If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the cartoon at the top right hand corner on page 4 of the March 14, 2018edition ofthe Methow Valley News is worth at least that many–depending on how it’s interpreted. In case you missed it, the drawing featured a wide-eyed, fearful pig, fish, cow, goat, bear, deer and other allegedly delectable and destroy-able beings on a cracker, being shoveled into the gaping mouth of a ginormous human head.
Though it’s caption was, “Bite of the Methow,” it seemed to symbolize the ‘Bite of Humanity,’ as in the chunk that meat-eating is taking out of this once vibrant planet.
If you can’t find it in yourself to care about cruelty issues, you might at least consider your food choices in regards to the fact that animal agriculture is the “third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after the energy and industrial sectors,” according to “The Case for a Carbon Tax on Beef” by Richard Conniff in theNew York Times, March 17, 2018.
And asChatham House, an influential British think tank, points out, livestock production is responsible for more greenhouse gas “ than the emissions produced from powering all the world’s road vehicles, trains, ships and airplanes combined.” Conniff adds, “including grazing, the business of making meat occupies about three-quarters of the agricultural land on the planet.”
Call it food for thought, but what you eat is actually affecting our weather these days.
Let me admit up front that I would rather be eating a cheeseburger right now. Or maybe trying out a promising new recipe for Korean braised short ribs. But our collective love affair with beef, dating back more than 10,000 years, has gone wrong, in so many ways. And in my head, if not in my appetites, I know it’s time to break it off.
So it caught my eye recently when a team of French scientists published a paper on the practicality of putting a carbon tax on beef as a tool for meeting European Union climate change targets. The idea will no doubt sound absurd to Americans reared on Big Macs and cowboy mythology. While most of us recognize that we are already experiencing the effects of climate change, according to a 2017 Gallup poll, we just can’t imagine that, for instance, floods, mudslides, wildfires, biblical droughts and back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes are going to be a serious problem in our lifetimes. And we certainly don’t make the connection to the food on our plates, or to beef in particular.
Paying the Price for Polluting
The production of beef has a larger impact on the environment than that of any other meat or dairy product. A tax based on carbon emissions could increase the price of beef by up to 41 percent in supermarkets.
The cattle industry would like to keep it that way. Oil, gas and coal had to play along, for instance, when the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency instituted mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. But the program to track livestock emissions was mysteriously defunded by Congress in 2010, and the position of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association at the time was that the extent of the emissions was “alleged and unsubstantiated.” The association now goes an Orwellian step further, arguing in its 2018 policy book that agriculture is a source of offsets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Agriculture, including cattle raising, is our third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after the energy and industrial sectors. At first glance, the root of the problem may appear to be our appetite for meat generally. Chatham House, the influential British think tank, attributes 14.5 percent of global emissions to livestock — “more than the emissions produced from powering all the world’s road vehicles, trains, ships and airplanes combined.” Livestock consume the yield from a quarter of all cropland worldwide. Add in grazing, and the business of making meat occupies about three-quarters of the agricultural land on the planet.
Beef and dairy cattle together account for an outsize share of agriculture and its attendant problems, including almost two-thirds of all livestock emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. That’s partly because there are so many of them — 1 billion to 1.4 billion head of cattle worldwide. They don’t outnumber humanity, but with cattle in this country topping out at about 1,300 pounds apiece, their footprint on the planet easily outweighs ours.
The emissions come partly from the fossil fuels used to plant, fertilize and harvest the feed to fatten them up for market. In addition, ruminant digestion causes cattle to belch and otherwise emit huge quantities of methane. A new study in the journal Carbon Balance and Management puts the global gas output of cattle at 120 million tons per year. Methane doesn’t hang around in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide. But in the first 20 years after its release, it’s 80 to 100 times more potent at trapping the heat of the sun and warming the planet. The way feedlots and other producers manage manure also ensures that cattle continue to produce methane long after they have gone to the great steakhouse in the sky.
The French researchers, from the Toulouse School of Economics, decided to take a look at a carbon tax on beef because the European Union has committed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions more than half by midcentury — and that includes agricultural emissions. The ambition is to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, widely regarded as a tipping point at which cascading and potentially catastrophic effects of climate change could sweep across the planet. Their study found that a relatively steep tax, based on greenhouse gas emissions, would raise the retail price of beef by about 40 percent and cause a corresponding drop in consumption, much like the sugar tax on sodas and the tax on tobacco products.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to put a carbon tax on fossil fuel, a larger source of greenhouse gas emissions? You bet. But many people who now commute in conventional gas-fueled automobiles have no better way to get home — or to heat their homes when they get there. That broader carbon tax will require dramatically restructuring our lives. A carbon tax on beef, on the other hand, would be a relatively simple test case for such taxes and, according to the French study, only a little painful, at least at the household level: While people would tend to skip the beef bourguignon, they could substitute other meats, like pork and chicken, that have a much smaller climate change footprint.
The tax would also reduce the substantial contribution of beef and dairy cattle to water pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss and human mortality. (A 2012 Harvard School of Public Health study found that adding a single serving of unprocessed red meat per day increases the risk of death by 13 percent.) Those factors have already driven down beef consumption in the United States by 19 percent since 2005.
Zohra Bouamra-Mechemache, a co-author of the French study, readily acknowledged that the proposed carbon tax on beef has no chance of becoming reality, “not even in Europe” and certainly not in the United States. Our politicians continue to regard the beef industry as, well, a sacred cow. And even if the rest of us acknowledge the reality of climate change, we tend to put off actually doing much about it in our own lives. It’s a J. Wellington Wimpy philosophy: We want our hamburgers today, on a promise to pay on some future Tuesday, probably in our grandchildren’s lifetimes.
Still, the idea of a carbon tax on beef makes me think. I crave the aroma of beef, from a burger, or a barbecue brisket cooked low and slow. It’s just harder to enjoy it now when I can also catch the faint whiff of methane lingering 20 years into our increasingly uncertain future.
Physicist Stephen Hawking died today at the age of 76. In the latter stages of his illustrious career, Hawking devoted a considerable amount of time and effort to issuing warnings of future threats—from the perils of climate change and nuclear war through to artificial superintelligence and alien invasions. And for this he was often ridiculed. But here’s the thing: Hawking was right—and it would be incumbent upon all of us to heed his advice.
