Climate Change Is Gaining Visibility As A Political Issue

Global warming and climate change were first brought to public attention in 1979 when NASA’s Jim Hansen testified on the topic before the US Congress. It was given increased attention by former US Congressman and Vice President Al Gore in his 2006 book ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Nevertheless, as a political issue for politicians to run for election on, it remained relatively quiet – until recently. Suddenly, several of the people seeking the Democratic Party nomination for US president in 2020 have identified climate change as an important part of their appeal to voters. In fact, one candidate has identified climate change as his primary electoral focus.

I certainly believe that climate change is one of the two biggest challenges facing the world today, along with the need to control nuclear weapons. This is reflected in Chapter 10 of my recently published book ‘Water, Energy, and Environment – A Primer’ (see my previous blog post). The book was published by International Water Association Publishing.

The chapter identifies and discusses six questions that I believe must be addressed as we confront climate change:

  • Is there a physical basis for understanding global warming and climate change?
    • Is there documented evidence for global warming and
    climate change?
    • Can global warming and climate change be attributed to
    human activities, and what are those activities?
    • What are the potential short- and long-term impacts of
    global warming and climate change with respect to water
    supply, environment, and health?
    • What is the anticipated time scale for these impacts?
    • What can be done to mitigate the onset and potential
    impacts of global warming and climate change?

I provide the link to this chapter below (it is an Open Access free download) to bring increased attention to this issue and contribute to the needed broad public discussion that may finally be getting underway. The chapter can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.2166/9781780409658_0165.

‘Water, Energy, and Environment – A Primer’ Has Been Published

    My new book has just been published and is available online as an Open Access free download at 

https://iwaponline.com/ebooks/book/744/Water-Energy-and-Environment-A-Primer

Clicking on this URL will bring you to a page showing the cover, several choices under the cover image (pdf, share, ..), and a listing of each individual section and chapter. Clicking on pdf under the cover image will allow you to download the entire book.  Chapters can be downloaded individually from the list that follows. 


Please bring to the attention of the groups you work with – it’s a freebie!

New Book: ‘Water, Energy, and Environment – A Primer’

After a long hiatus from blogging while I worked on a new book, I am pleased to announce that the book ‘Water, Energy, and Environment – A Primer’ will be published by International Water Association Publishing (IWAP) on February 18th (2019). It will be available in both printed and digital form, and the digital version will be downloadable for free as an Open Access (OA) document.

To access the free digital version go to IWAP’s OA website on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IWAP_OA.

Attached below is front material from the book, its preface and table of contents. Designed to serve as a basic and easily read introduction to the linked topics of water, energy, and environment, it is just under 200 pages in length, a convenient size to throw into a folder, a briefcase, or a backpack. Its availability as an OA document means that people all over the world with access to the internet will have access to the book and its 10 chapters.

With the completion of the book I plan to return to a regular schedule of blogging.
…………………………..
Contents
Preface ………………………………….. xi
Acknowledgement ……………………….. xv
Acronyms ……………………………… xvii
Epigraph ……………………………….. xxi
Chapter 1
Water and its global context …………………. 1
1.1 Earth’s Water Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Saline Water and Desalination Processes . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Energy Requirements and Costs of Desalination . . . . . 5
1.4 Demand for Freshwater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.5 Implications of Limited Access to Freshwater . . . . . . . . . 9
1.6 Actions to Increase Access to Freshwater . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.7 Gender Equity Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Chapter 2
Energy and its global context ……………….. 13
2.1 Energy’s Role in Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Energy Realities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 What is Energy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.4 Energy Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.4.1 Important questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.4.2 How is energy used? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.4.3 Electrification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Chapter 3
Exploring the linkage between water
and energy ……………………………….. 23
3.1 Indirect Linkages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.2 The Policy Linkage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.3 The Conundrum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.4 Addressing the Conundrum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.5 The Need for Partnership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Chapter 4
Energy production and its consequences for
water and the environment …………………. 29
4.1 Impacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4.2 More on Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
4.3 Environment and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.3.1 The theocentric worldview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.3.2 The anthropocentric worldview . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4.3.3 Other worldviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Chapter 5
Energy options ……………………………. 37
5.1 Fossil Fuels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
5.2 Nuclear Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
5.3 Geothermal Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
5.4 The Sun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
5.5 Energy Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
5.5.1 Energy demand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
vi Water, Energy, and Environment – A Primer
5.5.2 Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
5.5.3 Saving energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
5.5.4 Accelerating implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
5.5.5 Energy Star . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
5.5.6 The lighting revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
5.5.7 Energy efficiency in buildings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
5.5.7.1 Zero energy buildings . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
5.5.7.2 Electrochromic windows . . . . . . . . . . . 52
5.6 Energy Efficiency in Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
5.7 Energy Efficiency in Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Chapter 6
Fossil fuels ………………………………. 61
6.1 Coal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
6.1.1 Carbon capture and sequestration . . . . . . . . . . 63
6.1.2 A conundrum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
6.2 Petroleum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
6.2.1 Oil spills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
6.2.2 Peak oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
6.3 Natural Gas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
6.3.1 Methane hydrates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
6.3.2 Fracking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Chapter 7
Nuclear power ……………………………. 85
7.1 Nuclear Fission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
7.1.1 Fission fundamentals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
7.1.2 Introduction to nuclear issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
7.1.3 Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
7.2 Nuclear Fusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
7.2.1 Fusion fundamentals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
7.2.2 Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
7.2.3 Barriers to Fusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
7.2.4 Pros and cons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
7.2.5 Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Chapter 8
Renewable energy ………………………… 97
8.1 The Sun’s Energy Source and Radiation
Spectrum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
8.2 Direct Solar Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
8.2.1 Photovoltaics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
8.2.2 Concentrating solar power (CSP) . . . . . . . . . . 108
8.2.2.1 Power tower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
8.2.2.2 Linear concentrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
8.2.2.3 Dish engine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
8.2.2.4 CSTP history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
8.2.2.5 Advantages and disadvantages . . . 112
8.2.2.6 Thermal storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
8.2.2.7 Current status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
8.2.2.8 Concentrating photovoltaics (CPV) . 115
8.3 Solar Power Satellite (SPS) System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
8.4 Hydropower and Wind Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
8.4.1 Hydropower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
8.4.2 Wind energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
8.4.2.1 Onshore wind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
8.4.2.2 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
8.4.2.3 An onshore limitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
8.4.2.4 Offshore wind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
8.5 Biomass Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
8.5.1 Sources of biomass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
8.5.2 Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
8.5.3 Biofuels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
8.5.4 Algae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
8.5.5 Biochar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
8.5.6 The future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
8.6 Geothermal Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
8.6.1 Sources of geothermal energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
8.6.2 Manifestations of geothermal energy . . . . . . . 135
8.6.3 Uses of geothermal energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
8.6.3.1 Geothermal power generation . . . . . 136
8.6.3.2 Ground-source heat pumps . . . . . . . 138
8.6.4 An unusual source of geothermal energy . . . . 140
Ocean Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
8.7.1 Wave energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
8.7.1.1 Wave energy conversion
devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
8.7.1.2 Potential and pros and cons . . . . . . . 143
8.7.2 Ocean current energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
8.7.3 Tidal energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
8.7.3.1 Barrage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
8.7.3.2 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
8.7.3.3 Environmental impacts . . . . . . . . . . . 147
8.7.4 Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) . . 147
8.7.4.1 Barriers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
8.7.4.2 OTEC technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
8.7.4.3 Other cold water applications . . . . . . 149
8.7.4.4 OTEC R&D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Chapter 9
Energy storage …………………………… 151
9.1 Storage and Grids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
9.2 Types of Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
9.2.1 Traditional and advanced batteries . . . . . . . . . 153
9.2.1.1 Lead–acid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
9.2.1.2 Sodium sulfur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
9.2.1.3 Nickel–cadmium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
9.2.1.4 Lithium-ion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
9.2.1.5 Supercapacitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
9.2.2 Flow batteries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
9.2.3 Flywheels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
9.2.4 Superconducting magnetic energy
storage (SMES) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
9.2.5 Compressed air energy storage (CAES) . . . . 159
9.2.6 Pumped storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
9.2.7 Thermal storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
9.3 Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
9.4 Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
9.5 Fundamental Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Chapter 10
Policy considerations …………………….. 165
10.1 Important Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
10.1.1 Is there a physical basis for understanding
global warming and climate change? . . . . . . 166
10.1.2 Is there documented evidence for global
warming and climate change? . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
10.1.3 Can global warming and climate change be
attributed to human activities, and what are
those activities? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
10.1.4 What are the potential short- and long-term
impacts of global warming and climate
change with respect to water supply,
environment, and health? What is the
anticipated time scale for these
impacts? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
10.1.5 What can be done to mitigate the onset
and potential impacts of global warming
and climate change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
References ……………………………… 183
Index …………………………………… 189

