We were thinking about things like sea level rise, how it was locked in, so it was a question of thinking about how much sea level rise, how fast, where it would be experienced worst– sea level rise is not just the melting icecaps, it's also that warm water expands, it’s “thicker”– The local tides also factor in with tide-funneling coastline shapes causing some areas to be affected worse– And we were thinking about how to adapt.
Figuring out where to move and when, how long it could make sense to wait, were questions on almost everyone’s minds. Areas that we’d thought of as cool and alpine were warming up. Anywhere could be where there’d be fires next. Lots of areas were drying out with local vegetation that evolved in wetter climates becoming dry dead fuel. And then there were more and more areas that looked like they’d be, unpredictably, at times, too wet and too low lying when floods came. Ironically, it was sometimes impossible to find potable, unpoisoned drinking water in some of those same areas.
Everyone was aware of the hopelessness and the resignation. I mean, even if we didn’t consciously acknowledge it, it was there as a sense we all had. If nothing else, you knew it without knowing it.
Those of us who knew enough, who weren’t listening to the national network, cable or legacy internet programs as our news sources, blamed the fossil fuel companies. We blamed what we understood was their psycho-graphic control. We remembered, in the early days, how swathes of people didn’t believe that there was climate change, or if they believed it, they didn’t think it was man made, or maybe they did think humans were causing it. Maybe they thought it would be good, or not so bad.
Maybe some people thought it would be bad, but not for them. Or they thought they’d get some personal benefit from what was happening, the way they were plugged into the system, so that the good for them would outweigh the bad. . . Some people, a lot, said it was happening, but didn’t think they could do anything about it. Others suspected they could do something about it, but just couldn’t figure out what that was.
Some of us did something about it by voting for politicians who said they were going to do something about it but then didn’t. We voted for those kinds of politicians more than once. And we spent a lot of time figuring out who to believe as we voted. It seems we could never be right. It was a no-win proposition every time. Many of us just didn’t have time for all of it. Life was increasing taxing with people struggling to make ends meet. Or we maybe we did have the time, but we somehow never got around to doing anything. Escapist fantasy was especially popular. We could watch it on our tablets indoors while our air conditioners ran. Life spent with super heroes saving worlds around the universe, frequently earth itself, and CGI generated versions of our favorite old movie stars was a tad more soothing . .
. . . There were a thousand things that could be picked from, essentially an infinite menu of reasons not to do anything about climate change that the fossil fuel companies could deliver in tailored packages to suit our individual personalities and disable us. “Nano-targeting” was one phrase for it. The social media companies, data-collecting marketers like Amazon, the search engines, our phone and door bell trackers, provided the manipulators with everything necessary to know about any of us. They picked our leaders for us too. It meant they also picked and had a hand in which charismatics were sent into bubble oblivion, maybe assigned small personalized ineffectual followings to be dispensed with at the same time.
We knew they were doing it. You could tell. I mean, if you cared to pay attention, you knew. You didn’t need hints from those occasional leaks. Besides, some of those leaks were themselves meant to make you think certain things and why get entangled? Yes, sure, go ahead and connect the dots as proof if you were compulsive about proving things. But, otherwise, just go with the big overall picture. You could tell. You could just easily tell.
First, I’ve got to say that it didn’t seem like anything when you stopped running into people who wanted to tell that there was no climate change, that it wasn’t man made, or wouldn’t be so bad, anything from that whole list of crap. After all, it made sense that people were simply out of rope to believe the impossible; That was clearly explanation enough. . .
That explanation went far enough to cover that much. . .
. . I remember young, red-headed Edgar excited about his new job. Truly excited. Really? He was working on solar capture fabrics. An anomaly? I remember that first and best. Then Shaheen was excited about her job— It involved road and highways generating energy, multiple ways actually. Hester was working on storage, with weights elevating on rails that could spin flywheels coming down. Her eyes had a certain gleam.
It was the sense of optimism that was disorienting. Each time it seemed unexpected, and now the repetitiveness of such encounters just made it seem much more improbable. – People, I mean a different kind of people, were actually going back into government and interested in doing all sorts of things there, a ton of it having really positive implications rippling out in all directions for the climate. Also respecting government, you, of course know the names of the new capable and charismatic leaders who arose. They emerged pretty much right away.
My friend Joshua had no knack at all for engineering, but his enthusiasm for things that others were achieving got him involved in promoting and spreading the word. Technically, he was “advertising” the new technologies to help make them successful in finding a market, and, indeed, he was now working at a legacy advertising firm that had taken this on as its specialty. PR firms were going the same route.
