Even a pandemic is not enough →

From Bloomberg:

“In some ways, the dire lockdowns undertaken to stop Covid-19 have fast-forwarded us into an unlikely future—one with almost impossibly bold climate action taken all at once, no matter the cost.

“Just months ago it would have been thought impossible to close polluting factories virtually overnight and slash emissions from travel by keeping billions at home. Now we know that clear skies and silent streets can come about with shocking speed.”

The journalists then spend pretty much the whole article genuflecting on all the wonderful things that have happened to the planet as the human horror unfolds: better air quality, less traffic congestion, birdsong, world peace, and durian fruit for everyone.

Ok, I made up the last two.

Then they calmly dig in the knife, and twist it:

“Because of the inertia in the climate system, even if we were to significantly reduce or stop our emissions today, you would still see the increase in temperatures expected for the next 20 years almost unaffected,” Buontempo said. “In reality it is very likely that the total concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will continue going up in the future.”

Here’s the famous CO2 in the atmosphere plot we know so well:

See what happened during the 2008 financial crisis?

Sweet fuck all is what happened.

The article rounds off with a bit of fantasy utopia on an unlikely near-term future.

“The efforts will need to be titanic, even bigger than the ones it took to bring the world to a temporary halt in the face of Covid-19. Businesses will have to keep their green promises—and make new, more ambitious plans in the middle of the worst economic crisis in decades. People shocked by disruptions to daily life and widespread unemployment will need to rethink their daily behaviors. Nations will need to reach the sort of agreements that happen rarely in international gatherings such as the United Nations annual climate talks, now postponed until 2021 due to the virus. Governments planning to spend trillions in stimulus packages will need to invest in solutions that create jobs and growth while reducing emissions.”

Not only do the efforts need to be titanic, but we are on the Titanic.

Children vs some dopey countries →

I know you’ve all been hanging out for some Greta news:

“Greta Thunberg and a group of other children have pushed forward their legal complaint at the UN against countries they accuse of endangering children’s wellbeing through the climate crisis, despite attempts to have it thrown out.”

Their case is against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey.

Why those countries?

“Although 140 countries, excluding the US, have ratified the UN convention on the rights of the child, only 46 governments have adopted a protocol that allows for this kind of legal action. Of those, the five biggest greenhouse gas emitters – Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey – are targeted in the lawsuit…”

Doh! Sucks to be them.

“Three countries – Brazil, France and Germany – have replied to the petition, saying it should not be admissible by the committee.“

But on Tuesday the children hit back, arguing that the countries should be judged by their behaviour on the climate crisis. They said the three countries were all failing to cut their emissions in line with the Paris agreement.”

This taking governments to court is really picking up steam.

“More than 1,300 legal actions have been brought around the world to try to force governments to confront the climate crisis. More than 1,000 are in the US.”

Go Greta and Co.!

[Cover photo: John Thys/AFP via Getty Images]

The crazy number of ships moving shit from A to B →

I stumbled upon this cool visualisation from 2012 by KILN showing ships moving around the world in real time.

Courtesy of KILN

If you go to their website, you can watch the ships moving, and a cool informative video.

These ships run on bunker fuel, pretty awful stuff:

“[Bunker fuel is…] heavy, residual oil left over after gasoline, diesel and other light hydrocarbons are extracted from crude oil during the refining process.”

Back in 2012, these ships added more than one million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere a day. Or one billion kg, if you prefer.

Per day.

Funny story, none of these emissions are “owned” by any country under current climate negotiations. And they already represent around 3% of the world’s C02 emissions. Magical emissions we pretend don’t exist.

It’s easy to get tied up in circles trying to find ways to reduce these emissions.

“Needing less shit” is probably a good start.

[Cover photo: from KILN]

Renewables overtake coal in the US →

A companion piece to yesterday’s blog post:

“Hydropower plants, solar farms, and wind farms generated more electricity than coal in the United States for a record 40 days in a row, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said in a new report.”

Here’s a pretty picture showing this:

Green seems to be the go-to colour in these kinds of plots.

So, what does this mean in numbers?

“Coal’s high cost has made it increasingly one of the last fuel choices for many utilities, a trend reflected by its declining market share for electric generation: just 15.3% in April, according to preliminary EIA figures.

“In January, coal’s market share fell below 20 percent for the first time in many decades—and possibly for the first time in the entire history of the U.S. power industry—ending at 19.9%.

“EIA figures also show its share continued to erode, falling to 18.3% in February and 17.3% in March. As recently as 2008, coal’s market share was above 50 percent in the months of January, February and March.”

Even better in the overall scheme of things:

“FERC’s latest monthly “Energy Infrastructure Update” report (with data through February 29, 2020) also reveals that wind and solar are on track to each provide more new generating capacity than natural gas over the next three years. Moreover, the mix of all renewables (biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) will add nearly 51 GW of new generating capacity to the nation’s total by February 2023 while that of natural gas, coal, oil and nuclear power combined will actually decrease by almost 2 GW.”

Though you’d really hope that the 51 GW of new renewables would come with a 51 GW drop in non-renewables, not a 2 GW drop. Also, biomass being classed as renewable energy is pretty debatable. Stay posted for a fireside chat about biomass one of these days.