……………………

Preface
This book springs from my strong conviction that clean water and clean energy are the critical elements of long-term global sustainable development. I also believe that we are experiencing the beginning of an energy revolution in these early years of the 21st century. Providing clean water requires energy, and providing clean energy is essential to reducing the environmental impacts of energy production and use. Thus, I see a nexus – a connection, a causal link – among water, energy, and environment. In recent years we have adopted the terminology of the water-energy nexus for the intimate relationship between water and energy, and similarly we can apply the term nexus to the close connections among water, energy, and environment. Thisuse of the term nexus can be, and has been, extended to include the related issues of food production and health. Dealing with, and writing about, a two-element nexus is difficult enough. In this book, I will limit my analysis and discussion to the three-element water -energy-environment nexus and leave the discussion of other possible nexus elements to those more qualified to comment.

This book also springs from my observation that while there are many existing books of a more-or-less technical nature on the three elements of this nexus, a book addressing each of them and their interdependencies in a college-level primer for a broad global and multidisciplinary audience would be valuable. Consideration of these and related issues, and options for addressing them, will be priorities for all levels of government. They will also be priorities for many levels of the
private sector in the decades ahead, both in developing and developed nations. A handbook-style primer that provides an easily read and informative introduction to, and overview of, these issues will contribute broadly to public education. It will assist governments and firms in carrying out their responsibilities to provide needed services and goods in a sustainable manner, and help to encourage young people to enter these fields. It will serve as an excellent mechanism for exposure of experts in other fields to the issues associated with the water-energy-environment nexus. Further, in addition to the audiences mentioned above, target audiences include economists and others in the finance communities who will analyze and provide the needed investment funds, and those in the development community responsible for planning and delivering services to underserved populations.
The book is organized as follows: the first chapter will be devoted to the concept of nexus and how the three elements, water, energy, and environment, are inextricably linked. This recognition leads to the conclusion that if society is to optimize their contributions to human and planetary welfare they must be addressed jointly. No longer must policy for each of these elements be considered in its own silo. Chapters 2 and 3 will be devoted to spelling out global contexts for water and energy issues, respectively. Chapter 4, on related environmental issues, will address the issues of water contamination, oil spills, fracking, radioactive waste storage, and global warming/
climate change. Chapter 5 will be a discussion of energy efficiency – i.e., the wise use of energy – and its role in limiting energy demand and its associated benefits. Chapter 6 will focus on the basics of fossil fuels – coal, oil, natural gas – which today dominate global energy demand. Chapter 7 will discuss nuclear-fission-powered electricity production, which today accounts for 10% of global electricity. It will also discuss the prospects for controlled nuclear fusion. Chapter 8 will discuss the broad range of renewable energy technologies – wind, solar,hydropower, biomass, geothermal, ocean energy – which are the basis of the now rapidly emerging energy revolution. Chapter 9 will discuss the closely related issue of energy storage. Finally, Chapter 10 will address
policy issues associated with water, energy, and environment, discuss policy history and options, and provide recommendations.

Climate Change As Seen By Climate Change Scientists

This is my first blog post in a while – I have been devoting my writing time to a new book entitled ‘Water, Energy, and Environment – A Primer’. I anticipate its publication in the first half of 2019.

The reason for posting the attached article from Esquire magazine is that I found it to be an important discuusion of climate change with an unusual human twist: How is the debate about climate change impacting the scientists intimately engaged in the debate? It is long – longer than any piece I have ever posted on this blog web site – but I want it to be seen by as many people as possible, and by posting it here in its entirety it may mske it easier for some people to access it. The article is well written – once I started reading I could not stop. I hope you find it as engrossing as I did.

