting our energy fighting them head-on.

What all this suggests is that the biggest environmental impact you can personally make is via local politics promoting zoning reform, public transit, municipal transparency, and legal protections for people who work at home and are at risk of becoming high-tech gig workers (Uber for programmers).

And buy an e-bike. That might be the most effective action you take this year.

The Fly in the Ointment

We stand on the brink of a global anocracy, a semi-authoritarian world of faux democracies owned by oligarchs and managed using personalized propaganda and decision control. Hand in hand with this goes techno-feudalism, a post-capitalist economy where we no longer own anything, but rent everything from the oligarchs. I dubbed this the Rights Economy in Permanence, back in 2002.

Russia and Egypt are the poster children for anocracy: they have multiple political parties and regular elections, but only one party can actually win. The United States is about to enter an anocratic phase, if it hasn’t already. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple constitute the core of the techno-feudal economy. Their purpose is to turn the entire planet into a money-pump, where all wealth flows uphill into an ever-smaller circle of rentiers, for whom we all work.

Next week, in Part II, I’ll talk more about these profoundly dangerous realities, and what we can do about them.

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