Britain's longest period without coal since the 1700s! →

When this post went to press:

If the record is still ongoing, you can what it is up to now here in this article.

This hasn’t happened since coal was invented.

Ok, that’s not a very scientific way to put it.

Let me rephrase: This hasn’t happened since the industrial revolution began, more than 300 years ago!

Here’s another cool plot showing the evolution of Britain’s coal use over the last nine years:

The green bits are where no coal was used for power.

Though green makes us think of trees and birds and big gulps of fresh air, don’t forget that natural gas—which is still a fossil fuel—remains the UK’s largest source of power, covering 15-50% of demand most of the time.

Another cool interactive plot from Drax Electric Insights shows where the power comes from at any time in the UK. Feel free to geek-out with this plot. I know I did.

You can see the solar power input cycling up and down with day and night, and how important gas becomes on cloudy days without much wind.

This is called intermittency, and is a real problem for these two types of renewable energy.

That is a story for a cloudy day.

[Cover art: Guardian Design]

The good news and the bad news →

There is good news.

But nothing exists in a vacuum.

Not even Covid-19.

Not even good news.

The context: Global Co2 emissions need to fall by around eight per cent per year for the next decade to limit warming to less than 1.5°C.

Guess what the fall is now expected to be in 2020, due to Covid-19?

Eight per cent.

That was the good news.

It was brought to you by clear skies, birdsong, and humpback whales in Wellington harbour.

Photo: Cass Kinghan

Now for the bad news.

That eight percent drop in Co2 emissions is with half the planet sitting at home, shops shut, cafés and restaurants doing take-out (at most), no tourism, and nearly all international passenger flights cancelled.

So, tell me, how do we take off another eight percent next year?

On top of that.

Do we become subsistence farmers?

Is there some middle ground?

Methinks this story doesn’t end well.

[These happy thoughts were brought to you by palm oil infused with charred orangutan. You’re welcome!]

On ya bike! →

These past week I have been walking up the middle of the road just because I can. There have been no cars in suburban Auckland under Level 4 lockdown. Almost total silence to boot. Bliss.

I even took the bike out a few times on these empty streets. I tell you, it’s very surreal to cycle around a big city without missiles whooshing past.

We’ve now dropped down to Level 3 in kiwi-land, which means stuff-all your social life, just that more businesses can now open, including takeaways. That’s “take-out” or “to go” for some of you out there.

The roads have started to fill back up with cars.

In a country like this, with fairly terrible (though improving!) public transport, the return of cars won’t cause additional traffic problems because most people here are already car-for-life addicts.

But in places with real public transport, the worry is that everyone will switch to cars as Covid-19 restrictions ease to avoid getting infected on public transport.

Happily, lots of plans are underway to try to push people on to their bikes instead.

New York City is closing down streets near parks for biking, walking, and jogging only. New York of all places!

Milan is to transform 35 km of streets with walking and cycling zones over the summer. Here’s one of their plans:

Paris continues its war against cars by opening one of its most famous main roads—rue de Rivoli—to bikes, buses and taxis only.

It’s also looking at adding cycle paths to the roads that follow key metro lines in order to maintain “capacity” on those routes as fewer people head underground to brave the confined spaces and infamous sticky metro poles.

Other cities with cool initiatives include Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Vancouver, Oakland, Winnipeg, Denver, Calgary, Budapest, Berlin, Bogota, and Mexico city.

Bravo!

Earth Day 2020

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.

Earth Day is the one day a year we pretend to give a fuck about the planet.

This is what protesters looked like for the first Earth Day in New York, 50 years ago.

Santi Visalli / Getty Images

No shortage of P2 masks back then!

They were protesting about air pollution at the time.

Air pollution has fallen massively worldwide since Covid-19 hit.

There is even talk of a 5% drop in global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels this year, the biggest ever. (Let’s just pretend we’ve forgotten the 830 million tonnes of CO2 produced by the Australian bushfires, la la la la la, I can’t hear you, I’m not listening to you!)

A pandemic is a pretty ghastly way to achieve a drop in emissions though. There’s not much jumping for joy coming from me.

And let’s not forget the bigger picture. In the US for instance—without bringing Covid-19 into the picture—the air quality continues to suck due to climate change and its roll-on effects, such as more frequent forest fires leading to more small particles in the air.

“A new report from the American Lung Association finds nearly half of the nation's population—150 million people—lived with and breathed polluted air, placing their health and lives at risk. The 21st annual "State of the Air" report finds that climate change continues to make air pollution worse, with many western communities again experiencing record-breaking spikes in particle pollution due to wildfires. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of air pollution on lung health is of heightened concern.”

Meanwhile, as Trump “fights” Covid-19, he’s also finding time to make things worse in other ways.

“The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has gutted an Obama administration regulation requiring coal plants to cut their emissions of mercury and other pollutants that carry significant risks to human health.”

In a massive coincidence no doubt:

“The EPA […is] currently headed up by former coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler.”

Today I sit in a room in suburban Auckland. We are all under “lockdown” here. Outside, not a sound, except for insects and birds in the garden. About once an hour a car rolls past like a portal to another time. A plane flying overhead is a cause to come out and stare at the novelty of a plane flying overhead. I feel like a pygmy in the Amazon being buzzed by a turboprop for the first time. What the hell is that thing? Is it a bird?