…………….

WHEN THE END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION IS YOUR DAY JOB

Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can’t really talk about it.

BY JOHN H. RICHARDSON
JUL 20, 2018

The incident was small, but Jason Box doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s been skittish about the media since it happened. This was last summer, as he was reading the cheery blog posts transmitted by the chief scientist on the Swedish icebreaker Oden, which was exploring the Arctic for an international expedition led by Stockholm University. “Our first observations of elevated methane levels, about ten times higher than in background seawater, were documented . . . we discovered over 100 new methane seep sites…. The weather Gods are still on our side as we steam through a now ice-free Laptev Sea….”

As a leading climatologist who spent many years studying the Arctic at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State, Box knew that this breezy scientific detachment described one of the nightmare long-shot climate scenarios: a feedback loop where warming seas release methane that causes warming that releases more methane that causes more warming, on and on until the planet is incompatible with human life. And he knew there were similar methane releases occurring in the area. On impulse, he sent out a tweet.

“If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.”

The tweet immediately went viral, inspiring a series of headlines:

CLIMATOLOGIST SAYS ARCTIC CARBON RELEASE COULD MEAN “WE’RE FUCKED.”

CLIMATE SCIENTIST DROPS THE F-BOMB AFTER STARTLING ARCTIC DISCOVERY.

CLIMATOLOGIST: METHANE PLUMES FROM THE ARCTIC MEAN WE’RE SCREWED.

Box has been outspoken for years. He’s done science projects with Greenpeace, and he participated in the 2011 mass protest at the White House organized by 350.org. In 2013, he made headlines when a magazine reported his conclusion that a seventy-foot rise in sea levels over the next few centuries was probably already “baked into the system.” Now, with one word, Box had ventured into two particularly dangerous areas. First, the dirty secret of climate science and government climate policies is that they’re all based on probabilities, which means that the effects of standard CO2 targets like an 80 percent reduction by 2050 are based on the middle of the probability curve. Box had ventured to the darker possibilities on the curve’s tail, where few scientists and zero politicians are willing to go.

Worse, he showed emotion, a subject ringed with taboos in all science but especially in climate science. As a recent study from the University of Bristol documented, climate scientists have been so distracted and intimidated by the relentless campaign against them that they tend to avoid any statements that might get them labeled “alarmists,” retreating into a world of charts and data. But Box had been able to resist all that. He even chased the media splash in interviews with the Danish press, where they translated “we’re fucked” into its more decorous Danish equivalent, “on our ass,” plastering those dispiriting words in large-type headlines all across the country.

The problem was that Box was now working for the Danish government, and even though Denmark may be the most progressive nation in the world on climate issues, its leaders still did not take kindly to one of its scientists distressing the populace with visions of global destruction. Convinced his job was in jeopardy only a year after he uprooted his young family and moved to a distant country, Box was summoned before the entire board of directors at his research institute. So now, when he gets an e-mail asking for a phone call to discuss his “recent gloomy statements,” he doesn’t answer it.

Five days later: “Dr. Box—trying you again in case the message below went into your junk file. Please get in touch.”

This time he responds briefly. “I think most scientists must be burying overt recognition of the awful truths of climate change in a protective layer of denial (not the same kind of denial coming from conservatives, of course). I’m still amazed how few climatologists have taken an advocacy message to the streets, demonstrating for some policy action.” But he ignores the request for a phone call.

A week later, another try: “Dr. Box—I watched your speech at The Economist’s Arctic Summit. Wow. I would like to come see you.”

Box takes temperature and conductivity readings at Kane Basin, near the Humboldt Glacier, Greenland. The customary scientific role is to deal dispassionately with data, but Box says that ‘the shit that’s going down is testing my ability to block it.’
Nick Cobbing
But gloom is the one subject he doesn’t want to discuss. “Crawling under a rock isn’t an option,” he responds, “so becoming overcome with PTSD-like symptoms is useless.” He quotes a Norse proverb:

“The unwise man is awake all night, worries over and again. When morning rises he is restless still.”

Most people don’t have a proverb like that readily at hand. So, a final try: “I do think I should come to see you, meet your family, and make this story personal and vivid.”

I wanted to meet Box to find out how this outspoken American is holding up. He has left his country and moved his family to witness and study the melting of Greenland up close. How does being the one to look at the grim facts of climate change most intimately, day in and day out, affect a person? Is Box representative of all of the scientists most directly involved in this defining issue of the new century? How are they being affected by the burden of their chosen work in the face of changes to the earth that could render it a different planet?

Finally, Box gives in. Come to Copenhagen, he says. And he even promises a family dinner.

For more than thirty years, climate scientists have been living a surreal existence. A vast and ever-growing body of research shows that warming is tracking the rise of greenhouse gases exactly as their models predicted. The physical evidence becomes more dramatic every year: forests retreating, animals moving north, glaciers melting, wildfire seasons getting longer, higher rates of droughts, floods, and storms—five times as many in the 2000s as in the 1970s. In the blunt words of the 2014 National Climate Assessment, conducted by three hundred of America’s most distinguished experts at the request of the U. S. government, human-induced climate change is real—U. S. temperatures have gone up between 1.3 and 1.9 degrees, mostly since 1970—and the change is already affecting “agriculture, water, human health, energy, transportation, forests, and ecosystems.” But that’s not the worst of it. Arctic air temperatures are increasing at twice the rate of the rest of the world—a study by the U. S. Navy says that the Arctic could lose its summer sea ice by next year, eighty-four years ahead of the models—and evidence little more than a year old suggests the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is doomed, which will add between twenty and twenty-five feet to ocean levels. The one hundred million people in Bangladesh will need another place to live and coastal cities globally will be forced to relocate, a task complicated by economic crisis and famine—with continental interiors drying out, the chief scientist at the U. S. State Department in 2009 predicted a billion people will suffer famine within twenty or thirty years. And yet, despite some encouraging developments in renewable energy and some breakthroughs in international leadership, carbon emissions continue to rise at a steady rate, and for their pains the scientists themselves—the cruelest blow of all—have been the targets of an unrelenting and well-organized attack that includes death threats, summonses from a hostile Congress, attempts to get them fired, legal harassment, and intrusive discovery demands so severe they had to start their own legal-defense fund, all amplified by a relentless propaganda campaign nakedly financed by the fossil-fuel companies. Shortly before a pivotal climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, thousands of their e-mail streams were hacked in a sophisticated espionage operation that has never been solved—although the official police investigation revealed nothing, an analysis by forensics experts traced its path through servers in Turkey and two of the world’s largest oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