When Hawking wasn’t talking about Euclidean quantum gravity, naked singularities, or radiation seeping from black holes, there’s a good chance the Cambridge Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was doing his best Chicken Little impersonation, telling a global audience that the sky above would soon give way, should we choose to keep ignoring it.
For Hawking, there was no shortage of ways in which the sky could fall. Early in his career he warned us about comets and asteroids, but by the mid-aughts he began to focus his attention on self-inflicted wounds. In 2006, at the age of 64 and with virtually nothing left to prove, Hawking posed the following open question online: “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?” Over 25,000 people chimed in with their own opinions, with many asking Hawking for his own advice. “I don’t know the answer,” he replied. “That is why I asked the question.”
That same summer, and in another sign of his mood shift, Hawking told a news conference in Hong Kong that life on Earth “is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.” This time around, however, he volunteered an answer to the problem: colonize other planets or perish.
Hawking’s view of humanity had turned grim, and by 2010 he was warning of alien invasions, saying, “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.” In her 2012 book, Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work, author Kitty Ferguson wrote about the physicist’s view of computer viruses and why he thought they were a new form of life. “Maybe it says something about human nature, that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive,” said Hawking. “Talk about creating life in our own image.”
More recently, Hawking began to voice his concerns about artificial intelligence. In 2014, he famously said that AI was our “worst mistake in history,” and he signed an open letter warning of AI risks, alongside like-minded public figures including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, physicist Sir Martin Rees, and biologist George Church. “One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand,” he wrote in an Independent op-ed with computer scientist Stuart Russell and physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek. “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” A year later, he added his name to an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous killing machines.
It sucks to hear, but he was right. We’re in big trouble. And we need to do something about it.
Last year, for example, Oxford’s Global Priorities Project listed asteroid impacts, global warming, artificial intelligence, and global pandemics among humanity’s most pressing near-term risks. With the shifting geopolitical climate, we have no choice but to worry—yet again—of nuclear war. Hawking’s view of malevolent aliens may have violated popular conceptions of friendly extraterrestrial visitors, but he was right to be terrified. At the same time, there’s no shortage of potential existential risks in our future, whether it be from a poorly programmed artificial superintelligence, a nanotechnology-powered apocalypse, or a retreat into a dystopian totalitarian dark age.
Of course, Hawking didn’t come up with these threats from thin air, nor was he the only one making such warnings. He just happened to be exceptionally vocal about it, and because of his extraordinary reach, he was able to communicate his message to a large global audience. That’s why he got branded as a Chicken Little, and why we became so inclined to associate these doom-and-gloom scenarios exclusively to him.
The best way to honor Hawking’s legacy, in my opinion, is to take inspiration from his admonitions and his persistency. He may have sounded misanthropic at times, but his warnings came from a good place. Despite the physical hardships he had to endure for so many years, Hawking never gave the impression that he gave up on his own life, and by virtue of his ceaseless warnings, he never gave up on humanity either.
Yes, the future looks scary—but as Hawking reiterated time and time again, the worst thing we can do when threats appear on the horizon is to plant our heads firmly in the ground.
The top five meat and dairy corporations have higher greenhouse gas emissions than oil giant Exxon – if we’re going to have a ‘Green Brexit’, let’s start by examining how we eat
People walking in the snow by Tower Bridge in London, as the highest level of weather warning has been issued for parts of England and Wales PA
Reducing meat production and meat eating has the potential to avert climate catastrophe. That sounds dramatic, but consider the facts. Livestock farming is responsible for as much as 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – higher than all forms of transport combined. And a recent report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy revealed that the top five meat and dairy corporations have higher greenhouse gas emissions than oil giant Exxon.
This week I hosted a debate in the European Parliament on how we can reduce the climate impact of our diets based on a new report about tackling climate change through plant protein agriculture. Just 5 per cent of European consumers in 2016 followed a vegetarian diet compared with 19 per cent in Asia. And to feed the animals that eventually end up as meat on our plates requires the import of vast amounts of protein crops – especially soy – in the form of animal feed. This in turn contributes to deforestation in Latin America where large-scale intensive farms grow GMO soya to feed our animals.
The UK climate provides the perfect conditions for growing plant protein – largely peas and beans – for direct human consumption. Fava beans are but one example of the huge potential. They add essential nitrogen to soil, provide food beneficial to insects and are highly nutritious.
Hemp seeds are another. They can be grown almost anywhere, require low inputs of fertiliser, herbicides or pesticides and need little water, land and maintenance. Despite the potential, for farmers and consumers alike, the UK currently only assigns about 16 per cent of agricultural land to the growing of protein crops.
For farmers, protein crops can be incorporated into sustainable crop rotation systems and help a shift away from intensive chemical-reliant monocultures. They also have the rare ability to take nitrogen from the air and capture it in soil, reducing the need for expensive and environmentally damaging nitrogen fertilisers. For consumers, protein crops offer a more affordable source of protein than meat with many health benefits including being a good source of iron and fibre.
UK weather: Amazing timelapse video shows snow falling across London
EU production of protein crops is tiny compared with consumption. Just 2.5 per cent of soya beans consumed in the EU are grown in the EU. A consultation launched recently by the Commission demonstrates a growing recognition of our over-dependency on protein imports for animal feed and the need for greater self-sufficiency. It is the first step in developing an EU-wide protein plan. As Greens, we are pushing for more protein crops to be grown on arable land and that one or two protein crops are incorporated into crop rotations. We also want to see a greater use of EU-grown protein plants for fodder for animals.
It is important to stress that this is not about demonising or alienating livestock farmers, but providing alternatives and encouraging more diversified diets with less dependence on meat for protein. There would also be huge environmental benefits, from reduced methane emissions (from farms) and carbon emissions (from transporting animals) through to protecting forests and wildlife from massive monoculture plantations.
there are barriers to growing protein crops in the UK: costs are high and revenues are low due to low yields and low consumer demand. But surely “Green Brexit” offers a unique opportunity to be incentivising protein crops and helping to generate a market for them. This could be achieved through subsidies to farmers who grow them as part of crop rotations, publicly funding R&D on their benefits, public awareness campaigns of their health properties and procurement practices that encourage schools, hospitals and other public organisations to use more protein crops.
