High Stakes
Climate crisis, war, and COVID-19
The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released earlier this week. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the report “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” It is yet another grave warning about the climate crisis and the urgency of enacting transformative changes to human society to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
The Summary for Policymakers is worth reading, or at least skimming through. One thing that is important to highlight from this report is that the effects we are seeing from our current level of global warming are much worse than predicted, in some ways exceeding what was anticipated to occur in 2100. We are seeing increased harm from extreme weather events, diseases, displacement, famine, etc. and can expect it to get worse as long as emissions continue unabated. Additionally, this report emphasizes a holistic socio-ecological perspective, highlighting the interconnection of climate and environmental crises and human and ecosystem health.
It is hard for me to figure out what else there is to say about it. At this point, many of our most serious environmental harms are relatively simple to mitigate from a physical and technological perspective. In broad strokes we know what is happening, what has to be done, and what will happen if we do not do it; the primary obstacles are political in nature.
Relatedly, Putin’s abhorrent war on Ukraine continues. Russia is the world’s second-largest producer of oil and gas, trailing only the US, and Europe depends on it for energy, especially for heating in the winter. There are, unsurprisingly, calls for increased military spending in response, and the fossil fuel industry and its political lackeys are capitalizing on this crisis by trying to further entrench fossil fuel extraction. This war is also significantly affecting access to other commodities like wheat and sunflower oil.
The sheer wastefulness of war—of life, labor, resources—is overwhelming. As always, people are needlessly suffering and dying with ecological devastation left in the wake of advancing Russian forces. And in this conflict, the threat of nuclear war looms large.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, despite what the Biden administration and comfortable pundits are telling us. While cases are down from the Omicron spike, there are still tens of thousands of new ones each day in the US and around 2,000 deaths, and there is research showing increased risk of serious negative health effects from COVID-19 infection (not to mention “long COVID”). Significant portions of this country and the rest of the world—especially Africa—remain unvaccinated, creating the conditions for more suffering and possibly new and worse variants to emerge.
This is all maddening, and is by no means an exhaustive list of the many ongoing horrors in our world. It can feel like we are facing some sort of unstoppable death drive. Our vastly unequal global society is mostly run by people who are so warped by money and power that they have in many respects lost their humanity, produced by and reproducing systems of exploitation on a path to destruction. The most oppressed and vulnerable—the working class, the poor and racialized populations of the world—suffer disproportionately, during crises and during “normal” times.
Will we get through this? Outside of nuclear annihilation, that depends on who “we” includes. Humanity has persisted through many historical atrocities and crises, but many people suffered and died along the way and did not get through them. Many more people will suffer and die due to global warming, the war in Ukraine, and COVID-19. How many is yet to be determined and will depend on what we do.
Crises magnify inequities, their new harms playing out along existing vulnerabilities of society. They also reveal cracks in the system, and are inflection points where glimpses of different worlds—better and worse—appear, and new structures can take shape faster than seemed possible yesterday. The powers-that-be are trying to double down on the status quo that brought us here, which we cannot afford; for those who “benefit” most from this arrangement, there are no other options. But none of this is inevitable or unchangeable.
Fossil fuels by their very nature facilitate concentrations of power and inequality, which is why it can be tempting to try a rhetorical judo move by using our opponents’ logic against them and framing renewable energy as a way to secure independence from other nations. This is well-meaning but I think it misses the forest for trees—antagonistic security is the logic of the old world we need to get away from. And renewable energy still requires resource extraction to make the component parts for generation and transmission, including minerals from Russia. We live in an interconnected world, and that should be a strength rather than a weakness like it often is now.
When I look at wars, pandemics, and ecological crises, I see intertwined problems with intertwined solutions. Interstate competition, military buildup, fossil fuel dependency, and exploitation of human and nonhuman nature for profit makes us collectively less safe in a variety of ways. Reducing the amount of weapons in the world makes us more secure from war and mitigates the climate crisis and the ecological destruction that causes pandemics. Free movement of people, open sharing of technology like renewable energy and vaccines, and international cooperation and aid through a more democratic UN allows us to use our global interconnection and diversity to our collective advantage. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
I will leave you with the last line of the IPCC report, which sums up the stakes better than I can:
Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.
Weekly Roundup
We should seize and ban yachts, regardless of the national citizenship of their owners. They are unsustainable polluting monstrosities that symbolize obscene waste and wealth inequality.
The revival of wolves in the US has been a conservation success story, but some people are determined to reverse this progress for cruel and misguided reasons. The Biden administration must protect them.
Industrial agriculture is perhaps best conceived of as mining of the soil, extracting resources that are not returned and producing ecological degradation. A recent study assessed soil erosion in the Corn Belt and found that around 35% of the area has lost topsoil, the most fertile and important soil. This reduces crop yields, emits carbon, and increases air and water pollution.