No scientist has come in for more threats and abuse than Michael Mann, whose “hockey stick” graph (so named because the temperature and emissions lines for recent decades curve straight up) has become the target of the most powerful deniers in the world.

uhAmong climate activists, gloom is building. Jim Driscoll of the National Institute for Peer Support just finished a study of a group of longtime activists whose most frequently reported feeling was sadness, followed by fear and anger. Dr. Lise Van Susteren, a practicing psychiatrist and graduate of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth slide-show training, calls this “pretraumatic” stress. “So many of us are exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of posttraumatic disorder—the anger, the panic, the obsessive intrusive thoughts.” Leading activist Gillian Caldwell went public with her “climate trauma,” as she called it, quitting the group she helped build and posting an article called “16 Tips for Avoiding Climate Burnout,” in which she suggests compartmentalization: “Reinforce boundaries between professional work and personal life. It is very hard to switch from the riveting force of apocalyptic predictions at work to home, where the problems are petty by comparison.”

Most of the dozens of scientists and activists I spoke to date the rise of the melancholy mood to the failure of the 2009 climate conference and the gradual shift from hope of prevention to plans for adaptation: Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth is

a manual for survival on an earth so different he doesn’t think we should even spell it the same, and James Lovelock delivers the same message in A Rough Ride to the Future. In Australia, Clive Hamilton writes articles and books with titles like Requiem for a Species. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, the melancholy Jonathan Franzen argued that, since earth now “resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy,” we should stop trying to avoid the inevitable and spend our money on new nature preserves, where birds can go extinct a little more slowly.

At the darkest end of the spectrum are groups like Deep Green Resistance, which openly advocates sabotage to “industrial infrastructure,” and the thousands who visit the Web site and attend the speeches of Guy McPherson, a biology professor at the University of Arizona who concluded that renewables would do no good, left his job, and moved to an off-grid homestead to prepare for abrupt climate change. “Civilization is a heat engine,” he says. “There’s no escaping the trap we’ve landed ourselves into.”

The most influential is Paul Kingsnorth, a longtime climate activist and novelist who abandoned hope for political change in 2009. Retreating to the woods of western Ireland, he helped launch a group called Dark Mountain with a stirring, gloomy manifesto calling for “a network of writers, artists, and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself.” Among those stories: progress, growth, and the superiority of man. The idea quickly spread, and there are now fifty Dark Mountain chapters around the world. Fans have written plays and songs and a Ph.D. thesis about them. On the phone from Ireland, he explains the appeal.

“You have to be careful about hope. If that hope is based on an unrealistic foundation, it just crumbles and then you end up with people who are despairing. I saw that in Copenhagen—there was a lot of despair and giving up after that.”

Personally, though he considers them feeble gestures, he’s planting a lot of trees, growing his own vegetables, avoiding plastic. He stopped flying. “It seems like an ethical obligation. All you can do is what you think is right.” The odd thing is that he’s much more forgiving than activists still in the struggle, even with oil-purchased politicians. “We all love the fruits of what we’re given—the cars and computers and iPhones. What politician is going to try to sell people a future where they can’t update their iPhones ever?”

He laughs.

Does he think it would be wrong to take a transatlantic airplane trip to interview a climate scientist?

He laughs again. “You have to answer that yourself.”

All this leaves climate scientists in an awkward position. At NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which early in the year was threatened with 30 percent budget cuts by Republicans who resent its reports on climate change, Gavin Schmidt occupies the seventh-floor corner office once occupied by the legendary James Hansen, the scientist who first laid out the facts for Congress in 1988 and grew so impassioned he got himself arrested protesting coal mines. Although Schmidt was one of the victims of the 2009 computer hacks, which he admits tipped him into an episode of serious depression, he now focuses relentlessly on the bright side. “It’s not that nothing has been done. There’s a lot of things. In terms of per capita emissions, most of the developed world is stable. So we are doing something.”

Box’s tweet sets his teeth on edge. “I don’t agree. I don’t think we’re fucked. There is time to build sustainable solutions to a lot of these things. You don’t have to close down all the coal-powered

stations tomorrow. You can transition. It sounds cute to say, ‘Oh, we’re fucked and there’s nothing we can do,’ but it’s a bit of a nihilistic attitude. We always have the choice. We can continue to make worse decisions, or we can try to make ever better decisions. ‘Oh, we’re fucked! Just give up now, just kill me now,’ that’s just stupid.”

Gavin Schmidt in his office at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Box’s dire forecast annoyed him. ‘You don’t run around saying, ‘We’re fucked! We’re fucked! We’re fucked!’ It doesn’t incentivize anybody to do anything.’
Gavin Schmidt in his office at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Box’s dire forecast annoyed him. ‘You don’t run around saying, ‘We’re fucked! We’re fucked! We’re fucked!’ It doesn’t incentivize anybody to do anything.’
Sam Eaton
Schmidt, who is expecting his first child and tries to live a low-carbon existence, insists that the hacks and investigations and budget threats have not intimidated him. He also shrugs off the abrupt-climate-change scenarios. “The methane thing is actually something I work on a lot, and most of the headlines are crap. There’s no actual evidence that anything dramatically different is going on in the Arctic, other than the fact that it’s melting pretty much everywhere.”

But climate change happens gradually and we’ve already gone up almost 1 degree centigrade and seen eight inches of ocean rise. Barring unthinkably radical change, we’ll hit 2 degrees in thirty or forty years and that’s been described as a catastrophe—melting ice, rising waters, drought, famine, and massive economic turmoil. And many scientists now think we’re on track to 4 or 5 degrees—even Shell oil said that it anticipates a world 4 degrees hotter because it doesn’t see “governments taking the steps now that are consistent with the 2 degrees C scenario.” That would mean a world racked by economic and social and environmental collapse.

