Everybody talks about the weather

but now we have done something about it

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” - Mark Twain

This week is climate week in New York. This means that many people I know are flying from across the world to attend the many talks and conferences being held here. The amount of CO2 they will emit on each of these flights is more than many people produce in a year, and more than some create in a lifetime. I won’t be here for it as I am burning a year of someone else’s CO2 to fly to Europe for other events that seemed important to me (me, me, me!).

Over the last few days, I have been reviewing some recent systemic analyses on the climate emergency, returning to the basic question I asked in a recent essay here: Why haven’t we answered the call of rising emissions? I also received some interesting comments and answers to this question from readers, which I look forward to explore in future essays.

One of the main papers I reviewed (highly recommended) is “Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?”, from The Annual Review of Environment and Resources, with a number of authors including UK climate scientist Kevin Anderson. While these authors consider “multifaceted reasons” for our collective failure to prevent rising emissions, they land on one main factor: “The central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control.”

I am also exploring the work of Nate Hagens. I recommend that everyone watch his half-hour animation, The Great Simplification. The same ideas are explored in more academic terms in his essay, “Economics for the Future — Beyond the Superorganism”, from Ecological Economics. He writes: “What began some 11,000 years ago as hunter gatherers cooperating to obtain physical surplus from land, has morphed into a globally connected human culture maximizing financial representations of physical surplus … In pursuit of economic growth, modern human culture appears as a self-organized, mindless, energy seeking Superorganism, functioning in similar ways to a brain-less amoeba using simple tropisms.”