At night, I take walks down the middle of the road, revelling in the silence, taking deep breaths of crazy fresh air.

Life goes on.

[Cover photo credit: AP, New York, 1970]

What happens next? Part I

In the US, the initial bailout for passenger airlines has been set at 25 billion dollars.

These same airlines spent 45 billion dollars on stock buybacks over the past five years.

Strict conditions on aviation emissions reductions were removed from the final version of the bailout.

Where I come from, this is called, Not learning from your mistakes.

As the climate kerfuffle looms like a horror shitshow on the backside of the coronavirus pandemic, it would be nice to think some people are imagining a “better world” that could follow after the coronacollapse.

I know I am.

I estimate I have about 1% of the world’s population with me on this one.

*

I’m currently locked down in New Zealand, one of the worlds most selfish and least self-aware countries. It’s very much a society of Me! Me! Me!, freeDumb, and high per capita CO2 emissions.

It’s also geographically far away from the rest of the planet with a relatively small population. The temptation is overwhelming here to pretend that our emissions “don’t matter”, our way of life is “good”, exporting massive amounts of meat and dairy overseas is “necessary for our economy”, and importing four million tourists a year to gape at the “untouched nature” is “vital”.

And so on.

Basically, New Zealand is a late-stage Capitalist habitat-destroying CO2-spewing consumer society with much too much riding on “business as usual” to take a good hard look in the mirror.

However…

New Zealand locked down early, decapitating the exponential corona nightmare in its tracks, meaning it may be one of the first countries to experiment with post-first-wave reopening of businesses and society.

Let’s not pretend that the 99% reality here will be anything other than winding the clock back up to Go! Drive! Work! Consume! Pollute! as quickly as possible. After all, all those who have lost their jobs want them back quick snap! Which is totally understandable.

So is there a silver lining in the other 1% reality?

The tourism industry here has been pushed into that 1% zone simply because the ongoing mess in the rest of the world—and in particular the great chunks of it that funnel tourists to New Zealand—means that they can’t quickly get back to business as usual, even if they want to!

They are therefore getting a chance to imagine, “What happens next?” despite plentiful grinding of teeth.

And that imagining is happening. Tourism New Zealand is leading plans to radically change their approach to the visitor industry. Kelvin Davis, head of Tourism New Zealand:

“We have an opportunity to rethink the entire way we approach tourism to ensure that it will make New Zealand a more sustainable place, enrich the lives of all our people and deliver a sector which is financially self-sustaining in the longer term:”

Less tourists but staying for longer would be a good start. In the last ten years, the number of tourists coming to New Zealand has approximately doubled. New Zealand was still a fully-functioning country in 2010; surely it can survive just fine with half as many tourists.

(However, in that time, government policy has allowed the country’s population to increase by half a million, some of whom got jobs in this expanded tourism industry—which will no longer exist. You can go down a Capitalist population growth jobs rabbit hole here if you want. It’s messy.)

A former general manager of Tourism New Zealand, Cas Carter, wrote this piece about a fantasy tourism future for New Zealand.

“The fancy attractions with the $100 plus entry tag had to rethink their pricing strategy to attract New Zealanders.

“They had to reconsider what they were offering too. For example, the 'hāngi and show' Māori tourism product was remodeled for Kiwis seeking an authentic, immersive language and culture learning experience”.

And:

“Despite private sectors gasps, the Government put a two million per annum cap on international visitors with special allowances for those visiting friends and relatives.

“Tourism operators who had been focused on volume-based revenue either quickly pivoted to meet the high-end visitor market or disappeared.

“Some moved into marketing environmental based products that supported a rejuvenated 100 per cent Pure New Zealand brand.”

The sky’s the limit when coronavirus gives you a chance to dream.

Take that chance.

When the air clears →

On Tuesday, Los Angeles had some of the cleanest city air in the world.

It was the best air quality ever recorded there in March.

Photo by Angel Riveros on Unsplash

In downtown Auckland, my friend Lucy said the view across the sea to the Coromandel Peninsula was clearer than she’s ever seen it.

In northern India, people in the city of Jalandhar have seen the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years.

It’s closer to 150 km if you look at a map, but still, if you can see mountains that far away, they’re pretty freaking massive.

Here’s a Snopes article on the “first time in 30 years claim”. Believe it or not, the claim is basically true!

Jesus.

The are plenty of photos of epic mountains in the Snopes article if you want something to dream about while locked away at home.

You’re welcome.

[Cover photo: Ashish Sharma]

Most new electricity generation was green in 2019 →

From the Guardian:

“Almost three-quarters of new electricity generation capacity built in 2019 uses renewable energy, representing an all-time record.”

Here’s the last 20 years’ data:

The elephant in the room of course is that this is from “new” sources, so it’s on top of current electricity generation, rather than replacing it.

“Fossil fuel power plants are in decline in Europe and the US, with more decommissioned than built in 2019. But the number of coal and gas plants grew in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In the Middle East, which owns half the world’s oil reserves, just 26% of new electricity generation capacity built in 2019 was renewable.”

There is still good news to be had though:

“New data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) shows solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world’s power, marking another record.”

All of this only really matters if the total amount of fossil fuels burned for power decreases absolutely. We’re still not there yet. The percentage of energy generated by green sources has to continue to rise, and the total fossil fuel output has to decrease before you’ll see me grinning like a madman.