This week, extreme weather has been in the news: the “Beast of the East” bringing cold weather and blizzards to the UK, as well as the Arctic experiencing unprecedented warmth. This prompted one climate scientist to comment: “There are further surprises in store as we continue to poke the angry beast that is our climate.”
Changing the way we grow, produce and eat food is not only essential to tame this “angry beast”; it is also one of the easier ways we can transition to a low carbon economy and lifestyle. We just need the right economic incentives and political will to make it happen.
There has been a lot of buzz recently about climate change because whether skeptics want to admit it or not, climate change is a reality. With drastic temperature changes, water scarcity, extreme drought and destructive storms, climate change is one of the biggest global challenges of our time. Given the importance of the issue, many are looking for ways to lower their carbon footprint to help the planet.
Unplugging electronics when they aren’t in use, turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth, biking instead of driving, and planting gardens and trees are all great ways to fight climate change. But what if there was one thing you can do TODAY that could have a greater impact than all of the above? What if you could have a positive impact on the planet simply with your food choices? Consider these stats…
1. Think Fossil Fuels Are the Only Source of GHGs?
2. Would You Rather Bike Everywhere to Cut Emissions or Eat a Beyond Burger?
Shockingly, beef eaters use 160 percent more land resources than people who eat a plant-based diet. From all of the emissions involved in deforesting land to make way for grazing cattle and grow hundreds of acres of corn and soy (which is used as livestock feed) to the methane emissions from the animals themselves, producing meat is a gassy business.
3. The BEST Way to Shrink Your Carbon Footprint
By simply leaving animal products off of your plate for a year, you can cut your carbon footprint in HALF. And all you have to do is eat yummy, plant-based foods!
As we learn more about the impact of factory farms on the environment and animals, we are faced with a choice – either buy into this destructive industry – or choose better. For more impactful stats like these and to learn how you can help the environment with your book choices, check out the new #EatForThePlanet book!
In its effort to lead the global push against climate change, the world’s second-largest economy has assigned soldiers to tree-planting duty, spent billions of dollars on cleaner energy (pdf), and has actively pushed some of its cities away from using coal.
Still, China has yet to figure out what to do about one of its biggest environmental hurdles—its demand for milk.
That’s because the world’s most populous country is expected to almost triple its consumption of dairy across the next 30 years, according to a study published this month in the journal, Global Change Biology. To figure out just how much the world would be impacted by China’s appetite for dairy by 2050, a team of researchers led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences set out to assess what factors in the country would drive milk consumption and measure the ultimate impact.
In short, the rising demand for for dairy in China will increase the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions coming from dairy herds by 35%, it’ll require 32% more land be dedicated to dairy, and it will boost nitrogen pollution from production by 48%, according to the study.
The bad news is there’s no way to avoid the increases. The possible good news is that by modernizing how farmers handle nitrogen-rich manure, changing dairy cow diets to reduce methane emissions, and improving land management, the increases could be more modest.
The world’s 270 million dairy cows live on farms that produce the manure, ammonia, methane, and nitrous oxide that are negatively impacting the climate. The agricultural sector accounts for about 14% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.
“The consequences of sticking to a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario are unthinkable,” the lead author of the study, Zhaohai Bai, has said.
Between 1961 and 2016, milk consumption in China increased more than 25 times to 31 kg (68 lb) per capita each year. (Milk is measured by the weight of its milk-fat content.) It’s now the world’s largest importer of milk and per-capita consumption is expect to increase to 82 kg per year by 2050, according to the study.
It’s become a familiar narrative, one that’s been unfolding in the nation for some time. China is developing rapidly, creating a larger middle class with more purchasing power. With more money to spend, the more people are indulging in dairy and meat products.
“For a more sustainable dairy future globally, high milk demanding regions, such as China, must match the production efficiencies of the world’s leading producers,” Bai said.
As dog musher Mel Omernick slipped nylon harnesses over her Alaskan huskies’ lithe bodies, the dogs were already straining with forward momentum. Pogo pressed her paws into the ground below, the sound of her yelps joining with those of the three other dogs that Mel and her husband, Keith, were hooking up to their tuglines. The cries melded with the barking of a hundred other dogs at the Redpaws Dirty Dog Dryland Derby in northern Wisconsin.
It was the first weekend of November, and race participants had come from all over Wisconsin and neighboring states, and as far away as New Hampshire and Quebec, to run their dogs. All year, they had fed and watered and trained and cleaned up after their teams, awaiting the moment they could let their dogs loose across the starting line.
Now the race weekend had finally arrived, though it had gotten off to a rocky start. Once again, the weather was to blame.
Northern Wisconsin is still a frigid place come winter. But as the state has warmed, the certainty of snow gradually vanished, leaving the traditional winter dogsledding races frequently cancelled for lack of good powder. Organizers responded by adapting the sport itself, from dogsledding to “dryland” racing.
The Dirty Dog Derby was the first of its kind in the area, started in 2006 to extend the racing season into spring and fall so that mushers like Mel and Keith could have more chances to compete, and dogs like Pogo more chances to run. Swapping out sleds, dogs instead pull mushers on unmotorized rigs or a cart with four to 10 dogs or modified bicycles (bikejoring) pulled by two dogs: in some cases, a single musher simply lashes herself by bungee cord to a single dog and runs behind him in an event called canicross. Dryland variations tend to be shorter events, sprints of a few miles instead of the hundreds of miles of the iconic long-distance sled races often associated with the sport.
With snow becoming less reliable, many dogsled racers have turned to dryland racing, with rigs on wheels replacing traditional sleds. Credit: Meera Subramanian
In the weeks before their race, the Dirty Dog organizers had been worried they’d have to cancel it if the warm weather they were experiencing into late October—still hitting 70 on some days—continued. Since dogs can’t sweat—the only means they have to release heat from their bodies is through their tongues and the pads of their paws—mushers won’t run their dogs if there’s a risk they’ll get “fried” by overheating.