“Oh yeah,” Schmidt says, almost casually. “The business-as-usual world that we project is really a totally different planet. There’s going to be huge dislocations if that comes about.”

But things can change much quicker than people think, he says. Look at attitudes on gay marriage.

And the glaciers?

“The glaciers are going to melt, they’re all going to melt,” he says. “But my reaction to Jason Box’s comments is—what is the point of saying that? It doesn’t help anybody.”

As it happens, Schmidt was the first winner of the Climate Communication Prize from the American Geophysical Union, and various recent studies in the growing field of climate communications find that frank talk about the grim realities turns people off—it’s simply too much to take in. But strategy is one thing and truth is another. Aren’t those glaciers water sources for hundreds of millions of people?

“Particularly in the Indian subcontinent, that’s a real issue,” he says. “There’s going to be dislocation there, no question.”

ADVERTISEMENT – CONTINUE READING BELOW

And the rising oceans? Bangladesh is almost underwater now. Do a hundred million people have to move?

“Well, yeah. Under business as usual. But I don’t think we’re fucked.”

Resource wars, starvation, mass migrations . . .

“Bad things are going to happen. What can you do as a person? You write stories. I do science. You don’t run around saying, ‘We’re fucked! We’re fucked! We’re fucked!’ It doesn’t—it doesn’t incentivize anybody to do anything.”

Scientists are problem solvers by nature, trained to cherish detachment as a moral ideal. Jeffrey Kiehl was a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research when he became so concerned about the way the brain resists climate science, he took a break and got a psychology degree. Ten years of research later, he’s concluded that consumption and growth have become so central to our sense of personal identity and the fear of economic loss creates such numbing anxiety, we literally cannot imagine making the necessary changes. Worse, accepting the facts threatens us with a loss of faith in the fundamental order of the universe. Climate scientists are different only because they have a professional excuse for detachment, and usually it’s not until they get older that they admit how much it’s affecting them—which is also when they tend to get more outspoken, Kiehl says. “You reach a point where you feel—and that’s the word, not think, feel—’I have to do something.’ ”

This accounts for the startled reaction when Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas—who was a member of the group that shared a Nobel prize with Al Gore for their climate work—announced that she’d become “professionally depressed” and was leaving the United States for England. A plainspoken Texan who grew up in Houston as the daughter of an oil geologist, Parmesan now says it was more about the politics than the science. “To be honest, I panicked fifteen years ago—that was when the first studies came out showing that Arctic tundras were shifting from being a net sink to being a net source of CO2. That along with the fact this butterfly I was studying shifted its entire range across half a continent—I said this is big, this is big. Everything since then has just confirmed it.”

But she’s not optimistic. “Do I think it likely that the nations of the world will take sufficient action to stabilize climate in the next fifty years? No, I don’t think it likely.”

She was living in Texas after the climate summit failed in 2009, when media coverage of climate issues plunged by two thirds—the subject wasn’t mentioned once in the 2012 presidential debates—and Governor Rick Perry cut the sections relating to sea-level rise in a report on Galveston Bay, kicking off a trend of state officials who ban all use of the term “climate change.” “There are excellent climate scientists in Texas,” Parmesan says firmly. “Every university in the state has people working on impacts. To have the governor’s office ignore it is just very upsetting.”

The politics took its toll. Her butterfly study got her a spot on the UN climate panel, where she got “a quick and hard lesson on the politics” when policy makers killed the words “high confidence” in the crucial passage that said scientists had high confidence species were responding to climate change. Then the personal attacks started on right-wing Web sites and blogs. “They just flat-out lie. It’s one reason I live in the UK now. It’s not just been climate change, there’s a growing, ever-stronger antiscience sentiment in the U. S. A. People get really angry and really nasty. It was a huge relief simply not to have to deal with it.” She now advises her graduate students to look for jobs outside the U. S.

No one has experienced that hostility more vividly than Michael Mann, who was a young Ph.D. researcher when he helped come up with the historical data that came to be known as the hockey stick—the most incendiary display graph in human history, with its temperature and emissions lines going straight up at the end like the blade of a hockey stick. He was investigated, was denounced in Congress, got death threats, was accused of fraud, received white powder in the mail, and got thousands of e-mails with suggestions like, You should be “shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families.” Conservative legal foundations pressured his university, a British journalist suggested the electric chair. In 2003, Senator James Inhofe’s committee called him to testify, flanking him with two professional climate-change deniers, and in 2011 the committee threatened him with federal prosecution, along with sixteen other scientists.

ADVERTISEMENT – CONTINUE READING BELOW

Kayaking the melt-water, Petermann Glacier.
Kayaking the melt-water, Petermann Glacier.
Nick Cobbing
Now, sitting behind his desk in his office at Penn State, he goes back to his swirl of emotions. “You find yourself in the center of this political theater, in this chess match that’s being played out by very powerful figures—you feel anger, befuddlement, disillusionment, disgust.”

The intimidating effect is undeniable, he says. Some of his colleagues were so demoralized by the accusations and investigations that they withdrew from public life. One came close to suicide. Mann decided to fight back, devoting more of his time to press interviews and public speaking, and discovered that contact with other concerned people always cheered him up. But the sense of potential danger never leaves. “You’re careful with what you say and do because you know that there’s the equivalent of somebody with a movie camera following you around,” he says.

Meanwhile, his sense of personal alarm has only grown. “I know you’ve spoken with Jason Box—a number of us have had these experiences where it’s become clear to us that in many respects, climate change is unfolding faster than we expected it to. Maybe it is true what the ice-sheet modelers have been telling us, that it will take a thousand years or more to melt the Greenland Ice Sheet. But maybe they’re wrong; maybe it could play out in a century or two. And then it’s a whole different ballgame—it’s the difference between human civilization and living things being able to adapt and not being able to adapt.”

As Mann sees it, scientists like Schmidt who choose to focus on the middle of the curve aren’t really being scientific. Worse are pseudo-sympathizers like Bjorn Lomborg who always focus on the gentlest possibilities. Because we’re supposed to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, and a real scientific response would also give serious weight to the dark side of the curve.

