Atomic Nerds

I have made prior efforts to comment on environmental issues and politics intelligently, or at least in a fashion that tries to be reasonable and make some kind of productive point.

This will not be one of those posts. This one was born of frustration and fed on a very large dose of the blackest metal in my collection. This is a rant. If you want informative and productive, read the linked posts. For wandering, non-cohesive, and angry, read this.

There are days when I really wish I were the kind of person that Dennis Leary wrote an anthem for in “Asshole” and truly just didn’t give a shit about the environment, because at least then I’d have a side, and I could just get down and roll in the sheer massive unadulterated schadenfreude there is to be enjoyed in ripping apart the cult of rosary-stroking and heretic-bashing that has become synonymous with the modern “green consciousness”.

And heaven knows, there is meat to be had there, a vast banquet of it. Take your pick; whether it’s “Save The Earth” concerts that blow the entire energy and carbon-emission production of the poor African nations it was fashionable to have a party to “save” twenty years ago completely out of the water, Al Gore flying in his private jet from his mansion housing a family of four to accept a Nobel peace prize for alerting people to the CO-2 emission crisis that will, if he’s right, make the last two hundred years seem like a golden age of world peace, or mind-blowingly wealthy songstresses telling us to tighten our belts one more planet-kissing notch by only using one square of toilet paper, these people don’t need me to make them look ludicrous or hypocritical. They have beclowned themselves far more effectively than me or Dennis Leary ever could on our meanest, most rage-and-chemical-fueled day.

But the problem is that I’m not on the other team, either. I can’t look at the world as it is and think environmental problems are just a hilarious dog-and-pony show, the newest religion to come down the pike ever since singing for Jesus became so painfully uncool. We’re gutting our oceans, and with every new fish that becomes fashionable as the old standbys become too expensive or too rare collapses in sequence- we have moved from reaping each trophic layer from the top on down, to the point where the predators we used to gorge on and are now finally thinking to protect may not have anything to feed on as we haul the base of the whole thing up bait ball by bait ball. We fret about the energy-balance and carbon-emission implications of meat, while the agricultural runoff from the massive base of grain we’ll supposedly replace the calories with washes into our gulfs and deadens yet more entire zones of previously rich ocean life. Economic prosperity is swell and it’s fucking great that more and more people can afford a home, but every new zone of human habitation is another zone that breaks up the big corridors of wilderness that lets America retain the amazingly robust variety and population of wildlife that it has. With every person that moves out to that nice lovely emptiness, another few follow, until the cougars and wolves that roam the purple mountains’ majesty have to be shot because they’re eating the kindergarteners in the new school district it only made sense to create. It pisses me off even more that I’d really like to be one of those people that got there first, and would probably want to leave again as soon as I were followed.

But I’m sure as fuck not on the other team, either. Can’t stop to worry about soil salinization, because the end of the fucking world is coming and it’s all going to end in a giant lethal cloud of a crucial portion of the carbon cycle that none of us can help emitting because we’ve got an aerobic fucking metabolism just like almost everything living on the entire planet! And the same carbon we combust every time we take a deep breath is what’s emitted every other time we combust carbon to get energy, even when producing food or cleaning water! So let’s rub our rosaries and come up with a plan to reduce our carbon footprint, because it gets bigger and bigger the more we live and the more we do with our lives. Produce high levels of technology? Tons of carbon. Have children? Good god, you’re introducing MORE of the damn aerobic organisms, and big mammals at that? Have a dog? Christ, you might as well have an SUV. The author of the first article I linked there allows as to how the residents of Burkina Faso can mayhap be forgiven for reproducing so goddamn much, because their carbon footprint is tiny anyway- because Burkina Faso is a land of grinding poverty, short lifespans, minimal literacy, and rampant infectious disease. GOOD FOR THEM, THEY’RE NOT PRODUCING HARDLY ANYTHING BUT PEOPLE WHO EAT FOR A LITTLE WHILE, THEN DIE! HOW CARBON-NEUTRAL!

What’s almost never mentioned in any of the awareness-raising and rosary-stroking of “reducing your footprint” is that it won’t work. The only way to be “carbon-neutral” as a planet is for most of our population to die and for the rest to live as minimally- which is to say, desperately- as the Burkinans, and people will not fucking volunteer for that. The issue is that in order to really make an impact on the planet according to the broadly accepted warming scenarios, it doesn’t make sweet fuckall worth of difference how many squares of toilet paper we hoggish Westerners use, because by the most wildly optimistic calculations we’d have to cut back to the point where costs of carbon abatement would amount to half the fucking global economy. That doesn’t fit into a slogan, and there wee problem there is nobody is going to do it. It’s not because they’re greedy capitalist pigs, it’s because they CAN’T; if you think people are upset about the current recession, try telling them they’ve got to accept a lifestyle sustainable by standards of five hundred years ago, because otherwise the planet is going to get warmer.

Every single scenario I have ever seen put forth by the catastrophists for how we’re actually going to do something involves instituting a heavily statist global authority that decides what everyone’s “fair share” in carbon use is and controls the entire world’s carbon emissions. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream- everyone who has ever longed for a system in which the right people have total control and could just make the whole steaming chaotic mess of humanity behave in a rational fashion for everyone’s good would like roughly the same thing. The problem isn’t even that it’s not going to work for the same reasons just about every technocratic solution doesn’t work, but because the entire world isn’t going to band together to put the power in the hands of the Right People who’ve just been waiting for their chance. Faced with increasing economic consequences, people are going to be fucking angry, and even if their governments were suicidal enough to tell them “Everything will be fine, you just have to accept a less than third-world lifestyle and let the smart Westerners with the calculators, who also happen to be your historical imperial masters, tell you what to do from there”, they’re not going to accept it. They’re going to do what every nation with a pissed off population does- either break down for find another target to beat the shit out of in order to satisfy the perceived problem is, which is going to be what it almost always is- those other fuckers are taking more than their fair share. Whether you call it a French revolution, a Third Reich, a Rwandan genocide, a great leap forward, or a reduction in the carbon footprint, a whole lot of people will stop breathing. And the rest of the environment that we’re supposedly trying to save in the first place is going to look like battlefields always do- torn to shit and of benefit to nothing living but the carrion birds.

The problem is that the real problems not only have no good solutions that aren’t complete fantasy, we can’t even tell what the real problem is, what it’s shaped like, and how much of a problem it is. Climate science is still incredibly young as sciences go, and in terms of ambition and scale, it makes a unified physical theory of the universe look like something somebody’s going to work out over their ham sandwich at lunch. It’s about how EVERYTHING, physical and biological and chemical, affects EVERYTHING ELSE on earth. It’s a global ecology combined with global physics, and if we’re going to take some metaphors to mix to hell, it’s like trying to calculate the effect on the weather of a billion butterflies all flapping at cross-purposes. We can tell CO2 does certain things, but we also know it has a diminishing-returns effect*, so we know that none of our models adequately explain either historical or ongoing data. We had to start looking into positive feedback effects to explain why the world had gotten so much warmer than would be explained by carbon alone, then we had to postulate other effects in order to explain why it apparently has stopped getting warmer for the last ten years or so, and meanwhile the ice caps and the levels of dissolved carbon in the ocean and solar radiation are doing all sorts of fucking crazy things, and it all amounts to the kind of complex and developing science that invariably gets reported in the news as though the God Oracle Science had spoken and informed us that it had seen its shadow and we’re going to have six more weeks of winter this year.

What people are fighting over isn’t science, it’s politics; what exactly climate change is and what really drives it the most and what it’s going to look like is science, but what we’re going to fucking do about it is all politics, and that’s what we’re really fighting over. If you look at the actual scientific contents of any given year of an IPCC report and then the policy recommendations, the two documents might as well be from two separate universes, because what the panel wants politically and what it found scientifically (which usually turns out to be a lot more of “here’s what we know so far, here’s the new stuff we learned, outlook hazy”, as science usually is) are two completely different things. Meanwhile, the skeptics are going to pounce on absolutely everything any scientist who has ever mentioned climate in passing has said that disagrees with that political agenda as though it were the groundswell of a new dissident revolution- while the scientists quoted ask them to please stop quoting them now. It looks an awful lot like how “intelligent design” proponents go after all signs of dissension between evolutionary theorists, which confuses and annoys the theorists because they’re certainly in a position to know that they all fight like cats in a sack over the details of evolutionary theory all the time anyway. It’s not a coincidence that very often they’re the same people anyway- if those who fret about the end of the world have their God Oracle Science (that has very little to do with lowercase science as it is actually practiced), then inevitably the same mythical figure is a treacherous, deceitful demon for someone else.

People point out, from either side, that the other has more to do with politics and ideology than reality, and they’re both right, and it doesn’t actually have any effect on the argument. Politics are how things actually get done on a societal scale in reality, and any human that isn’t mentally handicapped is political, including the scientists and the journalists, no matter how much their professional ideals are to be objective. Pointing out that they’re not ENTIRELY objective isn’t an argument-ender, it’s reporting that the sky continues to be blue; the idea that science or journalism ever had some sort of golden age where politics weren’t heavily involved is every bit as mythical as the One Fair World- or, for that matter, the world where the free market fixes everything and we don’t have to worry about any of it because enlightened self-interest will obviously arrive at organic economic solutions that let us keep our wildernesses and our cheerful consumerism entirely intact, or the world where ancient humans had their ancient wisdom that let them live entirely sustainably and without impact until Demon Civilization came along. (Eden is SUCH an appealing idea even some atheists love to embrace it, apparently.)

The real problems are complex and mysterious and its potential solutions equally so, so people do what they always do when confronted with “way beyond me”- they grab a totem and wrench the whole thing down to something that fits in it, so they can have some continuing idea of what to do. The alternative is just to throw up your hands and remain the passive victim of fate, and the killer is, what ethical or sensible human would possibly want to do that?

But in the meantime, I’d kind of appreciate it if we didn’t dismantle our high-tech, wasteful means of continuing to investigate the big, real problems (i.e., highly developed societies) in the name of slaying the shadows they cast.

*If you want a less profane and more informative explanation, check the second of my posts linked from the top described as “me trying to be productive rather than ranty”.

Posted Ranting, watermelons |