Wilding: the return to nature of a British farm, by Isabella Tree. A kind of review →

When your last name is Tree, you’re either going to become a logger or a hugger.

Thankfully for Britain, Isabella Tree preferred hugs.

But it didn’t start out that way.

In the 80s she got together with Charlie Burrell just before he took over Knepp Castle Estate, 3500 acres of intensive agriculture and dairy farming south of London.

They plugged away at it for seventeen years before the combination of poor soil, price fluctuations, debt, and irrational European subsidies all got a bit much. As Isabella writes in Wilding—published in 2018,

“Quite when we realised the farm was doomed to fail is hard to pinpoint now, almost two decades on.”

Wilding is the story of what happened after the doom descended.

*

From the year 2000 on, Isabella and Charlie slowly let piece by piece of Knepp’s 3500 acres return to nature. Those three words: return to nature, disguise an epic battle with farmers, neighbors, government, funding agencies, and even conservationists themselves.

Their gateway drug was letting the first 350 acres go, seeding them with native wildflowers. Even this seemingly simple task was hard work; it took three years for these flowers to outcompete residual seed from the previous 55 years’ intensive agriculture.

I was shocked to read that wildflower meadows are barely a thing in the UK any more.

“Since the 1930s, 97 per cent of the UK’s wildflower meadows—7.5 million acres—have been lost, mostly ploughed up for arable, fast-growing agricultural grass and forestry.”

Indeed, the UK trying to feed itself during and after World War II, compounded by farming lobbies and then European agriculture subsidies that totally fucked up the link between what was needed and what was actually grown, has led to a countryside that is—to my great surprise—not very “natural” at all.

Did you know that England has only 944 square kilometers of land conserved for nature? That’s less than 1% of its surface. France has 30 times that. The introductory chapter of Wilding is full of harrowing statistics like these, and the no-Einstein-required consequence is that biodiversity has nosedived, with numerous bird species heading towards extinction, bees too, and insects (what insects?!) plummeting in numbers.

So yeah, it turns out that the British countryside has become about as biodiverse as a bucket of Roundup. This was a real surprise to me, given how “lovely” the British countryside looks, superficially at least.

It was the intense hum of insects in those first 350 acres in the summer of 2002 that told Isabella and Charlie they were on to something.

“Most conspicuous of all was the ambient noise: the low-level surround-sound thrumming of insects—something we hadn’t even known we’d been missing. We walked knee-deep through ox-eye daisies, bird’s-foot trefoil, ragged robin, knapweed, red clover, lady’s bedstraw, crested dog’s tail and sweet vernal grass, kicking up clouds of butterflies—common blues, meadow browns, ringlets, marbled whites, small and Essex skippers—and grasshoppers, hoverflies and all sorts of bumblebees.”

Yes, I must warn you, the book is chock-a-block with plants, flowers, fungi, insects and animals that I have not heard of and wouldn’t recognise in a police line-up if you paid me. But really, I’m truly glad that they all exist and are thriving at Knepp. Really!

So. Many. Living. Things. Here’s that bird’s-foot trefoil by the way:

Source.

They then brought in fallow deer to graze the 350 acres, which also meant plenty of rutting at those horny times of the year, bringing a bit of headbanging to the land.

Next, a trip to Holland to meet revolutionary Dutch ecologist Frans Vera pushed the whole adventure into turbodrive.

I’ll spare you the details but basically this dude discovered that introducing big grazing animals into a landscape not dominated by closed-canopy forest is a bit like feeding Red Bull to a three year old.

Biodiversity goes nuts.

He turned 15 000 acres of land reclaimed from a freshwater lake into a kind of Serengeti. In the Netherlands, for goodness’ sake!

“Meandering herds of grazing animals: stocky, primeval-looking Konik ponies the height of a zebra with black legs and faces and mouse-grey coats, foals at foot; dark-coated Heck cattle with the sharp, curving horns of oxen; great gatherings of red deer. Through the binoculars we could see, on a raised mound, a knot of furry red fox cubs scrabbling over each other in excitement as their parent, brazen as a jackal, returned to the den with a goose in its jaws.”

The prevailing theory until Frans Vera showed up was that if you left land like this to regenerate, it would eventually turn into closed-canopy forest, as “Europe used to be”.

However, with the arrival of geese and then grazing animals and all the natural processes they kick-started—like soil regeneration and accidental habitat creation for other species, forest growth could simply not take over on the Dutch land, so everything but forest flourished, from fungi to insects, butterflies to flowers, plants to shrubs, and mice to primeval ponies!

He realised he was on to something.

Some conservationists and ecologists have still not recovered from the shock he set rolling, and today, the “obvious fact” that Europe used to be covered in closed-canopy forest is now not quite so “obvious”.

“This idea—that grazing animals could prevent spontaneous forest succession and generate more complex and biodiverse habitats instead—was heretical.“

Isabella and Ted have run with Frans’ ideas and not stopped for breath since, despite a god-almighty battle with the powers that be—including many nature lovers—that continues even today.

Like the famous reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone park where one change led to a cascade of biodiversity and ecological wins, their work at Knepp has been revelation upon revelation. You let nature do whatever the hell it wants, and miracles literally happen. Nature rediscovers itself.