But by the time the derby arrived on Nov. 4, race organizers were pining for a little heat. The race grounds—and the carefully groomed trails—were blanketed in nearly three inches of snow. The day’s races were cancelled. Mushers kept their spirits up but weren’t finding much humor in the irony: a dryland race, the sport’s creative solution to a paucity of snowfall, cancelled because of snow. Some mushers loaded up their trailers with their pent-up dogs and made their way back home, while others—usually those who had traveled greater distances—hung around, eating chili from the Dirty Dog Diner set up in the open-air lodge and taking shifts by the fireplace as they waited to see if the weather would change.
By the second day, the snow had melted just enough to turn the trails into a muddy, but navigable, quagmire. When the organizers announced early Sunday morning that the race was on, the grounds erupted in excitement and movement. Mel and Keith headed to their truck to get the team hooked up, and soon the dogs were pulling on their lines, amped to do what they seemed born to do: run.
Dogsledding, Without the Sleds
Today, dogsledding is undergoing a transformation. Or threat, depending on your viewpoint.
The first hit came with the advent of snowmobiles in the 1960s, when dogsledding began slipping away as the standard form of transportation for many of the world’s northernmost inhabitants. Instead it became recreational, one of those activities that meld sport, hobby and lifestyle into one expensive, obsessive pastime.
Champion sprint musher Jan Bootz-Dittmar has been racing dogsleds for four decades and has several sponsors. She took up dryland racing, but finds the loss of reliably snowy winters frustrating. Credit: Meera Subramanian
Now the ideal image of dogs, humans and a sled careening silently across snow is facing a new challenge as the climate warms and the weather weirds. The Iditarod, a thousand-mile race across Alaska that is the most famous of sled dog races, had to be rerouted two of the last three years as its organizers chased snow-covered terrain. In Wisconsin, since 2001, about one-third of the sled races failed to happen, primarily because of lack of snow.
“I definitely see a trend where things are not like they used to be,” said Jan Bootz-Dittmar, a champion sprint musher on snow and dry land who’s been running dogs for 40 years. Last year, insufficient snowfall caused half of the snow races in Wisconsin to be cancelled.
“That affects me,” she said in the cafe as she munched on potato chips in lieu of lunch, “and it pisses me off.”
The Accidental Life
Mel races drylands, but skijoring is what she loves most: the quiet “shwooosh shwooosh” of her skis gliding through a snow-silenced world but for the sound of her dog’s movement.
She lives in Lincoln County, in north-central Wisconsin, and we were talking in the kitchen of the home she and Keith share, a long green metal building divided into a utilitarian shop and a capacious, wood-ceilinged living space with a wall of windows looking out upon a stand of trees. Her parents’ home lies just beyond. Mel, 40, sees both of her parents nearly daily, but when it comes to dogsledding, she’s closer to her father, Ron Behm, who is approaching 70. The kennel of Alaskan huskies and hounds that was once Ron’s is now cared for by Mel and Keith, and they all train the dogs together.
The frequency of winter freezes that plunged the thermometer below average has been declining in Wisconsin since the 1980s, and the sport has had to change with the climate. Credit: Meera Subramanian
Father and daughter have been running sled dogs for more than 25 years, since they entered the sport by an accident of canine lust. Mel was still in junior high when the neighbor’s Malamute wandered over and found their Labrador mix, which was Ron’s hunting dog. One lone pup was the result, and they kept him and named him Tiny. He was no bird dog, but Mel and her three siblings kept him running all the time. When the neighbor’s dog got loose again the next year and a litter of four was born, the Behm kids had a team. The family was friends with Jan Bootz-Dittmar, who gave them some harnesses to try out.
Mel and her two younger brothers hooked up Tiny and the team to their red Radio Flyer wagon, and the boys would take turns riding while Mel, who was a gymnast at the time and wanted the exercise, darted in front, leading the dog. As the dogs grew, they swapped out the wagon with an old lawn mower, engine removed. Mel’s older sister Ginnie, daunted by the speed, would cheer them on, snapping photographs. Ron mowed a path through the grass so the children could holler “gee!” for right and “haw!” for left as the dogs learned commands.
Mel’s brother Adam was the first to enter a formal dogsledding race, with Ron joining him a few years later. By the time she was in college, Mel had quit gymnastics and started racing, too. Mel’s mother, Gail, stitched harnesses and kept the mushers supplied with baked goods and the fresh perch she caught while ice fishing, her preferred sport.
Dynamics of Differing
Despite all this family togetherness, there was one crucial split in the Behm household: politics.
At first, Mel told me, she was a Republican because her father was. “I didn’t pay attention to politics,” she said. But that changed when she became an emergency room nurse. Working 12-hour shifts with people in crisis, she suddenly realized that “some of the decisions that politicians were making were affecting my patients.”
She also saw how not just politics but also science affected them, from the medicines she could offer them to how their bodies responded. She saw science in her sport, too, where the principles of genetics were used to breed dogs for speed, endurance and tougher paws.
The length of the frost-free season has increased by as much as three weeks in some parts of Wisconsin since 1971, the state’s assistant climatologist said. Credit: Meera Subramanian
“I love science,” she said, “and I believe in evolution.” Evolution was one of the science-based subjects she’d argued with her dad about most fiercely when she was in college. “I feel like we’re an example of it, and our sled dogs are too. So, it’s logical. It just makes sense … our planet is changing.”
These were not conversations Mel and Ron had easily, or often. Usually they just avoided politics—and science—altogether, focusing on the thing that bound them, their love of dogs and dogsledding, their family life.
The world of dog mushers draws racers and trainers from across the political spectrum, and there’s a hesitation to talk about potentially divisive issues, such as climate change. Credit: Meera Subramanian
Within the contained world of dog mushers, there’s a similar hesitation to talk about potentially divisive issues. The entire political spectrum finds representation at the Dirty Dog Dryland Derby, from the young women showing up in a Prius with two dogs tucked in back, to the Trump supporter in a trailer emblazoned with “To the victor the spoils.” But as with Mel and her father, conversations among the mushers veer away from the political, to the point that many mushers don’t even know each other’s leanings or affiliations. Better to talk dogs than politics, and weather before climate. Even Ron, once I pressed him, was adamant that he was a “constitutionalist,” not a Republican. That was a distinction even his own daughter didn’t know.
Just a Blade of Grass
The second weekend in November, a second dryland derby was scheduled. Ron was slated to be a race marshal for that one, known as the Willow Springs Round Barn Fall Rally, and Keith was scheduled to compete; Mel planned to swing by after an all-night ER shift. But the skies stayed heavy most of the week, and, looking at the forecast of more snow, organizers cancelled the race by Tuesday night.
With his weekend freed up, Ron was willing to continue a conversation we’d started earlier in the week about what was happening to the climate and the sport he and his daughter both loved. Instead of race marshaling, he joined me at Mel’s house, laying down his coyote fur cap upon the kitchen table as Mel fixed coffee after her 12-hour shift.
While Mel Omernick sees the climate changing around her, her father, Ron Behm, is skeptical of any human role in climate change and leans on counter-arguments that scientists say aren’t major drivers of the changes. Credit: Meera Subramanian
Sitting side by side, Mel and Ron are two generations delighted in the world. Ron is still fit from his 30 years as a mail carrier, from which he retired in 2012; he now devotes himself to the Wisconsin Trailblazers race dog club, the Lions and a one-acre market garden that he tends with his wife. His white beard is trimmed, and Mel’s blonde hair is cut in a bob that falls in soft curls. They both default to easy smiles, even when their viewpoints clash.
Which they do, when it comes to climate change.
Mel feels that the winters of her youth are gone. Where was ice skating at Thanksgiving, like she remembers from her grandma’s when she was a kid?
“It always seemed harsh in the winter,” she said. But Ron had an explanation that had nothing to do with climate change. A trick of perception, he said as Mel listened respectfully, since in those days there was none of the high-tech clothing and efficient snow plows of today. He likened it to other mythic stories about one’s childhood, à la walking to school, uphill, both ways. “Probably that was a part of it,” Mel responded, nodding thoughtfully, both of them disagreeing in a way that was unfailingly polite.
There are 19 dogs out in the kennel, but six are allowed in the house, and they periodically came up to Mel and Ron, who stroked their heads. One dog took a brief interest in Ron’s coyote-skin hat—it’s roadkill, Ron told me—before venturing off again.
“One thing about weather,” Ron said, “we can all comment about it, but we can’t change it.” He sees climate changes as cyclical, pointing to the fact that long before humans were contributing any sort of emissions to the atmosphere, the state had “gone through three major warming trends, and also, three major freezing trends.” He mentioned the nearby Ice Age Trail that marks the edge of the last glaciation, 10,000 years ago.
Dogsledding in Wisconsin has been changing for other reasons as well, including the cost of the sport and loss of sponsorship. Credit: Meera Subramanian
But even as he referred to deep time and geological history, Ron expressed his strong skepticism of science. He trusts the Old Farmer’s Almanac before the weather report. Weather is cyclical, he insisted, listing off a catalog of counter-arguments to climate science that I’ve heard around the country, including from many of the Dirty Dog mushers. The current warming can be attributed to volcanoes, they’ve told me. And sunspots. And solar winds. And the media doesn’t report these things. None acknowledged that climate scientists account for these variables in their studies and readily accept the planet’s natural climate fluctuations.
What the planet has not seen is as rapid a rise in temperatures, predicted to become warmer than they’ve been for millions of years, long before humans settled into their spaces and their sports.
“I still don’t believe that man has been given the ability, no matter how proud they think of themselves, to completely control something that they’re only on its surface for a very short time,” Ron told me. “We’re here, a blade-of-grass scenario,” meaning that there might be seven billion of us, but we simply cannot have the impact that climate scientists are saying we have.
But while Mel politely agreed with her father that her recollection of colder winters in the past might be a trick of the mind, the truth is, data backs up her belief that Wisconsin winters are objectively milder than they used to be.
Mel Omernick enjoys bikejoring with her race dogs when there isn’t enough snow to ski with them. She also works as an emergency room nurse, where she sees how politics and science affect all of our lives. Credit: Meera Subramanian
Starting in the 1980s, the frequency of winter freezes that plunged the thermometer below average was declining. By the mid-1990s, when Ron and his kids were running with the Radio Flyer and Tiny’s team, the cold autumnal spikes had nearly vanished. Ed Hopkins, Wisconsin’s assistant state climatologist, told me that winters continue to be highly variable, with lots of snow some years and bare ground others, but he recently tallied up the length of the frost-free season since 1971 and found that in some parts of the state, it’s increased by as much as three weeks.
And Now, a Word from …
Dogsledding in Wisconsin has been changing for the past two decades for reasons aside from weather: the cost of dog food, the difficulty of finding long trail systems unimpeded by development or liability-averse landowners, the cost of fuel for the trucks to haul large teams. And one additional, significant change: the loss of sponsorship. It was sponsorship that had been keeping the races afloat, but sponsors started falling away as early as the late 1990s—often for weather-related reasons.
Dryland races involve plenty of mud, as Jan Bootz-Dittmar is evidence of after a race. Credit: Meera Subramanian
Ron spoke of one sponsor, the North Star Mohican Casino Resort over in Bowler, Wisconsin, that sponsored a dogsled race with a huge purse. “Then someone says … we can make more money with a polka band,” he said. “Bowler started to bring in live entertainment at the casino, instead of doing the race.”
How infinitely appealing an indoor, climate-controlled event must be for a sponsor. The complete opposite of the iffy one-day mudfest that ended up being the Dirty Dog Derby this year.
“This is a weather sport,” Ron said. “Your sponsors are expecting this much viewing of their product name, and if the weather is not conducive to that, you don’t get the viewership.”
“So if it’s too cold, too windy, rainy,” Mel continued, their conversation fluidly moving between them, “there are no spectators.”
The prizes for the long-distance snow sled races can still be substantial—the Iditarod winner takes home $75,000—but as the purses have shrunk, sprint mushers are lucky if they win enough for gas money home.
Traditional racing sleds hang on a shop wall near the kennels. Credit: Meera Subramanian
The move from dogsledding to dryland racing to casino polkas is enough to make you wonder if we’re doomed to become an indoor nation, seeking collective escape from an unpredictable world.
Many sports are suffering from the extremes in weather. Just as the sled dogs have their window where they can comfortably and safely compete, so do we two-legged athletes. It’s difficult to play tennis when it’s so hot your sneakers are melting on the court or you start hallucinating that you’ve seen Snoopy, as happened at the Australian Open a couple of years back. A study by the University of Waterloo’s Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change found that, unless carbon use plummets soon, a third of past Winter Olympics cities will be unable to host the event in the future because they won’t get cold enough. Winter recreation sports are estimated to be a $12 billion industry in the country.
Even snowless tracks still draw young dogsled racers excited by the thrill of the sport. Credit: Meera Subramanian
Loss of sponsorship and other factors are contributing to the decline in snow mushing in Wisconsin, but the greatest factor seems to be climate change. How long can the sport survive when the specter of uncertain weather is added to all the others? What is the fate of this sport—a healthy, life-affirming sport that people play instead of watch, that involves working in concert with animals instead of against them? Did the founders of the Iditarod think about the double meaning of their tag line, the “Last Great Race on Earth”?
When there isn’t enough snow for a sled but too much for a dryland cart, Mel and Keith Omernick take the dogs out with an ATV. Credit: Meera Subramanian
Mel and Ron and I had talked enough. There were dogs outside, eager in waiting. Ron donned his coyote fur hat, its tail draped between his shoulder blades as the rest of it blended with the color and cut of his beard. Mel slipped on her Carhartt jacket and we headed out to the kennel where Keith had been setting out the lines to run the dogs with an ATV. It was too snowy for a cart and not snowy enough for a sled, so a motor would have to suffice. The dogs were rowdy with expectation, fervent to bound through the whitened forest, past Ron and Gail’s garden, so recently put to bed, past the neat lines of the neighbor’s fields, crisp in sepia tones.
“I love to watch them run, and run with them,” Mel had said expectantly before we headed out. “To have them pull me and to be part of that team. And we’re out there in nature, whether it’s a beautiful sunny day, 20 below, raining, icing. We’re appreciating what the planet has given us, and God’s blessings that we’re healthy enough to do this.”
She was proving what her father had told me earlier about dog racing. “Nostalgia,” Ron had said, “is a big part of this sport.”
Top photo: Mel Omernick races dogsleds in Wisconsin, but lately the winter races have shiftrf to dirt tracks as the winter snow becomes less reliable. Credit: Meera Subramanian
The bears were flooded out of their winter hibernation spots, said Jennifer Vashon, the biologist who oversees the state’s bear program within the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
Last week’s bear-human conflict was the first such weather-related encounter that Vashon can recall. But, she said, having more bears become active early in the year does not put Mainers at much of a risk of running into one of them.
The bear versus dog tangle likely occurred because the dog disturbed a young bear that had recently relocated near a busy roadway and hadn’t fallen back into a deep hibernation, Game Warden Shannon Fish said.
Vashon agreed that the scuffle was a “freak coincidence.”
“I don’t see any reason that the weather is going to cause an increase in encounters between bears and people,” she said.
Heavy flooding from rain occurred earlier than usual, Vashon said. But if early-winter flooding becomes the norm because of climate change, it’s bears that will have to adapt, not people. Bears would gradually become more likely to establish their dens on higher ground, she said.
Last week’s mauling occured when 29-year-old Dustin Gray and his puppy, Clover, unwittingly stumbled upon a bear den in the woods just off of Route 1A in Dedham. Gray said he fought the bear off. Clover is now recovering from puncture wounds.
Near the place the conflict occurred, Fish found a small cave that looked like it had briefly housed a small bear. That led him to conclude the bear had recently moved out of a flooded den.
The National Weather Service does not record rainfall totals for Dedham, but Bangor received 5.53 inches in January, nearly double the its average for the first month of the year. That rain, combined with snow melt, caused widespread flooding, according to NWS meteorologist Mark Bloomer.
Vashon’s colleague, biologist Randy Cross, checked on five dens in a research area affected by the flooding and found that the bears in four dens had already left, she said.
When their dens flood, bears don’t roam around looking for food — or people, whom they tend to shy away from. Instead, they try to find somewhere nearby to resume hibernation, she said.
But, usually, that happens in rainy March — not January. And Vashon said that early-winter flooding could endanger newborn bears.
Cubs are born in January and cannot easily withstand flooding because they are tiny, hairless and vulnerable, she said. But by March cubs are five-pound “furballs” better equipped to cope, she said.
Vashon won’t know until the spring, when the state checks its cub counts, if last month’s heavy rains cost the lives of any newborns, she said.
“But this one year, there’s probably no reason to be concerned,” she said.
Climate change has made January rains more common, a trend that is likely to continue, according to Sean Birkel, a University of Maine climatologist.
But, Vashon said, that just means mother bears will seek out higher ground.
Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, suggested this week that climate change might not be a danger for humanity.
During an interview Tuesday with KSNV television of Las Vegas, Mr. Pruitt said that rising global temperatures are “not necessarily a bad thing” and that “humans have flourished’’ during times of warming trends. His comments represent a new wrinkle in Mr. Pruitt’s history of questioning the established science of climate change.
At the E.P.A., Mr. Pruitt has championed the elimination of policies intended to mitigate climate change. He also has long expressed doubt about the role of humans in rising global temperatures, despite the scientific consensus that human activity is the dominant cause of climate change.
His recent comments go a step beyond some of his previously stated views, some scientists say.
“I do think how Mr. Pruitt talks about climate tells us something important about how folks on the right view climate,” said Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank that advocates conservative solutions to climate change. Mr. Majkut cited in particular the search for what he referred to as “counter-narratives.”
Here is a selection of Mr. Pruitt’s comments on climate science:
Jan. 18, 2017: Mr. Pruitt’s confirmation hearing
Senator Bernie Sanders: 97 percent of the scientists who wrote articles in peer-reviewed journals believe that human activity is the fundamental reason we are seeing climate change. You disagree with that?
Mr. Pruitt: I believe the ability to measure, with precision, the degree of human activity’s impact on the climate is subject to more debate on whether the climate is changing or whether human activity contributes to it.
During his first appearance before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2017, as part of his confirmation hearing to be the head of the E.P.A., Mr. Pruitt walked a fine line on the subject. The climate is warming, he told lawmakers. But he also said, inaccurately, that the extent to which humans are responsible is not known.
When pressed by Senator Sanders, a Vermont independent, to offer his view on what is causing the climate to change, Mr. Pruitt responded, “My personal opinion is immaterial to the job.”
March 9, 2017: Interview with CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’
CNBC: Do you believe that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate? Do you believe that?
Mr. Pruitt: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the review and the analysis.”
The Squawk Box appearance offers one of Mr. Pruitt’s most definitive denials of established climate science, which holds that human activity is primarily responsible for the rise in carbon dioxide emissions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top climate-science body at the United Nations, calls carbon dioxide the biggest heat-trapping force and says that it is responsible for about 33 times more added warming than natural causes.
Mr. Majkut of the Niskanen Center pointed out that some conservatives mistrust authoritative groups like the I.P.C.C., believing they have been “captured by environmental ideology.” By casting doubt on established science, Mr. Pruitt’s words reflect that skepticism, Mr. Majkut said.
A few months later, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Pruitt shifted his stance a bit, acknowledging the role of carbon dioxide as a cause of climate change.
June 4, 2017: Interview with ‘Meet the Press’
Chuck Todd, speaking of climate change: Do you believe that CO2 is the primary cause?
Mr. Pruitt: CO2 contributes to climate change, much like — Methane actually is more potent.
Mr. Todd: You don’t believe that CO2 is the primary cause.
Mr. Pruitt: No, no. I didn’t say that. I said it’s a cause.
Mr. Todd: Primary?
Mr. Pruitt: It’s a cause of many. It’s a cause like methane and water vapor and the rest.
Mr. Pruitt’s evolving statements on climate science represent a form of “political communication,” as opposed to an effort to discuss scientific findings, said Nicole Lee, an assistant professor of communication at North Carolina State University who focuses on how scientists convey the complexity of climate change to the public. “It’s about not wanting to move the conversation to what to do about climate change,” she said.
In late 2017, Mr. Pruitt spoke on the television show “Fox & Friends,” promoting a plan to hold televised debates on climate change science. (Planning for the debates, called “red team-blue team” exercises, is still in the works, he said recently.) In his televised remarks, Mr. Pruitt raised the idea that even if temperatures are rising, it might not be a bad thing for humanity.
September 19, 2017: Interview on ‘Fox & Friends’
Mr. Pruitt: “I mean, with this climate change we know certain things. We know the climate’s always changing. We know that humans contribute to it in some way. To what degree, to measure that with precision is very difficult.
But what we don’t know is, are we in a situation where the next essential threat, is it unsustainable with respect to what we see presently? Let’s have a debate about that.”
Mr. Pruitt also maintained in the same interview that it isn’t possible to measure the degree to which human activity contributes to climate change.
That point is refuted by a sweeping climate-change study issued in November by the E.P.A. and other federal agencies. It is “extremely likely,” the report found, that more than half of temperature rise over the past half-century can be attributed to human activity. “There are no alternative explanations.”
January 31, 2018: Senate Environment and Public Works hearing
Mr. Pruitt: “There are questions that we know the answer to, there are questions we don’t know the answer to. For example, what is the ideal surface temperature in the year 2100, is something that many folks have different perspective on.”
That comment, made before a Senate panel, about knowing the “ideal surface temperature in the year 2100,” has become a recurring talking point. Mr. Pruitt has repeated it several times since.
According to the I.P.C.C., if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at their current rate, global temperatures will rise nearly 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100. The World Bank has found that would mean “a frightening world of increased risks and global instability,” including severe declines in crop yields, the migration of diseases into new regions and significantly rising sea levels.
“Some places will be essentially unlivable,’’ said Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for climate change programs at the Climate Institute, a Washington research group. “It’s a tremendously different world.”
When asked to comment on Mr. Pruitt’s statements or to frame his views on climate change, Jahan Wilcox, a spokesman for the E.P.A., referred to an interview Mr. Pruitt conducted with The New York Times podcast The Daily, where he discussed his position. “Here’s my view on it,” he said in that interview. “There are things we know and there are things we don’t know.”
Last December, atmospheric scientist Peter Kalmus ruffled some feathers when he called out 25,000 of his colleagues for flying to the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting.
Being acutely aware of the worsening impacts from anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) — since it was, after all, his job — Kalmus had already made some dramatic changes in his own life to reflect some of the steps he knew the larger culture needed to take.
In 2010 he quantified his own carbon emissions and realized they were dominated by flying: More than three-quarters of his emissions were from flying alone. So, over the next two years he made an effort to fly less, and began to think of his airplane trips within the context of a warming planet.
“In 2012, I was sitting on a plane — the last flight I’ve taken — and I had this strong, visceral sense that I didn’t belong there, that I didn’t want to continue being part of the problem,” Kalmus told Truthout, speaking for himself (and not on behalf of any institution with which he is affiliated). “Flying felt like a sort of taking from my children. It wasn’t guilt; it was clarity.”
Flying Less, a petition for academics with over 400 signatories, is becoming better known by the day, as is the No-Fly Climate Sci website, where Earth scientists and other academics who don’t fly or fly less are joining together to share their ideas.
“Flying felt like a sort of taking from my children. It wasn’t guilt; it was clarity.”
Like Kalmus, her work has impressed upon her the urgency of our global situation. She told Truthout the situation with ACD is “very urgent” and that real changes are long overdue.
“We should have curbed greenhouse gas levels about 20 years ago,” she explained. “We certainly have created the issue in the first place — all our wealth is based on this overuse of resources in connection with fossil fuel and land use impacts on rising greenhouse gases.”
In addition to the need for government action, Heinemeyer feels we are all obliged to do something about it.
“This includes assessing where we overuse resources and waste energy and limit this excess behavior,” she said. “This requires education but also leadership.”
Christoph Küffer is a professor of urban ecology in Zurich, Switzerland, and a member of No-Fly Climate Sci. He studies the ecology of the Anthropocene and ACD’s impacts on mountain ecosystems as well as restoring green infrastructure and biodiversity in cities.
“Obviously, [ACD] is a very urgent issue,” he told Truthout of his reasons for joining the group. “It affects foremost the weakest, and a small minority of us uses the vast majority of resources.”
Kalmus told Truthout he believes ACD is a far more urgent situation than the average person understands. He explained how it is affecting nearly every aspect of life on Earth.
“It threatens our homes, our livelihoods, our food supply, our geopolitical stability,” he said. “It’s happening faster than we expected. In the scientific community, we’ve had this unfortunate tendency to underestimate rates of change due to under-modeling complex processes such as permafrost methane release and ice sheet disintegration.”
