I am so angry, so sad. Today I drove my two children to the first day of a weeklong day-camp with a nature theme. They are learning about local species, pressing flowers, that kind of thing. The teachers expected that the kids would spend most of the day outside in nature. Instead, the kids will likely spend the entire week indoors, since there is so much wildfire smoke in our area that the air is designated by the EPA as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy,” depending on the time of day and the wind.
There have been so many wildfires in our area in recent years that Smoke is officially becoming the season after Summer and before What Happened To Fall. This increase isn’t random. It is due to climate change–climate change that we humans have known about since at least 1981 and have done next to nothing to stop.
As the Sacramento Bee put it: “This is climate change, for real and in real time. We were warned that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat.”
We were warned. And yet here we are.
As an environmental reporter, I keep my rage and despair about environmental horrors—and especially climate change—locked up in a big strong opaque container that I keep shoved in the back corner of my mind. So do most other environmental journalists I know.
But while I was watching my little kids walk into that building to spend a day–a week–trapped inside like Rapunzel learning about a disappearing nature they can’t even visit without choking on the fumes of our own greed, selfishness, and lack of imagination, my containment unit cracked open and howling anger exploded outwards from my heart along all my arteries until I was vibrating with bitterness and sorrow.
I will stuff this fierce grief back inside and close my box of rage back up. I must if I am to carry on. But for today, I am just so furious at everyone in a position to do something who did nothing. The more power you had to change things that you did not exert, the angrier I am at you.
(This includes myself, of course. I am no climate saint. Despite the solar panels on my house, I fly a lot for work and drive a car. But I am less mad at myself and my fellow “consumers” than at the fat cats at fossil fuel companies and politicians in power. I subscribe to the notion that we should not try to make environmental change by guilt-tripping citizens who are already dealing with trying to get by in a country where upper-income families have 75 times as much money as lower-income families. Environmental solutions must be systemic. The “straw ban” is a great example of this. A catchy campaign encourages already stressed-out consumers to alter their behavior—at a significant cost to the many disabled people who need plastic straws to drink—instead of working to reform waste management systems in key river basin and coastal hotspots around the world…and you get the idea.)
My kids having to spend nature day-camp locked indoors is a very minor issue compared to the global, intergenerational suffering climate change will cause. In a very real way, the fact that my emotional block was finally cracked by a minor inconvenience to my own very privileged kids points out a real problem with the lack of diversity in climate media. If I were the person I aspire to be, this moment of rage would have happened when I heard about some climate disaster befalling people with less power and agency. That’s my own failure.
Many people will have it much, much, much worse. People are already dying in fires, floods, and heat waves. Their livelihoods are taking a hit and some will see their whole way of life crumble, their cultural relationships with other species severed. Forests will die. Reefs will die.
And also, among these huge, sweeping harms there will also be the small harms: childhood summers spent trapped inside in the filtered chill of air-conditioning instead of outside climbing trees and catching bugs.
I am sitting here in my house with all the windows closed against the thick smoke, sweating profusely in the 90 degree heat. My kids are playing legos again instead of playing outside. We are talking about installing air conditioning in our house since this is going to happen every year for the foreseeable future. Of course, not everyone can afford A/C. Welcome to the future of temperature inequality. I am so disappointed in us. I am so angry. I am so sad. We were warned.
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Photo from NASA’s Terra satellite
Unfortunately, as long as much of our electricity is generated by fossil fuels, then switching on the Air con will simply exacerbate the problem.
If we’re to assume that CO2 is the base culprit (I’ve read research that turning raw land into farms matches the increase in CO2 better than fossil fuels), then in order to reverse the increase, we need to find a way to make extracting CO2 fromthe air profitable in some way. My research into biofuels tells me that it’s feasible (but, perhaps, not practical, but that’s an economic discussion) to extract 80-140 tons of dry matter from each acre each year. Approximately 45 percent of that is carbon and all that carbon came from CO2 in the air. It would be trivial to package that biomass into an inert form and either inject it back into the ground or stack it up as a reserve somewhere.
