Perhaps I suffer from an undiagnosed case of an undesignated condition of climate anxiety. In Kill Well, the first book in my climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet, such a diagnosable condition has found its way into the next edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the foundation reference for assigning all varieties of declared mental illnesses. Kill Well take place only a couple of years in the future from now.
You might think that a nervous guy like me would be susceptible to that wing of the climate change aware population called “Doomers.”
I am not.
Clearly, there are plenty of things about which to be anxious regarding climate change, and perhaps first and foremost is that there are still people, including some politicians and captains of industry (guess which industry I suggest as taking the lead here) who remain climate change deniers or climate change mitigation gaslighters. Anyone who has been paying attention in 2023—and my standard for what counts as attention in this case is anyone and everyone not in a year-long coma—knows that something is up just by looking out the window (and, yes, I know the difference between weather and climate, but quit interrupting). Even if you aren’t living in areas with absurd heat indexes and weirdly long heat waves, or breathing air clogged with wildfire smoke or getting singed, or getting flooded out by tumultuous deluges, you know there is something of a problem going on. A U.N. report from their World Meteorological Organization out earlier this year puts the tally at “Over two million deaths and $4.3 trillion in economic losses; that’s the impact of a half-century of extreme weather events turbo-charged by man-made global warming.” Keep in mind that this goes only until 2021, and keep in mind that 2022 and 2023 (so far, anyway) have been climate change-related disaster heavy years and the hits are going to keep on coming.
But I am not a doomer.
I’ve read a lot of essays from self-confessed doomers, and from doomer apologists, and from an alternative twin category, the “Collapsers,” and I’m impressed. I’m impressed that so many columns of type (or pixels, I guess) have been devoted to explaining how bad things are or how societal collapse is imminent and unavoidable. There is a sub-category among doomers that I’ll call, “Mitigationists,” but mainly because I’m not interested in spending more time trying to come up with a better name and I don’t want to use “Preppers.” I have some sympathy for them and their argument that climate change in its worse form is coming and the best thing to do is figure out how to cope with the new reality. But I have another take and here’s a little story: Some years ago one of my sisters was showing me a gun she had purchased and I asked her why the heck she’d gotten the gun, and her answer was to ‘protect my family if society breaks down.’ I suggested—I’m sure I was gentle in my response—that it might be better and more effective for her to work toward society not breaking down.
This is the way I think about the climate crisis. I can imagine things getting so bad that civilization itself collapses (and if I can’t imagine such a thing happening, I know where to read all about it!), but I believe it is better to imagine how to tackle the climate crisis short of actual civilization collapse.
But maybe that’s just me.
Here’s one example: “The Impossibility of Prepping for Civilizational Collapse: We won’t stop breaking the biosphere,” by Mitch, on Medium, published December 9, 2022.
He is tackling the subject of wet bulb, when humidity, plus high temperature, plus power loss adds up to trouble, as in the you can die kind of trouble. He also talks about the air being poisonous and that we can’t drink rainwater, but these are throwaway topics to heighten the sense of hopelessness. By the way, in describing the wet bulb scenario, he references putting the character’s dog in the fridge to cool down post-air conditioner shutdown; and then adds “Didn’t someone do that for a couple of minutes with a baby?” Ah, it is so nice to see the rare literary allusion, intentional or not, to James M. Cain’s pulp short story collection, Baby in the Icebox.
So, not only is Mitch catastrophizing—I mean, it is bad enough that the young mother he writes as a fictional example is in the hot seat, never mind the pooch—but he raises the prospects of microplastics, air pollution, and forever chemicals. He states that in order to continue to use fossil fuels countries will continue to…
…spin lies about green tech, electric vehicles and rebuildable energy, not letting on that every single technology depends on and is underpinned by fossil fuel use.
We simply won’t stop using fossil fuels. Using fossil fuels is currently a function of GDP. When you slow it or stop, GDP falls. There is not a politician alive that will tell you they are going to stop fossil fuels. That is the unvarnished truth.
Well, yeah, the resistance of fossil fuel companies and petrostates to lose business is a real thing, but economics is a real thing too and fossil fuels actually suck economically, relative to many alternatives. You have to find oil, drill and extract, and then refine, store, and ship it, and all that is expensive enough that countries, according to the International Monetary Fund, spend about $7 trillion each year subsidizing the f—kers, and the lion’s share of these subsidies are indirect subsidies, meaning the fossil fuel companies don’t have to pay for polluting the atmosphere and causing climate change.
Okay, that was a bit of digression, I’ll admit. My point may be that there is nothing inherently cheap about fossil fuels, even if there’s plenty of sleight of hand to make it appear so.