And yet, like Schmidt, Mann tries very hard to look on the bright side. We can solve this problem in a way that doesn’t disrupt our lifestyle, he says. Public awareness seems to be increasing, and there are a lot of good things happening at the executive level: tighter fuel-efficiency standards, the carbon-pricing initiatives by the New England and West Coast states, the recent agreement between the U. S. and China on emissions. Last year we saw global economic growth without an increase in carbon emissions, which suggests it’s possible to “decouple” oil and economic growth. And social change can happen very fast—look at gay marriage.

But he knows that gay marriage had no huge economic downside, and the most powerful companies in the world are fighting to stop any change in the fossil-fuel economy. So yes, he struggles with doubt. And he admits that some of his colleagues are very depressed, convinced there’s no way the international community will rise to the challenge. He gets into that conversation in bars after climate conferences, always pushing the side of hope.

Dealing with all of this has been a long emotional journey. As a young scientist, Mann was very traditional: “I felt that scientists should take an entirely dispassionate view when discussing matters of science,” he wrote in a book called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. “We should do our best to divorce ourselves from all of our typically human inclinations—emotion, empathy, concern.” But even when he decided that detachment was a mistake in this case and began becoming publicly active, he was usually able to put the implication of all the hockey-stick trend lines out of his mind. “Part of being a scientist is you don’t want to believe there is a problem you can’t solve.”

Might that be just another form of denial?

The question seems to affect him. He takes a deep breath and answers in the carefully measured words of a scientist. “It’s hard to say,” he says. “It’s a denial of futility if there is futility. But I don’t know that there is futility, so it would only be denial per se if there were unassailable evidence.”

There are moments, he admits, flashes that come and go as fast as a blinking light, when he sees news reports about some new development in the field and it hits him—Wait a second, they’re saying that we’ve melted a lot. Then he does a peculiar thing: He disassociates a little bit and asks himself, How would I feel about that headline if I were a member of the public? I’d be scared out of my mind.

Right after Hurricane Sandy, he was in the classroom showing The Day After Tomorrow with the plan of critiquing its ridiculous story about the Atlantic conveyor belt slowing down so fast that it freezes

England—except a recent study he worked on shows that the Atlantic conveyor belt actually is slowing down, another thing that’s happening decades ahead of schedule. “And some of the scenes in the wake of Hurricane Sandy—the flooding of the New York City subway system, cars submerged—they really didn’t look that different. The cartoon suddenly looked less like a cartoon. And it’s like, Now why is it that we can completely dismiss this movie?”

He was talking to students, so it got to him. They’re young, it’s their future more than his. He choked up and had to struggle to get ahold of himself. “You don’t want to choke up in front of your class,” he says.

About once a year, he says, he has nightmares of earth becoming a very alien planet.

The worst time was when he was reading his daughter Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, the story of a society destroyed by greed. He saw it as an optimistic story because it ends with the challenge of building a new society, but she burst into tears and refused to read the book again. “It was almost traumatic for her.”

His voice cracks. “I’m having one of those moments now.”

Why?

“I don’t want her to have to be sad,” he says. “And I almost have to believe we’re not yet there, where we are resigned to this future.”

The spring day is glorious, sunny and cool, and the avenues of Copenhagen are alive with tourists. Trying to make the best of things, Jason Box says we should blow off the getting-to-know-you lunch and go for a bike ride. Thirty minutes later he locks up the bikes at the entrance to Freetown, a local anarchist community that has improbably become one of Copenhagen’s most popular tourist destinations. Grabbing a couple beers at a restaurant, he leads the way to a winding lake and a small dock. The wind is blowing, swans flap their wings just off the beach, and Box sits with the sun on his face and his feet dangling over the sand.

“There’s a lot that’s scary,” he says, running down the list—the melting sea ice, the slowing of the conveyor belt. Only in the last few years were they able to conclude that Greenland is warmer than it was in the twenties, and the unpublished data looks very hockey-stick-ish. He figures there’s a 50 percent chance we’re already committed to going beyond 2 degrees centigrade and agrees with the growing consensus that the business-as-usual trajectory is 4 or 5 degrees. “It’s, um… bad. Really nasty.”

The big question is, What amount of warming puts Greenland into irreversible loss? That’s what will destroy all the coastal cities on earth. The answer is between 2 and 3 degrees. “Then it just thins and thins enough and you can’t regrow it without an ice age. And a small fraction of that is already a huge problem—Florida’s already installing all these expensive pumps.” (According to a recent report by a group spearheaded by Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin, secretaries of the Treasury under Bush Jr. and Bill Clinton, respectively, $23 billion worth of property in Florida may be destroyed by flooding within thirty-five years.)

Box is only forty-two, but his pointed Danish beard makes him look like a count in an old novel, someone who’d wear a frock coat and say something droll about the woman question. He seems detached from the sunny day, like a tourist trying to relax in a strange city. He also seems oddly detached from the things he’s saying, laying out one horrible prediction after another without emotion, as if he were an anthropologist regarding the life cycle of a distant civilization. But he can’t keep his anger in check for long and keeps obsessively returning to two topics:

“We need the deniers to get out of the way. They are risking everyone’s future…. The Koch Brothers are criminals…. They should be charged with criminal activity because they’re putting the profits of their business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people, and even life on earth.”

Like Parmesan, Box was hugely relieved to be out of the toxic atmosphere of the U. S. “I remember thinking, What a relief, I don’t have to bother with this bullshit anymore.” In Denmark, his research is supported through the efforts of conservative politicians. “But Danish conservatives are not climate-change deniers,” he says.

The other topic he is obsessed with is the human suffering to come. Long before the rising waters from Greenland’s glaciers displace the desperate millions, he says more than once, we will face drought-triggered agricultural failures and water-security issues—in fact, it’s already happening. Think back to the 2010 Russian heat wave. Moscow halted grain exports. At the peak of the Australian drought, food prices spiked. The Arab Spring started with food protests, the self-immolation of the vegetable vendor in Tunisia. The Syrian conflict was preceded by four years of drought. Same with Darfur. The migrants are already starting to stream north across the sea—just yesterday, eight hundred of them died when their boat capsized—and the Europeans are arguing about what to do with them. “As the Pentagon says, climate change is a conflict multiplier.”

