“Clean Coal,” Mitigation, and the Fate of the Earth

      Some disclaimers: I am not a scientist, but I have devoted many of my personal resources and much of my professional life to environmental education, conservation, and the new portfolio of endeavors heaped together as “sustainability” initiatives. 

A selection of my beliefs: I believe the natural world, meaning the interconnected web of life and the geophysical and biological systems that support that web, is changing in ways that certainly spell the end of life as humans have known it during our brief evolutionary moment, and may in fact spell the end of humanity’s role as assigned, at least in the Western canon, by the God of the ancient Hebrews, with “dominion … over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

I cannot understand how people, who by general and tolerant standards must otherwise be considered “intelligent,” can deny that the climate is changing, or that the preponderance of sophisticated analysis of rigorously collected data establishes, beyond a reasonable doubt, that anthropogenic factors are primarily to blame for the acceleration of that change.

Imagine my horror, then, to find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with none other than Rupert Murdoch, a significantly influential climate science denier, who is on record pronouncing in the tweetosphere, “If the sea level rises 6 inches . . . we can’t mitigate that, we can’t stop it. We’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores.”

He is right: we can’t stop sea level rise, if it’s going to happen – and of course it has already happened, measurably.  He’s probably right, too, that we can’t significantly mitigate sea level rise, beyond some minor defenses.  And he is certainly right that we’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores – unless, of course, we don’t care how long they last, how much money and effort we put into protecting them, and how much havoc such efforts wreak on the ecosystems surrounding those houses. 

It would be a heavy lift to carry Mr. Murdoch as a champion of coastal conservation and resilience science, an effort my colleagues and associates in the environmental protection movement would be horrified to be asked to consider. 

The sad truth is, however, that Mr. Murdoch’s quotation hints at the end-game strategy humans will soon have to embrace, like it or not. 

I repeat, I am not a scientist, and I make no claim to being comparatively well read in the literature of climate studies.  Perhaps I am just a pessimist.  I cannot shake the conviction, nonetheless, that we have already crossed the threshold, what Columbia Earth Institute professor James Hansen calls the “tipping point,” the point at which “forcings” affect the Earth’s systems enough to bring on a “cascade effect,” the fall of environmental dominoes the recovery from which, “in a timescale meaningful to humanity,” is highly unlikely.

How the cascade effect unfolds is still a matter of scientific debate.  But for human beings, the precise mechanisms and microcosmic effects hardly matter: as a species, we will probably not survive long enough to observe those mechanisms or to measure those effects.

Certainly not if we continue to tolerate the political nonsense and industrial wrongheadedness that wants us to believe that “mitigation” can reverse the trends set in motion by the last several centuries of human activity. 

If we hope to survive, indeed, if we can learn to be compassionate enough to hope for the survival of planetary ecosystems familiar and beloved to us now, nurturing every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, we cannot put our faith in merely mitigating.  Mitigating, according to current thinking, means planting trees so that we can burn coal, which can never be “clean,” no matter how often certain presidential candidates say it can.  Mitigation means patting ourselves on the back for reducing CO₂ emissions by shifting from our dependence on oil to a dependence on natural gas, resulting in the coincidental release of vast volumes of methane with a global warming potential 30 times that of CO₂.  Mitigation means driving (more) in hybrid and electric vehicles, the batteries for which require lithium, nickel, cobalt, and aluminum mined and extracted with significant collateral damage, and which are charged with electricity produced by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. 

Mitigation is a red herring, a feel-good diversion from the reality we must face.  Just as we have forced change upon the earth, the resulting cascade effect will force us to change, in a desperate attempt to adapt to the harsh realities of the world we have helped to create.  Rupert Murdoch has got it right: we will have to stop building on the seashores; we will also have to stop driving, one passenger per vehicle, and use our feet, our bicycles, and when necessary, our trains and buses, if they exist.  We will have to stop flying all over the world for business and pleasure, and instead pursue our business and find our pleasure closer to home.  We will have to stop expecting that Times Square will be lit brighter than day through the dark of the night, that our indoor spaces will be t-shirt warm in the depths of winter or sweatshirt cool in the dog days of summer, that our food will arrive by truck at our door in pre-portioned packages. 

We can make these changes now, and hope the systems of the Earth settle into a balance that can sustain some version of a life we may recognize.  Difficult, to say the least, but maybe worth the effort.  Sadly, we may have missed that chance, stumbling blindly along the mitigation path toward human doom, dragging myriad other forms of life with us. 

Time will tell.  In the meantime, as the dominoes fall, I suppose we should try to enjoy the entertainment of watching politicians quibble over policies that have little to do with the reality facing us all.

© Samuel G. Huber, October 10, 2016