What’s the catch? The minimal worth of the material, as animal feed, is $200 a ton (it can be easily converted to a liquid fuel suitable for use in diesel engines, but the overall value decreases). Thus, to sequester that material, I need at least that price, else it’s in my economic best interests to sell it higher.
If we assume $200 a ton for the material that’s 45% carbon, then the cost is $444 a ton for the carbon itself (assuming my math is correct; I’m a biochemist). Coal is nearly pure carbon and sells for around a tenth of that price. Thus, for there to be a market, someone has to be willing to pay at least 10x the price of coal for a product that’s just going to be stuffed into the ground or (‘dangerously’) held in easy to reach stockpiles.
There are certainly ways to capture carbon less expensively, but that’s not my point here. My point is if the economic value of the CO2, once it’s been captured into a format that’s easy to work with, is higher than the value to sequester it, then no one in their right (business) mind is going to sequester it. At least here in the US, with our current sociopolitical environment, to get any scale involved it has to be done via some sort of capitalistic method, thus maximally profitable for the people involved. Heck, CO2 itself is worth between $15 and $25 a ton, and almost all that is released directly into the atmosphere one way or another.
I would be tickled pink to set up a corporation that sequestered carbon… If I could be guaranteed a price around $200 a ton ($444 per ton of carbon). I might, after some small scale experiments and tinkering, be willing to accept a smaller price, as there may be certain economies I can utilize if all I’m doing is turning it into bricks that get stacked in a hole in the ground, which might allow me to see the same profit as animal feed, but at at lower price. But then market forces get involved. What if, one day, the price of animal feed spikes. Now I have an incentive to shift my production to target that market. To keep me turning it into bricks is going to require enough of a match to ensure my profit doesn’t get sacrificed.
Make a market for carbon sequestration that beats the alternatives and entrepreneurs will beat down barriers to maximize profit so quickly that we’ll be worrying about an ice age in a century or less.
Which is why I think it’s important that we not make the sequestered carbon too difficult to retrieve.
Very sad situation and very sad we took so little action.
I disagree with the blame someone else attitude however. I see it more and more around be…outrage at some other group and not personal action. The rich are a convenient target but sadly the loudest voices usually not only have no skin in the game but profit from the noise.
Great essay, Emma. I feel the same anger at an emphasis on personal actions rather than overhauling the huge systems that are making climate change worse.
When people ask me about this (which is fairly often, since I’m an environmental reporter), I answer that making those personal changes can be worth it for the sake of living one’s beliefs, which helps to build the inner focus and motivation most of us need to work each day towards the bigger changes. And some can send small pulses of demand up the consumer-to-business chain that help increase our supplies of healthy options.
So, I opt for 100% clean energy on my electricity bill. But even if every person in NY decided to so the same, it would still not be a drop in the oil barrel compared to federal subsidies for oil, coal and gas, or the current capture of the highest levels of our federal government by backers of oil, coal and gas.
We have destroyed the biosphere and it is unraveling at a non linear rate. It will get worse, faster and faster.
Very, very soon we will have 5 billion young people and plumeting who are going to be very, very angry. These literally are the “Good Old Days”.
https://kevinhester.live/2017/11/23/we-are-so-fucked-and-sooner-than-previously-thought/
What would’ve happened if you and other environmental reporters did not “keep my rage and despair about environmental horrors—and especially climate change—locked up in a big strong opaque container that I keep shoved in the back corner of my mind. “? I can’t help but wonder if shouting loudly and angrily enough would’ve countered the Kochs and their ilk.
I agree, the environmental solutions required are systemic. Continued, infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. The earth cannot bear our numbers, we are now in overshoot and will meet our end in the near future as we experience total system collapse. And, yet we continue breeding, and continue the to aspire to “more growth” economically. It is terrifying to behold.
I feel your pain sista. I’m part way through reading this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?fallback=0&recId=18p1YhKHhUhJuc6LlkTLtdXVfZx&geoContinent=NA&geoRegion=CA&recAlloc=thompson_sampling_story&geoCountry=US&blockId=signature-journalism-vi&imp_id=167598434&action=click&module=editorsPicks&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer