[TheClimate.Vote] November 11, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Wed Nov 11 08:31:12 EST 2020
/*November 11, 2020*/
[cheap chip]
*Trump Administration Removes Scientist in Charge of Assessing Climate
Change*
Michael Kuperberg was told he would no longer oversee the National
Climate Assessment. The job is expected to go to a climate-change
skeptic, according to people familiar with the changes.
The dismissal is a setback for the National Climate Assessment, a report
that the government is required by law to produce every four years.
By Christopher Flavelle, Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport
Nov. 9, 2020
WASHINGTON -- The White House has removed the scientist responsible for
the National Climate Assessment, the federal government's premier
contribution to climate knowledge and the foundation for regulations to
combat global warming, in what critics interpreted as the latest sign
that the Trump administration intends to use its remaining months in
office to continue impeding climate science and policy.
Michael Kuperberg, executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research
Program, which produces the climate assessment, was told Friday that he
would no longer lead that organization, people with knowledge of the
situation said.
According to two people close to the administration, he is expected to
be replaced by David Legates, a deputy assistant secretary at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who previously worked
closely with climate change denial groups.
Dr. Kuperberg's departure comes amid a broader effort, in the aftermath
of Mr. Trump's defeat last week by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.,
to remove officials who have fallen afoul of the White House. Also on
Friday, Neil Chatterjee, head of the agency that regulates the nation's
utility markets, was demoted by the White House, after he publicly
supported the use of renewable power.
In a message to colleagues, Dr. Kuperberg said he was returning to his
previous job at the Department of Energy. He was removed from the list
of staff on the research program's website on Monday.
Dr. Kuperberg did not respond to requests for comment. The Global Change
Research Program reports to the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy. Asked why Dr. Kuperberg had been removed from the
role, Kristina Baum, a spokeswoman for that office, said on Monday that
"we do not comment on personnel matters."
Dr. Kuperberg's dismissal appears to be the latest setback in the Trump
administration for the National Climate Assessment, a report from 13
federal agencies and outside scientists that the government is required
by law to produce every four years. The most recent report, in 2018,
found that climate change poses an imminent and dire threat to the
United States and its economy
*A biased or diminished climate assessment would have wide-ranging
implications.**
**
**It could be used in court to bolster the positions of fossil fuel
companies being sued for climate damages. It could counter congressional
efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where
it contributes to global warming.**
*
*And, ultimately, it could weaken what is known as the "endangerment
finding," a 2009 scientific finding by the Environmental Protection
Agency that said carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose
a threat to human health and therefore are subject to government
regulation. Undercutting that finding could make it more difficult to
fight climate change under the terms of the Clean Air Act...*
- -
Rachel Licker, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, criticized the actions of Trump administration officials.
"Even in their final days, they are continuing to attempt to bury the
overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/climate/michael-kuperberg-climate-assessment.html
[Greta watch 11-9-20]
*'Hypocrites and greenwash': Greta Thunberg blasts leaders over climate
crisis*
Exclusive: Leaders are happy to set targets for decades ahead, but
flinch when immediate action is needed, she says
Greta Thunberg has blasted politicians as hypocrites and international
climate summits as empty words and greenwash. Until humanity admits it
has failed to tackle the climate crisis and begins treating it as an
emergency like the coronavirus pandemic, society will be unable to stop
global heating, she said.
In an interview with the Guardian, Thunberg said leaders were happy to
set targets for decades into the future, but flinched when immediate
action to cut emissions was needed. She said there was not a politician
on the planet promising the climate action required: "If only," said the
teenager, who will turn 18 in January.
But she is inspired by the millions of students who have taken up the
school strike she began by herself in Sweden 116 weeks ago. Since then
she has addressed the UN and become the world's most prominent climate
campaigner. She also has hope: "We can treat a crisis like a crisis, as
we have seen because of the coronavirus. Treating the climate crisis
like a crisis – that could change everything overnight."
Thunberg said the scale and speed of the emissions reductions needed to
keep global temperature close to the limit set by the Paris climate
agreement are so great that they cannot be achieved by the normal
operation of society. "Our whole society would just shut down and too
many people would suffer," she said.
"So the first thing we need to do is understand we are in an emergency
[and] admit the fact that we have failed – humanity collectively has
failed – because you can't solve a crisis that you don't understand,"
Thunberg said.
Greta Thunberg: 'Only people like me dare ask tough questions on climate'
A vital UN climate summit had been scheduled to begin on Monday in
Glasgow but has been postponed for a year because of Covid-19. Thunberg,
however, said she was not disappointed by the delay: "As long as we
don't treat the climate crisis like a crisis, we can have as many
conferences as we want, but it will just be negotiations, empty words,
loopholes and greenwash."
She is also unimpressed with pledges by nations including the UK, China
and Japan to reach net zero by 2050 or 2060. "They mean something
symbolically, but if you look at what they actually include, or more
importantly exclude, there are so many loopholes. We shouldn't be
focusing on dates 10, 20 or even 30 years in the future. If we don't
reduce our emissions now, then those distant targets won't mean anything
because our carbon budgets will be long gone."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/09/hypocrites-and-greenwash-greta-thunberg-climate-crisis
[follow the money]
*Fed formally calls out climate change as stability risk*
Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last week that the "science and art" of
incorporating climate change into financial regulation is new.
The Federal Reserve on Monday for the first time formally highlighted
climate change as a potential threat to the stability of the financial
system and said it is working to better understand that danger.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/10/fed-climate-change-risk-435685
- -
[$$ The SEC and the FED give a speech]
*Playing the Long Game: The Intersection of Climate Change Risk and
Financial Regulation*
Commissioner Allison Herren Lee
Nov. 5, 2020
Keynote Remarks at PLI's 52nd Annual Institute on Securities Regulation
*Conclusion
*
I pose these as questions to illustrate just some of the areas that
warrant the SEC's attention as we do our part in addressing the
exigencies presented by climate change. This is an all-hands on deck
effort. We need to solicit engagement from all market participants,
leverage the work that has already been done by TCFD and others, and
move forward with considered, informed rule-making and other initiatives
in this space.
We have all recently witnessed in real time the market consequences of
waiting until a crisis is upon us to respond. We need not suffer those
consequences when it comes to climate change and ESG if we move
thoughtfully and quickly. I encourage you and your clients to help us in
this critical endeavor, and let me emphasize that we need everyone at
the table for this work. All input is welcome, but I especially value
hearing from those of you who disagree with these ideas or see them
differently. These are complex issues, and we reach the best results by
engaging in constructive dialogue across a wide range of perspectives.
Thank you again for the invitation to speak with you today; it's been a
pleasure.
https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/lee-playing-long-game-110520
[Eric Utne founded the Utne Reader - Interview and transcript]
*THE 2020 ELECTION: ANXIETY AND INCREMENTALISM**- Part 3
*November 6th, 2020
The 2020 campaign season has finally come to a close. And days after
November 3rd has passed, the country is still reeling.
About seventy percent of Americans - Democrats, Independents and
Republicans - say the election caused a significant amount of anxiety
and stress in their lives. That's up from fify percent four years ago.
How should we process those difficult emotions surrounding the election? ...
- -
"I like to say that I'm not hopeless, I'm hope free," says Eric Utne,
founder of the counter-culture magazine the Utne Reader and
self-described "recovering hope junkie."
He goes on to explain the distinction:
"When I think about being hope free, it's not despondent and despairing"
Utne says. "It's realizing that there's another choice."...
*PROGRAM PART 3 - ERIC UTNE*
*Eric Utne: *In the 70s, 80s and 90s I was able to track a lot of
different kind of ideas and social movements and currents from my
perch in Minneapolis, Minnesota by reading magazines and browsing
newsstands. And that was the way we sort of surfed the web of ideas
at the time. And I had a tendency to photocopy and send favorite
articles to a few in my family or friends, and I knew damn well they
weren't gonna read them. So, I got the idea that I should publish a
digest of the best of them and make them pay for it. So, I put
together what I thought was gonna be a little newsletter.
Initially, a 12-page newsletter then it grew in a couple issues to
16 pages.
And then I realized that people weren't, they were taking me up on
my free copy offer, but they weren't actually paying for it once
they got it. So this was in 1984. So, I had to suspend publication
and retool it and I designed 128-page magazine and sent that to
everybody who taken me up on the free copy offer. And this time
people did pay for it and it just it grew like topsy to eventually
300,000 which was twice the size of Harper's three times the size of
The Nation and The New Republic and the National Review. And it had
the most educated readers after the New York Review of Books more
educated than the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Harper's but they
were 10 years younger and they were very active. They were truly
activists.
So, my favorite thing at the magazine was to introduce the readers
to each other in what we called the neighborhood salon movement. And
we set up 500 salons all across North America there were 17 of them
in San Francisco, 40 in the LA area 29 in New York. The Blue Man
Group met in an Utne salon, marriages, businesses, cohousing
projects, schools all got their start in the salons. So that was my
favorite part of publishing the magazine was bringing these people
together.
*Greg Dalton:* When you were younger how important was hope to your
personal identity and work?
*
**Eric Utne: *Well, I was a hope junkie like many baby boomers. I
was optimistic and thought that, I actually was -- I realized
listening to Donald Trump and Joe Biden last night that I was
probably raised in a Trump like setting. I thought that I couldn't
have anything but hopeful thoughts or I would create my thoughts
would create the reality. And I was afraid to have anything but
hopeful and optimistic thoughts. And I realized how that plays out
last night in watching the debate. It doesn't play out very well.
*Greg Dalton:* So, you were hopeful when you're young because you
thought you were that's the way you were supposed to be because if
you had less than hopeful thoughts that they would somehow manifest
themselves. So, you like you pushed anything else away?
*Eric Utne:* Yeah. And I think that's a fairly typical American
certainly baby boomer worldview or kind of approach. But it took
me, you know, a lifetime to get over it. I'm a recovering hope
junkie now. And I like to say that I'm not hopeless, I'm hope free.
*Greg Dalton:* And you say you lost hope slowly over time. If there
was one moment when it really died for you. Not long after Donald
Trump election, you realized that if Hillary Clinton or even Bernie
Sanders had been elected, we'd still be rushing headlong over a cliff.
*Eric Utne:* It was less a moment. I mean I don't want to -- I
think Donald Trump is a symptom rather than the cause even though I
do think he's, you know, he's a symptom of hope run amok. I mean,
he was raised on Norman Vincent Peale and the power of positive
thinking. But it's really it was reading Paul Kingsnorth and the
Dark Mountain Journal and the Dark Mountain manifesto a few years
before that. That kind of opened my eyes. Paul Kingsnorth was an
activist and environmental editor for 20 years in the UK worked at
The Ecologist and was very active in environmental protests and
other work. And at some point, he realized after 50 years of
environmental action of environmental movement, things are going in
the wrong direction and his conclusion was it's not gonna turn
around. And he said a piece in the New York Times in 2014. He said
when people use the word hope with me I reach for my whiskey bottle.
And I got it and actually ended up going to Ireland to work on my
book and went to meet him and his wife and two kids living in the
back of the beyond in rural Ireland. And, you know, I was struck by
how hope free he was. He wasn't despondent and despairing except
possibly on a deep existential level, recognizing that we're all
mortal. But he was raising his kids and living his life with beauty
and grace and it seemed that love was informing his behavior rather
than hope. And I think that's a big difference.
And so, when I think about being hope free it's not despondent and
despairing. It's realizing that there's another choice. We have a
choice, moment by moment to do and to act in the world to be a
grandparent to my grandchildren. Not out of hope but out of love.
Just shower them with love. And so I'm actually kind of lighter and
freer and more activist than I've ever been, partly because I've
finished eight years of writing this book and now I'm free of that.
*Greg Dalton:* That's a certain freedom. So, it's counterintuitive,
and perhaps a paradox to say that when you realize when you let go
of hope most people would think that leads to despair, depression
like so much of the climate conversation, is there hope can we turn
it around. It's just obsessed in this future what I hear you saying
is what a meditative person would say is, we don't know the future,
what we have is right now and it sounds trite and cliché. Live in
the moment, right. But it's one thing to say it, another thing to
do it. So, you're saying that you're liberating you don't see hope
and it's okay?
*Eric Utne:* Yeah, I mean we're all mortal. We're all gonna die
sometime. The bigger dilemma is that maybe the civilization is
mortal, maybe it has a lifecycle. And maybe we're winding down. I
mean Margaret Wheatley writes a book called Who Do We Choose To Be?
And she looks at the lifecycle of 22 civilizations, I think. And
we're very much in the kind of end times behavior this polarization
that separation of the haves from the have-nots. The rampant
exploitation of national resources. We're exhibiting all those
behaviors and she says that at some time in most of those
civilizations a kind of warrior shows up a spiritual warrior who
feels called to preserve those things that are worth preserving in
the society and to help protect the people help them transition.
And to help people find the others find their true community. And
that's where I think we are right now is find the others and live a
more -- well, you know, in this piece I talked about a kind of hyper
local Green New Deal where we really need to turn our attention
while being mindful of what's going on on the planet and on the
national scale. But where we can really affect change is locally is
family and friends and neighbors. That's where it can happen. And
we're so divorced from that so estranged.
I tell about meeting Margaret Mead actually a few times and
interviewing her about tribalism and community. She said something
to me that really struck me. She said 99.9% of the time that humans
have lived on the planet we have lived in tribes. And then she
defined that as groups of 12 to 36 people. And she said only during
times of war or what we have now in modern urban Western cities does
the nuclear family prevail because it's the most mobile unit that
can ensure the survival of the species. But she said for the full
flowering of the human spirit we need tribes, we need groups, we
need community and we don't have it.
People are desperate to dive deeper than the either political debate
or the chitchat that happens over the water cooler to something
really deep and meaningful. And that's what your show is trying to
do there's not many opportunities for people to really dive deep.
*Greg Dalton:* And COVID seems to be bearing that as well. The
isolation of COVID in some ways there's more connection with COVID
because we can just click on you and you and I, we're talking over
the Internet now from across the country. So, you said a little bit
how COVID is a gift. How is COVID a gift?
*Eric Utne: *Well, it confronts us with our mortality and that's a
good thing. I had a Tibetan friend, Tashi. And he was working in
the laundry of the Children's Hospital schlepping soiled linens.
And then someone realized that this guy is really different. He had
a kind of presence that so they asked him to leave the laundry and
to come up into the ward where people were terminal either because
they were at risk of taking their own lives or because they had been
declared terminal with cancer, especially. And I said, well, what
did you do with them? And he said, well, I just sit and talk with
them. What do you talk about? Well, life is very precious. And
then I asked him, do you have a spiritual practice? He said, yeah,
I think about death every day. And that really struck me at the
time as kind of morbid, but now it's kind of spiritual practice.
And I also I think COVID, I think the fires and global climate
change and how it shows its face everywhere we turn. And the chaos
in the streets and what's going on with the economy. I mean there
are so many fronts in which changes so huge and extraordinary that
we realize that life is ephemeral. Change is the constant. And the
big change is we may die at any moment. And, you know, I'm
especially motivated by the thought that all of us may die. I mean
climate change is really it could get much worse very soon.
*Greg Dalton:* Yeah, so it seems to be hard because so much of this
is like, oh give up. There's an alternative which is and you talk
about how the boomers lost their way. The alternative is just like
indulge into immediate gratification. Well if the world is ending
let's party.
*Eric Utne:* Yeah. And then with COVID that doesn't work so well.
But there's another path and that's Extinction Rebellion. And what
they're doing in the UK right now, which I think is really
exciting. And Zadie Smith, I don't know if you saw what she said a
few days ago, but there's a group within Extinction Rebellion called
Writers Rebel. And it's writers like George Monbiot from the
Guardian and Margaret Atwood and on and on, and Zadie Smith. And
Zadie Smith spoke and she said that six years ago she talked about
climate despair and how that was kind of almost a species shame that
humans, it was a natural feeling that people would have because so
much of life dies at the expense of our lifestyles and our energy
consumption and our food choices and the rest of it.
She said -- they were protesting in front of the offices of the
Global Warming Policy Foundation which states on its website, "While
the foundation is open-minded on the contested science of global
warming it is deeply concerned about the costs and other
implications of many of the policies currently being advocated."
That's from that foundation. And so, Zadie Smith writes, let's see
here. "She realized that her previous beliefs that climate change
denial was rooted in a genuine fear was naïve. Now we know better,
she wrote. Now we know the outsized unruly emotions that surround
the scientific fact of climate change. They're fueled by something
far more calculated and external than species shame."
Basically, it's fueled by think tanks and right-wing lobbyists who
are paid by the financial institutions and the oil companies. And
Mark Rylance and a number of others are really stepping up and
saying yeah this is a concerted effort to make us feel that we just
have to change ourselves and things will get -- that's what it's
gonna take to survive. We don't need to reach out to each other as
you were talking about in community but also insist together that
our government change its policies to be more not just environment
friendly but to really make to recognize that this is an existential
crisis and we need to face it now.
So that's the other part of giving up hope is realizing that we
still have to act. We have to do whatever we can to make a
difference in the way that we best know how to use our energy and
talents.
- -
Greg Dalton: You've been listening to a Climate One conversation about
what's next for the climate movement in the wake of the 2020 elections.
We just heard from Eric Utne,
Founder and publisher of the Utne Reader and author of the new memoir,
Far Out Man: Tales of Life in the Counterculture. My other guests today
were Renée Lertzman, climate psychologist and founder of Project Inside
Out, and David Roberts, Energy & Climate Change Writer for Vox.
http://www.climateone.org/audio/2020-election-anxiety-and-incrementalism
[NYT article looking directly at the dark view]
*How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?*
Meet the scholars who study civilizational collapse.
By Ben Ehrenreich
Nov. 4, 2020
Listen to This Article [or read clips of text below]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collapse.html
- -
In recent years, the field Tainter helped establish has grown. Just as
apocalyptic dystopias, with or without zombies, have become common fare
on Netflix and in highbrow literature alike, societal collapse and its
associated terms -- "fragility" and "resilience," "risk" and
"sustainability" -- have become the objects of extensive scholarly
inquiry and infrastructure. Princeton has a research program in Global
Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk.
Many of the academics studying collapse are, like Tainter,
archaeologists by training. Others are historians, social scientists,
complexity scholars or physical scientists who have turned their
attention to the dynamics shaping the broadest scope of human history.
After I spoke to Tainter, I called several of these scholars, and they
were more openly alarmed than he was by the current state of affairs.
"Things could spin out," one warned. "I am scared," admitted another. As
the summer wore on even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was
willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities
that could allow things to go very badly indeed -- probably not right
now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he
worried, it could begin before the year was over.
For nearly as long as human beings have gathered in sufficient numbers
to form cities and states -- about 6,000 years, a flash in the
300,000-odd-year history of the species -- we have been coming up with
theories to explain the downfall of those polities. The Hebrew
Scriptures recorded the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and divine
rage has been a go-to explanation ever since. Plato, in "The Republic,"
compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence
like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th
century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures
have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they
adopt the trappings of civilization.
The question of collapse also haunted archaeology, but it was rarely
studied directly. In the field's early years, archaeologists tended to
focus on the biggest and most wondrous structures they could find, the
remains of monumental architecture abandoned for centuries in deserts
and jungles. Who made these marvels? Why were they left to rot? Their
mere existence suggested sudden and catastrophic social breakdowns. Yet
at the height of the Cold War, when the real possibility of nuclear war
took modern societies closer than they had ever been to the brink of
destruction, the academy lost interest in the subject. Scholars tended
to limit themselves to understanding single cases -- the Akkadians, say,
or the Lowland Classic Maya.
- -
Little about Tainter's early career suggested he would do otherwise. In
1975, after submitting his dissertation on the transition, in about the
year 400 A.D., between two cultures that had inhabited the lower
Illinois River, he was hired to teach at the University of New Mexico.
His contract was not renewed. "There was a senior professor," Tainter
says, "with whom I didn't get along."
He took a job with the U.S. Forest Service, which was hiring
archaeologists to assess the potential impacts of any project undertaken
on public land. Tainter would spend the next several years preparing and
reviewing reports in advance of logging or mining operations in New
Mexico's Cibola National Forest, about two hours out of Albuquerque.
In 1979, he and a co-author wrote a report for the Forest Service that
shows early signs of the concerns that would come to dominate his
professional life. It was an overview of the "cultural resources"
present in the area around a dormant volcano called Mount Taylor, a site
sacred to the Navajo and several other tribes. (The mineral division of
Gulf Oil Corporation was mining the mountain for its uranium deposits.)
The bibliography alone stretched to 37 pages, and Tainter included an
extensive section on the Chaco Canyon complex, which was more than 100
miles from Mount Taylor. The civilization at Chaco Canyon thrived for at
least five centuries until, beginning around 1100 A.D., its sites were
gradually abandoned. In a text destined for a government filing cabinet,
Tainter bemoans "the lack of a theoretical framework to explain the
phenomenon." Scholars, he complains, "have spent years of research on
the question of why complex societies have developed," but had devised
"no corresponding theories to explain the collapse of these systems."
It would take him most of the next decade to develop that theory, which
became the heart of "The Collapse of Complex Societies." Tainter's
argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies
develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional
structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems. For an
overwhelming majority of the time since the evolution of Homo sapiens,
Tainter contends, we organized ourselves in small and relatively
egalitarian kinship-based communities. All history since then has been
"characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of
complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control."
Larger communities would have to be organized on the basis of more
formal structures than kinship alone. A "chiefly apparatus" -- authority
and a nascent bureaucratic hierarchy -- emerged to allocate resources.
States developed, and with them a ruling class that took up the tasks of
governing: "the power to draft for war or work, levy and collect taxes
and decree and enforce laws." Eventually, societies we would recognize
as similar to our own would emerge, "large, heterogeneous, internally
differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the
resources that sustain life are not equally available to all." Something
more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them
together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that
Tainter calls "legitimacy," the maintenance of which would itself
require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less
flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.
- -
His second proposal is based on an idea borrowed from the classical
economists of the 18th century. Social complexity, he argues, is
inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and
more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits. "It's
a classic 'Alice in Wonderland' situation," Tainter says. You're
"running faster and faster to stay in the same place." Take Rome, which,
in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its
neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and
more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling
-- until it couldn't anymore.
Or consider Chaco Canyon, which had so puzzled Tainter. At its height a
thousand years ago, Chaco was the hub of a network of communities
stretching throughout the arid San Juan Basin. Thriving in such
unforgiving terrain, Tainter argues, depended on an intricate web of
"reciprocal economic relations" that took advantage of the landscape's
diversity. In hot, dry years, lower elevations suffered, but communities
at higher altitudes still received enough rain to grow and harvest
crops. In colder, wetter years, the reverse held: The lowlands produced
more than they needed while the growing season shrank in the highlands.
Complexity rose to meet the challenge. Tainter speculates that the
administrative center in Chaco Canyon was able to coordinate exchanges
of resources between so-called "outlier" communities at varying
elevations, none of which could have survived in isolation. As always,
solving one problem created new ones. With Chaco Canyon's success,
populations grew. Outlier communities multiplied until, Tainter argues,
the diversity that allowed the system to function was diluted as
"proportionately less could be distributed to each community
experiencing a deficit." Outliers began to drop out of the network. Over
the next two centuries, the stone-walled towns that dotted the San Juan
Basin would be gradually abandoned.
This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity --
the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural
symbiosis of the San Juan Basin -- begin to dwindle, Tainter writes,
societies “become vulnerable to collapse." Stresses that otherwise would
be manageable -- natural disasters, popular uprisings, epidemics --
become insuperable. Around 1130, a severe, half-century-long drought hit
the desert Southwest, coinciding with Chaco Canyon's decline. Other
scholars blame the drought for the abandonment, but for Tainter it was
the final blow in a descent that had already become inevitable. Chacoan
civilization had survived extended dry spells before. Why was this one
decisive?
The fall of Minoan civilization has been attributed to a volcanic
eruption and the subsequent invasion of Mycenean Greeks. The decline of
the Harappan civilization, which survived in the Indus Valley for nearly
a millennium before its cities were abandoned in about 1700 B.C.,
coincided with climate change and perhaps earthquake and invasion too --
and, recent research suggests, outbreaks of infectious disease. The
ninth-century desertion of the cities of Southern Lowland Classic Maya
civilization has been ascribed to war, peasant uprisings, deforestation
and drought. But haven't countless societies weathered military defeats,
invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt
themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?
Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in
every instance of collapse. We go about our lives, addressing problems
as they arise. Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally,
without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little
push arrives, and the society begins to fracture. The result is a
"rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical
complexity." In human terms, that means central governments
disintegrating and empires fracturing into "small, petty states," often
in conflict with one another. Trade routes seize up, and cities are
abandoned. Literacy falls off, technological knowledge is lost and
populations decline sharply. "The world," Tainter writes, "perceptibly
shrinks, and over the horizon lies the unknown."
A disaster -- even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social
unrest or a rapidly changing climate -- can, in Tainter's view, never be
enough by itself to cause collapse. Societies evolve complexity, he
argues, precisely to meet such challenges. Tainter doesn't mention it
specifically, but the last major pandemic makes the case well: The
Spanish Flu killed 675,000 Americans between 1918 and 1919, but the
economic hit was short-lived, and the outbreak did not slow the nation's
push for hemispheric dominance. Whether any existing society is close to
collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing
returns. There's no doubt that we're further along that curve: The
United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these
days. But how far along are we?
*Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps*. The first,
dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all
explanations. The second is more interested in the particulars of the
societies they study. Anxiety about the pandemic, however, bridges the
schisms that mark the field. Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the
usefulness of the very concept of collapse -- she was an editor of a
2010 volume titled "Questioning Collapse" -- but admits to being "very,
very worried" about the lack, in the United States, of the "nimbleness"
that crises require of governments.
McAnany points to the difference between the societies of the northern
and southern Maya lowlands during the first millennium A.D. The southern
region -- what is now Guatemala, Belize and parts of southern Mexico --
was more rigidly hierarchical, with "pronounced inequality" and a system
of hereditary kingship not as evident in the Yucatán Peninsula to the
north. Around the time a devastating drought hit in the ninth century,
the southern lowland cities were abandoned. Communities to the north
were not.
The apparent collapse of the Southern Lowland Maya, McAnany cautions, is
better understood as a dispersal. For the upper classes -- who appear to
have been the first to flee -- it was probably experienced as a world
ending, but most people simply "voted with their feet," migrating to
more amenable locations in the north and along the coast. That is no
longer so easy, McAnany says. "We're too vested and tied to places."
Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to
more equitably distribute resources, "at some point the whole thing
blows. It has to."
- -
Peter Turchin, who teaches at the University of Connecticut, follows
Tainter in positing a single, transhistorical mechanism leading to
collapse, though he is far more willing than Tainter to voice specific
-- and occasionally alarmist -- predictions. In Turchin's case the key
is the loss of "social resilience," a society's ability to cooperate and
act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that
the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last
40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more
unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional
legitimacy founders. "The United States is basically eating itself from
the inside out," he says.