He added that ACD is long-lasting because CO2 will stay in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, and the injury to biodiversity will take millions of years to heal.
Kalmus believes it is time for us all to take a step back and think seriously about what we actually need. Do we really need to fly halfway around the world in a matter of hours?
“Or are things like a healthy biosphere, stable climate and reliable food system more important?” he asked. “Is a carbon-rich lifestyle for an elite few worth hundreds of millions of climate refugees tomorrow, and disruption for tens of thousands or even millions of years?”
Kalmus believes that while wind and solar energy are obviously also part of the solution, he does not see the prospect of developing renewables as enough of a fix on its own. Hence, he is taking action to spread consciousness about how we all live.
“At work he studies the physics of clouds in a changing climate, and at home he explores how we can address climate change while living happier, more connected lives,” reads his “About the Author” page. “He lives in Altadena, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, with his wife and two children on 1/10th the fossil fuels of the American average. He enjoys orcharding, beekeeping, and backpacking.”
Is our fast, fossil-fueled lifestyle even that satisfying, or might we be happier if we slowed down a bit?
In our interview, Kalmus said that we all need to be asking ourselves some challenging questions.
“Can we get by with less electricity?” he asked. “If we cut our use in half in the US, we’d only need to build a quarter as much wind, solar and storage to decarbonize our grid. Is our fast, fossil-fueled lifestyle even that satisfying, or might we be happier if we slowed down a bit?”
Kalmus thinks what is required is a cultural shift to bring about the rapid, large-scale change that is our only hope for some mitigation of the impacts of ACD. In addition to institutional action, that cultural shift will require individuals to push the bounds of what society views as normal.
“We need to get to a point where burning fossil fuel is no longer socially acceptable,” he said. “I know we’ll get there, I’m pretty sure I’m on the right side of history here, but the question is how long will it take? Time isn’t on our side.”
Living What They Preach
Küffer, who has managed to go a year without flying, decided to affiliate himself with the No-Fly Climate Sci group because, he says, while humans invented the airplane, the pursuit of “non-flying” is its own form of innovation.
“Innovation happens only if we try, experiment and learn by doing,” he said. “There is a belief in our society that we can have everything together, that we can fly as much as we like and have simultaneously all the benefits of non-flying. But there are opportunity costs. My experience is that non-flying brings lots of benefits.”
Heinemeyer decided to affiliate herself with the no-fly group because of ACD’s impacts on society’s underpinning ecosystem services, including food security.
She does not see her efforts to fly less as an inconvenience.
“It might be an inconvenient truth, but it is quite convenient to stop flying … just do it!” she said. “However, I have to admit that there are some downsides and consequences one has to consider: lower international profile (no conferences over the pond), less involvement in conference attendance overall … and potential issues with promotion.”
However, Heinemeyer has three children and is working to be truthful with them about ACD issues and the urgency of changing their lifestyle, as well as how to do so.
“I feel that I have to live what I preach,” she said.
Kalmus thinks scientists and academics should be taking on the role of “cultural leaders.” He points out that Earth scientists, in particular, have front row seats to multiple, connected Earth system catastrophes unfolding in real time, from dying coral reefs to record-breaking wildfires — and they need to share that perspective with the public.
“We know that this isn’t the ‘new normal.’ It will get steadily worse until we stop burning fossil fuel,” he said. “Doesn’t this knowledge come with some responsibility? Studying climate change isn’t like studying astrophysics: Earth science has revealed a clear and present danger to civilization.”
The scientists behind the no-fly campaigns are not calling for individual change in a vacuum.
Kalmus feels he can’t separate being a scientist from being a concerned, responsible citizen and father. One way to communicate the urgency of the climate emergency, he says, is to live his life like it’s urgent — to model the transition away from fossil fuels.
“I don’t expect every Earth scientist to do this, but I do hope more start to see it this way, because we need all hands on deck,” he said, going on to add that he hopes that as a community, Earth scientists and climate researchers will embrace the seriousness of what their science is telling them. “A good place to start would be to find ways to systematically reduce our flying, like more teleconferencing, more local conferences. Doing this can only enhance our credibility.”
Küffer echoes the belief that “walking the talk” should be part of how credibility is evaluated among scientists and academics.
“As environmental scientists we can’t call upon the world to stop all CO2 emissions within the coming few decades while we ourselves don’t change our habits,” he said. “Maintaining credibility of scientific facts, academia and experts has become a key challenge of the sciences in our time.”
Reflecting on the kind of science that is needed today, Küffer added, “Flying even affects how we do science.”
Heinemeyer wants her colleagues to know that it is indeed possible to fly less, or even to cease flying altogether. Her hope is that her efforts will inspire people. She says she wants to “create a feel for ‘it does matter what I do,’ because simply put, it does — but only if enough of us do it!”
Too often, Heinemeyer said, people in her research area and institute work on the issue but then ignore the fact that they themselves can also be part of the solution. Many of them refuse to change their own emissions practices.
“Justifying flying by doing good is no good per se, mostly just a simple excuse for not trying alternatives,” she said. “Certainly flying less, if not stop flying, should be part of any research project.”
The scientists behind the no-fly campaigns are not calling for individual change in a vacuum. Kalmus, for example, also points to many ways we can all push for large-scale change, such as voting out those who attack science, and advocating sensible policies such as an annually increasing carbon fee and dividend. However, he also thinks a key tool in the individual toolbox is conspicuous non-consumption: cultural shift through individual change.
“This isn’t a hopeless situation,” he said. “Yes, climate change is here, and it’s a shame we didn’t start dealing with it 10 years ago. I’m not optimistic that we’ll keep global mean surface warming below 2 degrees Celsius. But 3 degrees of warming will be much worse than 2 degrees. And 4 degrees of warming will be much, much worse.”
There are worst-case warming projections that exceed even 4 degrees Celsius, and there are many factors that will continue to drive warming under the current global economic system. However, Kalmus and his colleagues are working to bring their lives in line with Mahatma Ghandi’s code of “being the change” they hope to see in the world. It is a heartfelt and dignified stance in a time of environmental uncertainty, violence and strife.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Exposing the Big Game 