Their neighbors, on the other hand, have taken the rewilding of Knepp—with all its “un-beautiful” scrub and thistle, anthills and flood plains, shallow ponds and unmanicured hedgerows—as an assault both on who they are (farmers here to save the country from starvation!) and on what England is “supposed” to look like, which is kind of like this:

Very pretty.

And basically dead, ecologically speaking.

Knepp, on the other hand, looks more like this:

Screenshot from this video of Knepp (Copyright).

A bit of everything is growing, fighting for life, insane biodiversity with owls, bees, butterflies, fungi, worms, bats, birds, deer and wild pigs (wild boar have not been allowed, yet.).

A decision on whether they can bring back beavers is expected this year.

While we’re on the subject of what the English countryside is “supposed to look like”, Isabella tells a great story about how different age groups reacted to an early tour through the property.

“We were familiar with the usual reaction from our own generation, the forty-to-sixty-somethings. Children of the agricultural revolution were aghast at what we were doing. The twenty-somethings were often more responsive. For them the idea of national food security, of digging for victory, was an anxiety from a bygone era.”

However, it was the really old folk that delivered the surprise.

“Those in their eighties could remember the agricultural depression between the wars, where marginal land across the country had been abandoned…to scrub. To them, clumps of dog rose and hawthorn, thickets of hazel and sallow—even swathes of ragwort—were not offensive at all. The landscape recalled them, instead, to their childhood ramblings in a countryside heaving with insects and birds… To some, it was positively beautiful… ‘This is how the country always used to look!’ ”

This is brilliant stuff. Who would have known our concept of what the English countryside is meant to look like is due to historical laziness and short-sightedness more than anything else? There’s nothing permanent in the slightest about how English countryside looks today!

I loved this book. It’s a modern take on Rachel Carson’s epic, Silent Spring, from the 60s, a celebration of nature as it could be.

The sheer interconnectedness of life—if you give it a chance—really does blow you away.

Wilding also makes you realise how little we have learned since Silent Spring was published. You almost come out of it thinking that humans really should be banned from exploiting half the planet for a decade or two, probably longer. Encouragingly, parts of Europe are already doing rewilding at a larger scale, bringing back things like bison and wolves—to the joy of sheep farmers everywhere.

The book can be a bit plodding from time to time, it’s not quite as poetic as Silent Spring. You almost feel the struggle to write it was up there with the struggle to make Knepp a success. But there’s so much joy, discovery, and illumination in the book, I breezed through it in a couple of days, daydreaming of what it would be like to have 3500 acres to play with.

Also, I learned that beavers are cool as fuck. I hope they get the green light to bring them in this year.

Today, Knepp “survives” on environmental grants, actual safari visits (just like in Africa!), and accommodation in rustic cabins, tree houses, and yurts in hidden parts of the property. Listen to the birds and insect in this tree house video, it’s insane! They also cull the cattle, pigs, and deer grazing the land and sell the meat as top-shelf organic.

All of their safaris, sleepovers, and sales have currently ground to a halt due to the coronavirus. I hope they can get it all up and running again soon. It truly is a magical place, and I can’t wait to visit and go on a safari!

See you soon, keep safe, stay at home, and dream of a better world.

An ode to cruise ships →

Cruise ships represent everything that’s wrong with late-stage capitalism: meaningless pollution, mindless travel, machiavellian tax dodging, etfuckingcetera.

That said, I’ll admit I’m interested in going on a cruise in the same way that I’m definitely interested in seeing what writhing maggots look like when you accidentally put meat in the compost.

David Foster Wallace—in his now infamous soliloquy—expanded this sensation of doom into a 24-page epic in Harper’s Magazine in 1996.

You, reader, are currently on lockdown. You definitely have time to read this.

*

In other news, it turns out cruise ships are petri dishes too.

Fuck cruise ships. Don’t even think of bailing them out Trumpywumpy.

[Cover photo credit: Kim Kyung-Hoon—Reuters]

When humans stop

Hard to talk of anything but the subject du jour at the moment, isn’t it?

Each morning after waking, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, a tense feeling mixed with helplessness comes over me in those seconds before I connect once more to the world.

What new horrors await me today?

Apart from in China and a few other Asian countries, this whole shitshow is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

The long run has never seemed so far away.

*

I feel so sad for all those people around the world who—as we speak—are arriving at overloaded hospitals. Some of them with triage: we’ll try to save you, but not that guy over there. Italy looms in my head like a nightmare on steroids. America is about to live its most traumatic event since 9-11, with a president so incredibly incapable of rising to the challenge—let alone understanding the challenge—that I have literally no hope. I’m so sad for the (mostly) old people about to go through the flipside of the American dream, maybe not coming out the other side. I’m beyond sad for the valiant medical staff on the frontline in Italy, France, Spain, America, everywhere, doing their best, risking their lives. For what they are going through and will go through in the days and weeks that follow, I can only weep.

*

More well-informed people than me seem to be worried that the whole financial system could topple. The rush to the “safety” of US dollars (ironically, the currency of the rich country coming dead last in its response) is causing all kinds of unintended bad shit to bubble up behind the scenes.

*

If this whole sorry mess does “blow over”, I’m under no illusion that we’ll massively change our destructive relationship with the Earth. There will be lots of ramping up, job renewal, coal spewing, oil burning, share buying, financial trickery. And the insidious return of getting money that doesn’t actually exist to spin faster and faster once more, bringing with it that soothing illusion of prosperity we (in the “rich” world) know so well.