Inequality and "popular immiseration" have left the country extremely
vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal
triggers like the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. He does
not hesitate to predict that we can expect to experience far more of the
kind of unrest we've seen this summer, "not just this year but in the
years ahead, because the underlying conditions are only getting worse."
When I last heard from Turchin late in the summer, he -- and more than
two million others -- had lost electricity in the wake of Tropical Storm
Isaias. His internet connection had been out for days. "There are a lot
of ironic angles," he says, to studying historical crises while watching
fresh ones swirl and rage around him. Having been born in the Soviet
Union and studied animal-population ecology before turning to human
history -- one early work was "Are Lemmings Prey or Predators?" --
Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the
sturdiest-seeming systems. "Very severe events, while not terribly
likely, are quite possible," he says. When he emigrated from the
U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter
into its constituent parts. "But it did."
Turchin is not the only one who is worried. Eric H. Cline, who teaches
at the George Washington University, argued in "1177 B.C.: The Year
Civilization Collapsed" that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and
western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including
natural disasters -- earthquakes and drought -- famine, political
strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own,
none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread
disintegration, but together they formed a "perfect storm" capable of
toppling multiple societies all at once. Today, Cline says, "we have
almost all the same symptoms that were there in the Bronze Age, but
we've got one more": pandemic. Collapse "really is a matter of when," he
told me, "and I'm concerned that this may be the time."
In "The Collapse of Complex Societies," Tainter makes a point that
echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. "The world today is
full," Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region
of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that
collapse, "if and when it comes again, will this time be global." Our
fates are interlinked. "No longer can any individual nation collapse.
World civilization will disintegrate as a whole."
When I ask him about this, the usually sober-sounding Tainter sounds
very sober indeed. If it happens, he says, it would be "the worst
catastrophe in history." The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently,
has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: "an elaborate global
system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing" in which
goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate
demands in another, and delivered only when they're needed. The system's
speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.
The coronavirus pandemic, Tainter says, "raises the overall cost,
clearly, of being the society that we are." When factories in China
closed, just-in-time delivery faltered. As Tainter puts it, products
"were not manufactured just in time, they were not shipped just in time
and they were not available where needed just in time." Countries -- and
even states -- were shoving to get at limited supplies of masks and
medical equipment. Meat production is now so highly centralized -- so
complex -- that the closure of a few plants in states like Iowa,
Pennsylvania and South Dakota emptied out pork aisles in supermarkets
thousands of miles away. A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply
chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer
flow to cities. "There would be billions of deaths within a very short
period," Tainter says.
Even a short-term failure of the financial system, Tainter worries,
might be enough to trip supply chains to a halt. The International
Monetary Fund's most recent "World Economic Outlook" warns of "wide
negative output gaps and elevated unemployment rates" in the short term,
"scarring" in the medium term, "deep wounds" and a level of uncertainty
that remains "unusually large." If we sink "into a severe recession or a
depression," Tainter says, "then it will probably cascade. It will
simply reinforce itself."
Recently, Tainter tells me, he has seen "a definite uptick" in calls
from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer
seems like a purely academic pursuit. Earlier this year, Logan, Utah,
where Tainter lives, briefly became the nation's No. 1 Covid hot spot.
An outbreak in June at a nearby beef plant owned by the multinational
meat giant JBS USA Food, which kept operating even after more than a
quarter of its workers tested positive, had spread throughout the
county. In two and a half weeks, cases there leapt from 72 to more than
700. They have since more than quadrupled again. At the same time
protests sparked by George Floyd's death were breaking out in thousands
of U.S. cities and towns -- even in Logan. The only precedent Tainter
could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was
the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population
of Europe by as much as 60 percent.
Scholarly caution may prevent Tainter from playing the oracle, but when
he was writing "The Collapse of Complex Societies," he recalls, "it was
very clear that what I was realizing about historical trends wasn't just
about the past." The book's Reagan-era roots are more than subtext. He
writes of visions of "bloated bureaucracies" becoming the basis of
"entire political careers." Arms races, he observes, presented a
"classic example" of spiraling complexity that provides "no tangible
benefit for much of the population" and "usually no competitive
advantage" either. It is hard not to read the book through the lens of
the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the
country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from
nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.
