The timelines where we fixed global warming
On path dependencies and the actions that we could have taken and didn't.
Ok, first, let’s start with an absolutely delightful and fun and interesting climate solution from this week’s podcast: Ridwell! If you’ve been hanging around certain cities in the US, you might have seen one of their cute little boxes on the porch (I have one!). It’s a subscription service that picks up hard-to-recycle items like batteries, plastics, light bulbs, and styrofoam, and also household goods like old clothes and fabric or rotating categories like old eyeglasses, used school supplies, yarn, and the like. I love it.
This week on the show, I interviewed Ridwell founder Ryan Metzger, about how it came to exist (he and his son started driving around and picking things up for neighbors in Seattle and he realized there was an actual market), how they find recycling and re-use partners and make the process transparent so you believe the recycling is happening, and the interesting economics of landfills that make it less attractive for cities to do this themselves.
Also, here’s a tip: in a lot of cities, you’re probably getting a bigger trash or recycling bin than you need, and if you use a service like Ridwell, you can potentially downsize the bin and cover close to the cost of the bi-weekly pickups. I cannot tell you what a relief I feel when I put some dumb piece of plastic from the top of a yogurt container or an Amazon mailing envelope in a Ridwell bag instead of the trash or the recycling bin where I know it doesn’t even belong. It is satisfying.
What could have been
Lately, I’ve been reminded of or come across some stories about forks in the road that could have put us on a different path, in terms of global warming. And because I’m a sci-fi nerd and I love to think about things like block universe theory, I like to imagine that there are parallel realities where we did take those actions, and we’re not in this place now. Anyway, before any more philosophy, here are some examples, and you’ll note they all have one thing in common.
Electric cars 50 years ago
In 1967, state and federal politicians had been worried about pollution and the cost to public health for at least a decade. California state Senator Nicholas Petris introduced a bill that would have banned internal combustion cars by 1975. The California Senate sent it to the state assembly by a vote of 26-5. That unexpected victory obviously galvanized the auto industry into serious spending, and then-Governor Reagan threatened a veto. The bill led to the passage of strict pollution control and fuel standards that wouldn’t have otherwise happened, but just imagine if the California Effect had pushed us into an era of electric or even steam-powered cars almost 50 years ago. Sigh.The 90s
The first IPCC reports on global warming came out in 1990 and they were strikingly on point. The 70s and 80s had seen an uptick in interest and concern around global warming (as evidenced by Petris’ bill in 1967), and for a brief moment in time, even President George H.W. Bush campaigned on fighting global warming. By the 1990s, however, fossil fuel money entered the chat, and in 1998, the American Petroleum Institute drew up the first of many multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns to discredit the science behind global warming. “Unless ‘climate change’ becomes a non-issue,” read the project brief, “meaning that the Kyoto proposal is defeated and there are no further initiatives to thwart the threat of climate change, there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our efforts.”Politics
Over the past several decades, the fossil fuel industry has spent around $5 billion in the US alone to fight policies that would slow global warming, reduce pollution and toxic waste from fossil fuel extraction, processing, and burning, and to elect friendly politicians. That’s just what we know about—dark money contributions may dwarf that spending. And that spending has successfully turned global warming into a partisan issue, as I’ve written about before, and these days, a full-blown identity issue. Here’s part of an analysis published by Yale Climate Connections:
”Fossil fuel money in politics tilts overwhelmingly toward Republicans. Oil and gas companies give 87% of their donations to Republicans, coal companies 95% of their campaign funds to GOP politicians.”
I bring this up not to instill despair, I promise. I bring it up to say that none of this is an accident. None of this is just “the way of things,” or most importantly, the way things have to be. The science is not in question, the effects are real, and there are actual villains who are spending and taking money with full awareness that the outcome could be the mass extinction of humanity (it already is for animals), and that the outcome is certainly and was always going to be the destruction, death, migration, economic cost, and worsening quality of life that we're already seeing, and that’s only going to get worse. (Sorry.)
We can also recognize that there were true turning points in history when we could have gone a different direction and we didn’t—another, actually, is our rejection of low-carbon nuclear power in favor of coal, oil, and gas. And in the spirit of sci-fi, I hope this allows you to imagine the worlds where we threw off the oil and gas yoke, built a cleaner, safer, cooler, happier world for ourselves.
Imagine a world where we rejected Detroit’s advances and built rail for cargo (seriously, do you really think semi trucks make any economic or efficiency or safety sense at all?) and bus and subway systems for humans and built gardens instead of parking lots. What if we had doubled down on steam and electric cars with little to no emissions in the 70s? Imagine not losing 9 million people every single year to fossil fuel air pollution. Or you can go super hard-core nerdy and go read the Foundation series and its depiction of harnessing atomic energy for interstellar travel and for tiny little nuclear-powered flashlights and other devices (like, yes, guns and such, but not only that!).
History is not yet written
We don’t actually have to do this.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about doomerism and how we were letting ourselves fall into the trap of believing our path is inevitable, no one’s doing anything, and there isn’t anything we can do as individuals, employees, or companies—despite the voluminous evidence that, in fact, plenty of people and companies (and global financial systems) are doing plenty, and maybe what they could use is our help. This week, Rebecca Solnit published a powerful exhortation against exhaustion in The Guardian (which made me feel awesome, obviously) and went a step further, saying actually, the New York Times isn’t even as bad as I said they were! And of course, she’s far more beautiful.
But a problem that took us 100 years to cause won’t be fixed overnight. As Solnit points out:
Change is often not linear but exponential, or it’s unpredictable, like an earthquake releasing centuries of tension. Big changes start small, and history is studded with surprises.
And this will require us to hold multiple thoughts at once, in addition to doing long, slow, boring, incremental work:
I wonder sometimes if it’s because people assume you can’t be hopeful and heartbroken at the same time, and of course you can. In times when everything is fine hope is unnecessary. Hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace; it’s a commitment to search for possibilities. Feelings deserve full respect as feelings, but all they inform you about is you. History is full of people who continued to struggle in desperate and grim circumstances, and so is the news from Ukraine to the Philippines. Some lived to see those circumstances change because of that struggle. Maybe this is what Antonio Gramsci meant with his famous phrase “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. Some days I think that if we lose the climate battle, it’ll be due in no small part to this defeatism among the comfortable in the global north, while people in frontline communities continue to fight like hell for survival. Which is why fighting defeatism is also climate work.
These remain what Bill McKibben calls “The Crucial Years.” There is no action too big or too small and it doesn’t make you a weirdo or a hippie or a liberal or a buzzkill or whatever you’re worried about. Imagine another world, if you will, where you take away all the fossil fuel money and influence and you ask any sentient being on earth this question:
“Would you like clean air, clean water, an abundance of nature, and a livable environment?”
Pretty sure we all know the answer.
See you next week!