You almost didn’t need the advertising or PR firms: People were hungrily seeking out news everywhere, because there was so much that was terrifically good to learn and potentially take advantage of yourself by finding new endeavors to plug into. Journalists were plying a new skill: solution identification. They were doing a real good job to investigate, find and bring solutions to the surface. A lot of surfaced solutions, or near solutions, were combining with others to make even better ones.
Renewables had already essentially been cheaper than fossil fuel. The flip over to zero fossil fuel use occurred fast. Elimination of the subsidies for fossil fuels might never even have been required. But is was more than that: With the flip, came a vast increase, an upward dizzying spiral, in the efficiency of energy production at lower and lower cost with less and less environmental impact. The energy storage problem for renewables was quickly solved in multiple scores of ways.
We soon had so much extra energy, a vast surplus, beyond what was needed for all our economic needs that it was obvious that there was only one thing to do with it. We started up all sorts engines and devices to extract carbon from the atmosphere and our oceans. At first the methods for extracting carbon from the seawater took the lead.– Either worked: The oceans, in a continual rebalancing, grabbed carbon from the atmosphere so it was the same thing. Carbon extraction was easier than dealing with the methane. Nevertheless, the fact was we were on track to get it all satisfactorily done.
There were a lot of jobs, with attendant excitement and enthusiasm, in the carbon extraction business too. The work that had once been done to determine the cost to the world of dumping carbon into the atmosphere like trash was handy in setting a price for what people could be paid per ton of carbon extraction. As the cost of the technology came down, profits attracted wider and wider scale participation. We turned back the clock. That was what people said: "We turned back the clock." The climate catastrophe chaos was reversed. The planet restored itself to what had been climate normalcy for all the tens of thousands of years any form modern human civilization has existed.
I felt dumb at first not to realize it. Where the change came from was obvious. Why the change was so sudden and complete was obvious. But, when you are in the middle of a whirlwind, recognition can come with obstinate slowness. I, like others, had been so habituated to blaming the fossil fuel industry for the way they commandeered psycho-graphics to immobilize the population and continue their plunder unimpeded, I wasn’t immediately ready to change the lens through which I viewed the world.
It was obvious, truly obvious. What was obvious was that some other group had taken power behind the scenes. All those psycho-graphic tools still existed, but now they had been wrested from the fossil fuel industry. The psycho-graphic tools, the ability to manipulate human beings in a fine tuned personalized way across a huge spectrum of personalities, was being turned around and used for purposes exactly opposite to how the fossil fuel industry had used them. Through psycho-graphic tools every individual’s strengths in terms of personality and skill, where they might fit in in terms of solving the climate change emergency, was systematically identified and assessed so that they could be tipped into taking the most appropriate personal actions they could take.
It worked. It worked.
My problem with all this, is that it wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. I revile psycho-graphics. I had this problem with it when it was being used by the fossil fuel industry to keep us consuming fossil fuels. I had the same problem when it was being used to keep us perpetually at war with huge amount of runaway military spending. I still have a problem with psycho-graphics. I ask you, where is the democracy in a group of powerful people, a coordinating elite, deciding the direction that everyone should take?
Where is the democracy? I thought it was all supposed to happen starting bottom up, grass roots, the wisdom of crowds when people listen to each other. Where is the democracy? Is this the way it was supposed to happen?
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| From the Kickstarter page for "The Truth Has Changed" tour. |
I will note that Fox’s show is a strenuous tour de force and challenging in the bleakness of some of its urgency. Project Censored has begun grappling with the notion that negative news reporting that eschews the provision of “solutions” is a form of news abuse. It results in “negative news overload” that enervates the public, a form of control in itself. Fox is interested in solutions too. The program notes for “The Truth has Changed” explains that one of his other endeavors is “The Solutions Project,” co-founded with Mark Ruffalo, Mark Jacobson and Marco Krapels. Similarly, with respect to the climate crisis, Project Censored notes that there is “The Drawdown Project.” Personally I believe many solutions would presently be unfolding at a quickening pace if we had a fossil fuels tax and were looking to start paying people to extract carbon from the atmosphere and oceans and I think the two should be related.
Fox’s show does not leave the subject of potential solutions entirely unaddressed, but it is mostly more about the urgency with which we need to find them. His show does not identify or present the questionable solution posed by the short story above. I hope it leaves your thoughts provoked.
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| The show was shut down at The Public. Content too challenging? |
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