Then again, I can’t imagine that everything is going to be the same as before, either. Everyone with an environmental bone in their body will be calling out to bring back a better world, somehow. A world with less air pollution, cleaner water, forests without bulldozers, birds singing, insects humming.

It’d be nice, right?

*

In any case, the Earth is already grinning like fuck.

In abandoned Venice, the water is not being churned up any more, and fish can be seen again (they were already there but living in the murk). It’s crystal clear!

Marco Capovilla

Dolphins swim in semi-abandoned Italians ports.

Nitrogen dioxide levels drop off a Chinese cliff:

Air quality improves world-wide.

How many deaths will this prevent? More than coronavirus causes?

It’ll be fascinating to look back on this a year from now, if we get there!

*

In other good-ish news, my copy of Wilding has arrived.

I’ll not be ordering another book online for the moment because somewhere out there, it means some poor sod in a warehouse has to go to work, put it in a package, send it off, and someone in the post office has to go to work—risking infection—to deliver it.

I want to be the least responsible as possible for putting people at risk for non-essential reasons at the moment.

Good luck to you all out there.

Bye for now.

Friends, we need to talk

Friends, we need to talk.

About love, life, coronavirus.

About hand sanitiser, air pollution, the meaning of life.

About toilet paper.

About the meaning of hot, heat, and fuck that’s hot.

About this doozie of a situation we’re in.

About Me! Me! Me! I want it! Now!

About all these things.

And more.

Shall we begin, dear friends?

Ok. Let’s do it!

Grab a stiff drink or a Kombucha and belt yourself in.

*

Once upon a time—the 1960s to be precise—in New Zealand, a little country at the edge of the world, Jo Crabb wanted to use the family oven for some baking.

This is how it worked back then:

“…you had to make at least two things at once, otherwise you were ‘wasting the oven’. Or, if the oven was already on, you were allowed to do some baking; you weren’t allowed to heat the oven up to do just one thing. Economy. It wasn’t the Depression: this was the 1960s. We weren’t poor, but those were thriftier times. It was just normal. Isn’t it funny how ‘normal’ changes?”

It sure is.

Can you imagine doing that kind of thing today?

I can’t.

So why don’t we?

Stop for a second, and ask yourself this question, honestly: Why wouldn’t you do this today?

Then, scroll on past the cute doggie.

Did you come up with any insights as to why you don’t double dip in the oven these days?

Is it because energy is too cheap?

Is it because ‘What the hell is wrong with you for even suggesting such a crazy thing’?

Is it because you’re living in a society where everyone aspires to do exactly what they want to do, exactly when they want to do it, to hell with the consequences?

(If you’re scavenging in rubbish bins for calories, you are not concerned.)

Or Is it that the consequences of our actions (e.g., turning off a light) are not immediately visible? Immediately obvious?

Is that the problem?

I mean, come on! What are the consequences of leaving the light on in an empty room, right?

To most of us, there are no consequences.

No-one tells us off if we do it. Our power bill is barely affected. We can take the hit of a few extra cents a month, maybe a dollar or two, without even noticing.

Powered by the world’s average energy source mix (a mixture of coal, solar, hydro, wind, etc.) it’s probably a few grams of CO2 per light bulb per day. A tiny tiny amount.

It sounds trivial. Why should we give a fuck?

Turning that light off in that empty room will not change the course of humanity.

It’s true.

But what happens when one billion people leave a light on in an empty room for an hour a day? A computer on overnight? Run the washing machine when it’s only 1/4 full?

Why is this “business as usual” so addictive, so soothing?

Is it because we can?

Is it the plausible deniability involved? (Who me? I’m a good person, I am, I’d never do a thing like that!)

Again, is it simply the lack of consequences?

*

Imagine if someone punched you in the nose each time you left a room without turning off the light.

Imagine if every time you switched off a light, the CO2 created during it’s on-time was pumped up your left nostril at high-speed, rather than being released in some far-away, invisible, unimagined place?

Or that you could choose the person that got it up the nose?

Or you could send it to a random person with a compulsory note attached to it with your address on it.

There’d be a lot less lights on in empty rooms, methinks.

*

What is missing in our imagination that makes us such magnificent sheep in this group passivity epidemic?

Does 51% of a country’s population have to have their life almost destroyed in at least one apocalyptic climate event before the mess we’re in sinks in?

(A good question to ask the next Australian you bump into.)

*

Reality bites in times like these. In times with dodgy viruses floating around.

We as a species have come to an implicit understanding—almost a subconscious hunch, never mentioned in polite society, in fact never mentioned at all—that consumption of stuff, necessary or otherwise, keeps the wheels turning.

And we are prepared to keep those wheels turning no matter what.

We are getting ready to put them back into overdrive once the viral peak is over.

It’s like a big world-wide perpetual motion machine based on group unthinking about the looming shit-show.

The planet is an afterthought.

The planet is currently taking a deep breath of its freshest air in years.

But humanity will not be deterred.

Growth is waiting in the wings, and we want it again!