Another point is that GDP is made up on anything that contributes to the economy and that can be renewables as easily as it can be fossil fuels. In fact, when you factor in the enormous costs of fossil fuel externalities (this is another name for indirect subsidies), GDP will likely be much healthier when we transition away from fossil fuels, right along with our transitioning away from pollution and doing what we can to reduce climate change problems.
The real canard in the quote above—and I see this all the time—is the claim that to get to clean tech we have to use fossil fuels, suggesting that we are screwed any which way. This is just plain silly. Clearly, we can’t decide that tomorrow and henceforth no one can use fossil fuels. The whole shebang would come to a screeching halt and millions or billions would die within days and weeks and months. But we can use fossil fuels to build clean energy and we can do it fast enough to blunt the worst of climate change.
I hope, anyway.
Speaking of hope, Mitch ends his essay in a way common in such doomer screeds, which is the ol’ bait-and-switch:
We can’t prep our way out of what’s coming and we can’t continue the way we’re going. We will have to figure out how to stop murdering the only livable planet we have ever discovered.
-and-
We are [the cure]. You and me and every single one of us who questions the status quo. Who can plainly see through the greenwashing and delay tactics of the fossil fuel industry to obfuscate and deny us a livable home.
We are the cure. The question remains: Will we ever let go of our creature comforts or will we burn the planet down taking every living thing with us?
Which raises another question, which is are we all doomed to bury the lede and thus must need wade through all predicted misery and imagined species death to get to this point?
And then there is Alan Urban, another writer who publishes on Medium, who has many pieces on Collapse, including a cute one titled “The Profound Loneliness of Being Collapse Aware,” published on April 21, 2023. He tells us, “2020 was the year I became ‘collapse aware’.” Urban has 1.5K Medium followers. Here is a partial list of his Medium articles:
- Overshoot: Why It’s Already Too Late To Save Civilization
- I Know Collapse Is Coming, But Have I Truly Accepted It?
- Collapse Catch-Up: August, 2023
- We Are Living in a Slow-Moving Explosion
- Collapse Catch-Up: July, 2023
- 2023 Is The Year Climate Change Went Exponential
- My Playlist for The Collapse
There are 32 other articles, but you probably get the drift. In fact, right before I posted “Done with Doomers,” Urban adds another Medium piece called “When Will The Collapse Kill Me?”
Urban, in the course of the essay cited here mentions a number of sacred texts for the ‘collapse-aware’ including The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells and Sid Smith’s How to Enjoy the End of the World, among others. Sid Smith is a proponent of energy return on investment, which is a serious area of study defined as (thanks Wikipedia!):
…energy return on investment (EROI), also sometimes called energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI), is the ratio of the amount of usable energy (the exergy) delivered from a particular energy resource to the amount of exergy used to obtain that energy resource.
This is a serious and useful area of research, and Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems and many other respectable organizations do good work. The problem is that too often in the lands of Medium and other such Rant-o-Ramas, EROI is described incorrectly, such as with solar panels and the claim that these panels require more fossil fuel use to be produced than the panels’ energy output.
Wow, right?
Except that these panels are not static in energy production in the instance of their production, but keep producing over 20 or 30 year periods. Fraunhoefer puts energy payback for PV installations at around one year, and I’m guessing this is already shorter as the tech and the economy of scale continues to lower PV cost. Getting 25 years energy equivalence for the cost of one year of fossil fuel use in PV production sounds pretty darn good to me.
But Urban doesn’t feel good. He writes:
I feel like I’m running around the deck of the Titanic, telling everyone, “Look! The ship is sinking!” and people are saying things like, “No it isn’t” or “We can still fix it” or “It’s not that bad.”
Maybe I’d be better off joining the orchestra, making music, and enjoying myself as the ship sinks.
Hmmm. How about putting down that fiddle and go help with the bilge pumps?
I’m not minimizing the climate crisis. We are in for a lot of suffering and it is likely enough that capitalism and its shadow greed will slow progress against climate change. People will be dying because of the climate crisis, and I know this because people are already dying because of the climate crisis. A major element of my series The Steep Climes Quartet is to imagine, extrapolated from a lot of reading and research, what might be ahead for us and to look at how people might cope.
Hint: Vote like your life depends on it because it does, and do what you can to help others.
Urban ends his piece with this:
If you feel alone or misunderstood because of what you know about the future, don’t despair. Be patient, and keep looking for likeminded people online or in person.
Let’s find one another and make music together before the ship goes down.
Hey, sorry to repeat myself, but instead, why don’t you put the goddamn fiddle down and help!