His home state of Colorado isn’t doing so great, either. “The forests are dying, and they will not return. The trees won’t return to a warming climate. We’re going to see megafires even more, that’ll be the new one—megafires until those forests are cleared.”

However dispassionately delivered, all of this amounts to a lament, the scientist’s version of the mothers who stand on hillsides and keen over the death of their sons. In fact, Box adds, he too is a climate refugee. His daughter is three and a half, and Denmark is a great place to be in an uncertain world—there’s plenty of water, a high-tech agriculture system, increasing adoption of wind power, and plenty of geographic distance from the coming upheavals. “Especially when you consider the beginning of the flood of desperate people from conflict and drought,” he says, returning to his obsession with how profoundly changed our civilization will be.

Despite all this, he insists that he approaches climate mostly as an intellectual problem. For the first decade of his career, even though he’s part of the generation of climate scientists who went to college after Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, he stuck to teaching and research. He only began taking professional risks by working with Greenpeace and by joining the protest against Keystone when he came to the intellectual conclusion that climate change is a moral issue. “It’s unethical to bankrupt the environment of this planet,” he says. “That’s a tragedy, right?” Even now, he insists, the horror of what is happening rarely touches him on an emotional level… although it has been hitting him more often recently. “But I—I—I’m not letting it get to me. If I spend my energy on despair, I won’t be thinking about opportunities to minimize the problem.”

ADVERTISEMENT – CONTINUE READING BELOW

His insistence on this point is very unconvincing, especially given the solemnity that shrouds him like a dark coat. But the most interesting part is the insistence itself—the desperate need not to be disturbed by something so disturbing. Suddenly, a welcome distraction. A man appears on the beach in nothing but jockey shorts, his skin bluish. He says he’s Greek and he’s been sleeping on this beach for seven months and will swim across the lake for a small tip. A passing tourist asks if he can swim all the way.

“Of course.”

“Let me see.”

“How much money?”

“I give you when you get back.”

“Give me one hundred.”

“Yeah, yeah. When you get back.”

The Greek man splashes into the water and Box seems amused, laughing for the first time. It’s the relief of normal goofy human life, so distant from the dark themes that make up his life’s work.

Usually it’s a scientific development that smacks him, he says. The first was in 2002, when they discovered that meltwater was getting into the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet and lubricating its flow. Oh, you say, it can be a wet bed, and then the implications sunk in: The

whole damn thing is destabilizing. Then in 2006, all of the glaciers in the southern half of Greenland began to retreat at two and three times their previous speed. Good Lord, it’s happening so fast. Two years later, they realized the retreat was fueled by warm water eroding the marine base ice—which is also what’s happening to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Just thinking about it makes him gloomy. “That’s unstoppable,” he says. “Abrupt sea-level rise is upon us.”

The Greek man returns with surprising speed, emerging from the sea like a god in a myth, laughing and boasting. The Greeks are masters of the waters! Pay me!

“I’m gonna give this guy a hundred kroner,” Box says.

He makes sure the tourists pay, too, and comes back smiling. He knows a Greek guy who’s just like that, he says, very proud and jolly. He envies him sometimes.

He leads the way to a quieter spot on the lakeside, passing through little hippie villages woven together by narrow dirt lanes—by consensus vote, there are no cars in Freetown, which makes it feel pleasantly medieval, intimate, and human-scaled. He lifts a beer to his lips and gazes over the lake and the happy people lazing in the afternoon sun. “The question of despair is not very nice to think about,” he says. “I’ve just disengaged that to a large degree. It’s kind of like a half-denial.”

He mentions the Norse proverb again, but a bulwark against despair so often cited becomes its own form of despair. You don’t dredge up proverbs like that unless you’re staying awake at night.

He nods, sighing. This work often disturbs his sleep, driving him from his bed to do something, anything. “Yeah, the shit that’s going down has been testing my ability to block it.”

He goes quiet for a moment. “It certainly does creep in, as a parent,” he says quietly, his eyes to the ground.

But let’s get real, he says, fossil fuels are the dominant industry on earth, and you can’t expect meaningful political change with them in control. “There’s a growing consensus that there must be a shock to the system.”

So the darker hopes arise—maybe a particularly furious El Niño or a “carbon bubble” where the financial markets realize that renewables have become more scalable and economical, leading to a run on fossil-fuel assets and a “generational crash” of the global economy that, through great suffering, buys us more time and forces change.

The Box family dinner isn’t going to happen after all, he says. When it comes to climate change at the very late date of 2015, there are just too many uncomfortable things to say, and his wife, Klara, resents any notion that she is a “climate migrant’.

This is the first hint that his brashness has caused tension at home.

“Well, she…” He takes a moment, considering. “I’ll say something like, ‘Man, the next twenty years are going to be a hell of a ride,’ or ‘These poor North African refugees flooding to Europe,’ and how I anticipate that flux of people to double and triple, and will the open borders of Europe change? And she’ll acknowledge it… but she’s not bringing it up like I am.”

Later, she sends a note responding to a few questions. She didn’t want to compare herself to the truly desperate refugees who are drowning, she says, and the move to Denmark really was for the quality of life. “Lastly, the most difficult question to answer is about Jason’s mental health. I’d say climate change, and more broadly the whole host of environmental and social problems the world faces, does affect his psyche. He feels deeply about these issues, but he is a scientist and a very pragmatic, goal-oriented person. His style is not to lie awake at night worrying about them but to get up in the morning (or the middle of the night) and do something about it. I love the guy for it :)”

So even when you are driven to your desk in the middle of the night, quoting Norse proverbs, when you are among the most informed and most concerned, the ordinary tender mercies of the home conspire in our denial. We pour our energy into doing our jobs the best we can, avoid unpleasant topics, keep up a brave face, make compromises with even the best societies, and little by little the compartmentalization we need to survive the day adds one more bit of distance between the comfortable now and the horrors ahead. So Box turns out to be a representative figure after all. It’s not enough to understand the changes that are coming. We have to find a way to live with them.

“In Denmark,” Box says, “we have the resilience, so I’m not that worried about my daughter’s livelihood going forward. But that doesn’t stop me from strategizing about how to safeguard her future—I’ve been looking at property in Greenland. As a possible bug-out scenario.”

Turns out a person can’t own land in Greenland, just a house on top of land. It’s a nice thought, a comforting thought—no matter what happens, the house will be there, safely hidden at the top of the world.

A Call to Arms Re Investing In Our Energy Future

The attached article by Steven Ratner appeared in the March 27, 2018 issue of the New York Times. It raises important questions about how the U.S.is preparing for future economic competition with other countries, particularly China. The questions are not new, but Ratner’s article is a timely reminder that our national leaders need to look forward and make and faciilitate investments now that will benefit us in the future. A dysfunctional and short-sighted Congress in recent years, and now a dysfunctional and short-sighted presidential Administration, are putting the nation’s long-term economic position and leadership role in jeopardy.

I say this for the following reasons: the world is in the early stages of an inevitable transition from dependence on fossil fuels (80% dependence today) to steadily increasing reliance on renewable energy in its various forms. After several decades of development triggered by the OPEC-imposed Oil Embargo of 1973-74, solar and wind energy are now rapidly joining hydropower as significant contributors to global electricity supply. Other forms of renewable energy – geothermal, biomass, ocean – are also experiencing active development. As global populations and water and energy demands increase as we move further into the 21st century, and there is greater attention to reducing the threat of global warming, the markets for renewable technologies will grow significantly. In the past the U.S. has led the movement toward greater use of renewable energy, and had expectations that it would lead the resulting market opportunities. This is no longer true: the U.K. and other European countries lead the world in the development and deployment of offshore wind, and China leads the world in production of solar PV panels and wind turbines. China has clear ambitions to take full advantage of rapidly emerging renewable energy markets, and is now well positioned to soon take the lead in offshore wind deployment. Less impressively, the U.S. only recently placed its first offshore wind turbines in Rhode Island.

The long-term economic consequences are clear: unless the U.S. takes a more aggressive stance toward achieving a major share of these emerging markets, there will be reduced U.S. economic growth and loss of jobs that will go overseas. What is lacking is a clear national commitment to facilitating and expediting a transition to a renewable energy future. This requires action by the U.S. COngress and leadership from the Executive Branch, both of which are now lacking. The GOP-controlled Congress and the U.S. President are still in the thrall of the fossil fuel industry and renewable energy in the U.S. Is not getting the support it deserves. Chinese and European governments are taking a long-term, economically sensible view. Ratner’s article points out that, at this point, the U.S. is not.

………………………………………..

Is China’s Version of Capitalism Winning?
查看简体中文版 查看繁體中文版
Steven Rattner MARCH 27, 2018

President Trump’s attacks on Chinese trade practices may be garnering the headlines, but underpinning that dispute lies a more consequential struggle, between liberal democracy and state-directed capitalism.

Of late, it’s a competition in which the Chinese approach has been delivering the more robust economic result. Indeed, implicit in the ferocity of the Trump administration’s attacks on China’s protectionism is the success of that nation’s economy.

Skeptics notwithstanding, China’s model, which has brought more people out of poverty faster than any other system in history, continues to flourish, as I’ve seen firsthand in a decade of regular visits. Meanwhile, liberal democracy — the foundation of the post-World War II order — is under pressure, most significantly for having failed in recent years to deliver broadly higher standards of living.

Here’s one stark example: Last week, Congress finally managed to pass appropriations legislation for the current fiscal year — six months after the budget year began. The 2,232-page bill was cobbled together in a frenzy, without any discussion of national priorities or careful examination of the expenditures.

In contrast, China is driving hard toward its “Made in China 2025” plan, an ambitious set of objectives to upgrade Chinese industry so that, among other things, it can manufacture its own high-value components, like semiconductors. And while we retreat internationally, China’s One Belt One Road Initiative will physically connect China to more than 65 percent of the world’s population.

If you think we have trade problems with China now, just wait.

To be sure, China is a long way from overtaking the United States. Its gross domestic product per person is just $9,380, compared with $61,690 in the United States. Less visible than the sleek modern skyscrapers that now dominate China’s cityscapes are the 700 million people — about half of China’s population — who still live on $5.50 per day or less.

And China’s mercantilist trade practices are indefensible, particularly its use of non-tariff barriers to discourage foreign companies from coming to China, its insistence that non-Chinese companies share their technology, its outright theft of intellectual property and on and on.

That said, I’m confident that China’s mixed system would have produced formidable growth even without these predatory practices. As China marches forward, Washington feels like it’s standing still.

Perhaps the only policy area on which President Trump and the Democrats agree is the need to fix the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. And yet, 14 months after the president was inaugurated, nothing has happened (except for the release of a plan that was quickly derided).

For its part, China continues to build airports, subway systems, renewable-energy facilities and the like at a torrid pace. Even its longstanding pollution problem is being addressed. In the past four years, China has succeeded in cutting concentrations of one pollutant — fine particulates — by 32 percent, roughly what it took the United States 12 years to achieve after passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970.

Next up, artificial intelligence. In mid-2017, China announced a plan to become a global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, sending shudders through American policy circles. One research report estimated that A.I. could add 1.6 percentage points to China’s growth by 2035.

At the moment, the United States remains the world leader in A.I., and our scientists are working hard to achieve further advances. But from the Trump administration: silence, notwithstanding a parting warning and a call to arms from President Barack Obama’s team.

As a capitalist, I’ve never believed in excessive government intervention in the economy. One of America’s greatest strengths has always been its flourishing private sector. But in a complex, global economy, the public sector should play an important role, and ours just isn’t.

China, despite its Communist heritage, understands the benefits of incorporating a robust free-enterprise element. Beijing bustles with internet entrepreneurs. Venture capitalists are pouring vast sums into a dizzying array of start-ups, including in prosaic industries like retailing. And an increasing number of “national champions” are expanding beyond China’s borders.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we rewrite our Constitution to emulate China. And I certainly understand the loss of freedom and civil liberties under the Chinese system. But that doesn’t mitigate the need for us to get our government to perform the way it did in passing the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

When Russia launched its first Sputnik satellite in 1957, our response was to redouble our efforts and win the race to the moon. While the merits of punishing China for its unfair trade practices are strong, that’s hardly the most important reaction to its extraordinary economic success.

Steven Rattner, a counselor in the Treasury Department under President Barack Obama, is a Wall Street executive and a contributing opinion writer.