Imagine if we decided to use this surreal world-wide coronavirus mess to reset to zero. To make better decisions about the future. To not kick-start all those idling coal-fueled factories in China. To decide that the new shitty made-in-China sofa we thought we wanted is not perhaps as important to our existence as previously imagined. That we don’t really need a fucking iPhone 27. That walking and taking the bus are things. That flying across the planet is a luxury, not a god-given right. That an SUV is not necessary for driving to the supermarket twice a week. That life is actually richer with less stuff, less noise. That we are destroying the wobbly platform we float precariously on, like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha yeah right!

*

Deep in the dirty soul of our collective delusion lies the quote that does not speak its name:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. -Upton Sinclair

It is found hiding in the cellar with its buddies: overpopulation, inequality, nationalism, and stupidity.

It’s quite a party down there.

*

Be a better person. Turn off the goddam light. Cancel the sofa. Don’t worry. Be happy.

I dare you.

Coronavirus-free zone

Ten happy planetary thoughts to put coronavirus out of your mind for a few merry minutes.

1.

Plans for direct trains between Paris and Bordeaux starting in 2022. It’ll be a 5 hour trip. Go suck on a lemon, Ryanair.

2.

Sustainable micro-grids powered by green energy can be really resilient when natural disasters hit.

3.

There’s lots of pressure on Marsh—the world’s largest insurance broker—to cut its ties with Adani, the company trying to build a massive new coal mine in Australia.

4.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. Solar is starting to push out coal in Australia. Now if they could just flatten out their population growth, stop having 8 month-long bushfire seasons, and hide ScoMo away in a cellar somewhere with a lump of coal for company, Australia would be on a roll.

5.

Globally, big coal companies are already predicting the end of coal and not even trying to hide it. They’re not stupid, they’re here to make money and buy useless shit with it just like the rest of us.

6.

There’s lots of pressure on big investors to step away from fossil fuels. Step away from the building, Sir!

7.

A climate activist decided to go for the top job at Poland’s top coal polluter. Funny.

8.

Germany has a real plan and a real timetable to shut down its coal burning for good, so far with no job losses.

9.

Energy-related emissions flatlined last year, despite “growth”. Imagine what a dose of global coronavirus will do to this year’s emissions. (Oops, I said the bad word again, sorry!)

10.

Last but not least, hip hip hooray for “Thunberging”, a new dating trend related to climate anxiety.

*

And there you have it.

I hope you’re all feeling just a little bit better now!

I know I am!

Bye for now.

And don’t forget to wash your hands!

Third runway at Heathrow ruled illegal due to climate concerns →

From the Guardian:

“Plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport have been ruled illegal by the court of appeal because ministers did not adequately take into account the government’s commitments to tackle the climate crisis.

“The ruling is a major blow to the project at a time when public concern about the climate emergency is rising fast and the government has set a target in law of net zero emissions by 2050”.

Good news for the planet. First it was France, now it’s the UK.

Also:

“The court’s ruling is the first major ruling in the world to be based on the Paris climate agreement and may have an impact both in the UK and around the globe by inspiring challenges against other high-carbon projects.

“It’s now clear that our governments can’t keep claiming commitment to the Paris agreement, while simultaneously taking actions that blatantly contradict it” said Tim Crosland, at legal charity Plan B, which brought the challenge. “The bell is tolling on the carbon economy loud and clear.”

Interesting legal precedent. You can see now how big new development projects in rich countries are going to be increasingly battered into non-existence by climate crisis activists.

No tears from this happy bunny.

Of course, some “we will appeal!” babble from head-in-the-sand muppets was added for “balance” to the Guardian article:

“We will appeal [as an interested party] to the supreme court on this one issue and are confident that we will be successful. Expanding Heathrow, Britain’s biggest port and only hub, is essential to achieving the prime minister’s vision of global Britain. We will get it done the right way.”

“Mike Cherry, at the Federation of Small Businesses, said: “The verdict is a blow to small firms who need greater regional and global connectivity, as well as more opportunities to export.”

Yeah, nah.**

Two slices of good news in two days.

We’re on a roll folks.

** kiwi slang, used when you are in a conversation and you kinda get what the other person is saying but don’t quite agree with what is being said, or don’t really give a shit.

[Cover photo: Adrian Pingstone, public domain]

Rewilding Britain →

Great whack-a-mole article on farms and wild spaces in the UK:

“For decades, the way we farm has been degrading land and destroying wildlife. Now there’s a revolution coming – but is it going to create more problems than it solves?”

My executive summary of this most excellent (and balanced!) article:

Intensive farming/agriculture eventually ruins the land. Some very rich people have been buying destroyed UK farming land and letting nature take over again—with a push or two here and there. Farmers worry that more land will be required for animals/crops in the future, not less. Big kerfuffle.

When one of those rich dudes decided to cull deer on his land—to help pine martens, mountain hares, and hen harriers make a comeback in their traditional lands, locals—who had deer on their land for commercial hunting—developed a hearty dose of cognitive dissonance:

“By 2013, MacDonell and his team had culled 8,000 deer at Glenfeshie, and his local opponents, among them a neighbouring deerstalking enterprise, had camped on the moral high ground. “When they shoot deer they call it sport,” MacDonell said wryly when I visited him last September, “and when we shoot deer they call it slaughter. Also, they claimed it would take hundreds of years for the woodland to regenerate.”

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

“We were standing on a track overlooking the River Feshie. On either side, young Scots pines displayed bright green needles against the glowing heather. Among the pines grew rowans hung with scarlet berries, and bilberry bushes whose leaves would be fair game for white moth caterpillars in spring. There were more new trees on the far side of the Feshie, binding the banks and spreading up the hillside. MacDonell smiled”.

This process is called rewilding.

Rewilding is, large-scale conservation aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and core wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and keystone species.

Rewilding is big. The interwebs is full of it.

I’ve just ordered Isabella Tree’s 2018 book Wilding which deals with her and her husband’s attempt to turn a 3500 acre tract of farming land back to nature from 2001 onwards.

How has it worked out for them?

“…the 3,500 acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade".

”Once-common species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of other species are rocketing. The Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life – all by itself”.

More glorious details:

“In 2001, starting with a small section of the estate and gradually expanding as funding became available, Burrell stopped ploughing the land and spraying it with chemicals. Removing internal fences allowed the wild Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs he introduced to browse and rootle over large distances, their disruptions creating habitats for other animals and plants. Dung beetles dived into delicious organic cowpats left by longhorn cattle that hadn’t been fed wormers and parasiticides; voles colonised the roots of a dead oak that under the previous regime would have been felled in the interests of tidiness. The summer of 2002 revealed wildflowers with delightful names such as bird’s-foot trefoil and lady’s bedstraw that hadn’t been seen in such numbers for a generation, along with a profusion of insects, which produced a continuous thrum – “something”, in Tree’s words, “we hadn’t even known we’d been missing”.

Their brilliant website full of photos and videos is well worth a visit if you want to feel joyful for a bit.

Apparently there are even larger and more ambitious rewilding schemes underway in other parts of Europe.

Yay!

The rest of the article swings back in the other direction; basically: We have to eat food and food comes from farms.

Which is mostly true, for the moment.

However, if the UK decided on a policy of zero net population growth from now on, you’d think a slow transition to rewilding would also be manageable.

But: Capitalism.

Also, the UK currently imports half its food, so the bigger picture is a messy one. What happens in a pandemic when food imports stop?

Maybe we’ll find out over the next few months.

Anyway, this real flip-side to rewilding utopias is still worth a read in the second half of the article.

But to finish on a high note, here’s a nice picture of camping at Knepp Wildland to brighten up your day.

Camping at Knepp Wildland—Copyright.

[Cover photo from Knepp Wildland’s Instagram feed—Copyright.]

Fabulous writing on cognitive dissonance in "what comes next?" Australia →

If I were a columnist for the New York Times (which I’m not) I’d have been proud as pudding to write as well as Australian Lisa Pryor did today:

“The summer barbecue talk was all cognitive dissonance. “Aren’t the fires terrible? And so many animals lost; it’s heartbreaking. We need to do more about climate change. But anyway, how was your trip to Japan? We are thinking of taking the kids next year — was the snow OK?” Conversations of a country driven off a cliff, suspended in the air for one moment before the fall”.

This is definitely a thing.

After the bushfires, smoke, military evacuations of tourists on beaches:

“Then came the floods and the heaviest rainfall in 30 years. Rain blew sideways, and the house creaked. We carted buckets in the opposite direction, bailing out our small lawn as it drowned in several inches of water. And it struck me that this — a sudden and opposite problem after months of drought — illustrated the impossibility of simply “adapting” to climate change".

“How do you adapt when the changes coming are not simply new patterns but the very loss of a predictable pattern? How do you adapt to chaos? How do you affordably prepare a home simultaneously for drought, wind, rain, smoke, dust, fire, blackouts, rising sea levels, falling trees, floods, hail and record-breaking temperatures?”

Adaption is a slimy word. One which was floating in the air at a suburban Columbus Coffee corner table meet-up this afternoon in Auckland between three (also slimy) political operatives that I eavesdropped on. They were brainstorming around the lack of scientific consensus and other nonsense.

Tools.

But I digress. Back to more coherent Lisa:

“So far, our national government has shown itself to be unequal to the task of taking climate change seriously. Its failures have revealed glimpses of the worst flaws of our national character, if such a thing exists: the stolid selfishness of my money, my holiday, my family, my right to burn coal. We need to feel international pressure to do more, and we deserve consequences for not doing as much as we should”.

To be fair, these seem to be planet-wide flaws.

For anyone wanted to feel personally targeted today (including yours truly), here’s her paragraph to you:

“While we are fighting for political action, we also need to ask ourselves hard questions as individuals and communities. The question I have been asking myself is, what does it matter that I accept the science of climate change if I continue to live my life as if climate change were a hoax? Who cares how many people accept the data if we are still consuming, traveling, investing, eating, dressing, voting and planning for the future as if global warming were imaginary?”

That hits home like a smack to the face, doesn’t it?

Since the bushfires Lisa has started using recovered shower and washing machine water to water the garden, composting, challenging herself to only buy second-hand clothes, and looking for more ethical places to invest retirement funds.

Of course, it’ll take more than that, but owning the problem is a useful initial step before moving on to greater things—like incessantly pestering the pushers of the growth-driven planet-destroying CO2-generating horror show we call modern life.

Meanwhile, a whiff of civil disobedience is in the air, tucked in there between the CO2 molecules.

Can you smell it?

[Image source: S. H. Chambers]