The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share
that "must be allocated to legitimization or coercion." And so it was:
As U.S. military spending skyrocketed -- to, by some estimates, a total
of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 -- the
government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy
by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and
incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers. What happened on a
national level happened locally as well, with police budgets eclipsing
funding for social services in city after city. "As resources committed
to benefits decline," Tainter wrote in 1988, "resources committed to
control must increase."
When I asked him if he saw the recent protests in these terms, Tainter
pointed again to the Romans, caught in the trap of devoting a larger and
larger share of their empire's resources to defense even as it
ceaselessly expanded, chasing ever-more-distant enemies, until one day,
they showed up at the city gates.
The overall picture drawn by Tainter's work is a tragic one. It is our
very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize
ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from
which there is no escaping. Complexity is "insidious," in Tainter's
words. "It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the
time." And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you
got there.
There is, however, another way to look at this. Perhaps collapse is not,
actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a
Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic
ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by
some combination of the two. Over the last 10 years, more and more
scholars have, like McAnany, been questioning the entire notion of
collapse. The critical voices have been more likely to come from women
-- the appeal of collapse's sudden, violent drama was always, as
Dartmouth College's Deborah L. Nichols put it, "more of a guy thing" --
and from Indigenous scholars and those who pay attention to the
narratives Indigenous people tell about their own societies. When those
are left out, collapse, observes Sarah Parcak, who teaches at the
University of Alabama at Birmingham, can easily mean erasure, a
convenient way of hiding the violence of conquest. This is not to
suggest that once-populous cities have never been abandoned or that the
kind of rapid social simplification that Tainter diagnosed has not
regularly occurred; only that if you pay attention to people's lived
experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly
fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.
Part of the issue may be that Tainter's understanding of societies as
problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals. Plantation
slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning
class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton
requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has
nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of
them counts as "society"?
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America's
billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion
dollars. In September, nearly 23 million Americans reported going
without enough to eat, according to the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities. Whatever problems those 686 billionaires may have, they are
not the same as those of the 23 million who are hungry. Insisting that
they should not be allowed to blur together puts not only "society" but
also collapse into a different sort of focus. If societies are not in
fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and
sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an
all-or-nothing game. Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality
that some have already suffered -- in the hold of a slave ship, say, or
on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations
faraway -- and survived.
"What do you do if you're still here after the story of failure has
already been written?" asks the Native American scholar Michael V.
Wilcox, who teaches at Stanford University. The cities of Palenque and
Tikal may lie in ruins in the jungle, a steady source of tourist
dollars, but Maya communities still populate the region, and their
languages, far from dead, can be heard these days in the immigrant
neighborhoods of Los Angeles and other American cities too. The
Ancestral Pueblo abandoned the great houses of Chaco Canyon sometime in
the 12th century, but their descendants were able to expel the Spanish
in the 1600s, for a little over a decade anyway. The Navajo, nearby,
survived the genocidal wars of the 19th century, the uranium boom of the
20th and the epidemic of cancer it left in its wake, and are now facing
Covid-19, which hit the Navajo Nation harder than it did New York.
The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what
happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when
the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems. The
climate crisis, as it continues to unfold, will give us additional
opportunities to panic and to grieve. Some institutions are certainly
collapsing right now, Wilcox says, but "collapses happen all the time."
This is not to diminish the suffering they cause or the rage they should
occasion, only to suggest that the real danger comes from imagining that
we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more
stable than the present.
If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations
that punctuate our history -- all those crumbling ruins -- begin to
fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and,
perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.
Perhaps our ability to band together, to respond creatively to new and
difficult circumstances is not some tragic secret snare, as Tainter has
it, a story that always ends in sclerotic complexity and collapse.
Perhaps it is what we do best. When one way doesn't work, we try
another. When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do
things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collapse.html
- -
[Video interview from 2005]
*Joseph Tainter on The Dynamics of the Collapse of Human Civilization*
TreeTV / N2K Need to Know
Joseph Tainter is an American anthropologist and historian. His
best-known work, The Collapse of Complex Societies. This discussion was
conducted in 2005 for The 11th Hour by Leila Conners. The discussion
covers Tainter's understanding of how societies work and don't work. We
also discuss energy issues and how, if we can, avoid collapse today.
For more interviews and films visit: http://www.n2k.world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsT9V3WQiNA
- -
[video presentation]
*This View of History: A Conversation With Peter Turchin*
Jul 10, 2018
The Evolution Institute
This webinar features evolutionary anthropologist and author Peter
Turchin discussing his new book "Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War
Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hTYBDjeUUU
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 11, 2013 *
MSNBC's Chris Hayes reports on the horror of Typhoon Haiyan, and what it
represents from a climate standpoint.
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/the-broader-outlook-for-peril-from-storms-63016003867
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