The centerpiece of their argument is housing, especially housing in California, which has received a lot of attention recently. There is supposedly a big housing shortage, and we can’t build our way out of the shortage because of excessive laws and regulations, especially environmental laws like CEQA in California.

CEQA is the California Environmental Quality Act, enacted in 1970. It, like many similar laws around the world, requires the government agency that will build or approve the project to prepare an environmental impact report if the project might have a significant impact on the environment. The EIR informs the public and the decision-makers about the project’s expected environmental impacts. Before CEQA, the agency approving a project had no information about how the project would affect the environment.

Anti-CEQA forces like the YIMBYs claim that CEQA is a massive drag on housing production because CEQA litigation can cause multi-year delays. But studies show that less than one percent of projects requiring environmental documentation under CEQA are litigated.There are four levels of process for projects under CEQA:

• Exempt projects - around 52% - projects that need do no CEQA review

• Negative declarations - around 42% - projects that need a relatively short statement of why their impacts are not significant

• Environmental impact reports (EIRs) - 6% or less - projects requiring a full evaluation because their environmental impacts are significant

• Projects that are litigated after approval - less than 1%

A certain amount of work and expense is required to prepare a negative declaration or an EIR, but it’s important for the agency approving the project to understand the project’s environmental impacts. Litigation is necessary to ensure that EIRs and negative declarations are properly prepared and conform to CEQA. Some changes to CEQA would benefit everyone, but a significant reform of CEQA is not going to get more houses and other projects built in California.

There are three tiers in the housing market: homeless housing, affordable housing, and market-rate housing. Abundance uses Los Angeles’ high rate of homelessness as evidence of a housing shortage here, but this argument ignores the many other causes of homelessness, such as mental illness, weakened social and familial networks, substance abuse, inadequate support after release from prisons and hospitals, and racism. Many homeless people cannot afford affordable housing and must live in shelters, permanent supportive housing, or transitional housing.

Affordable housing generally requires government subsidies and exemptions; otherwise developers can’t recover the costs of construction by renting the units out at below-market rates. Getting these subsidies and complying with the affordable-housing rules adds delay and expense to the process. I would support removing as many barriers and complications as possible from this process. Some of the barriers have already been removed by state legislation over the last few years.

Developers mostly build market-rate housing because it doesn’t come with the restrictions and red tape associated with building affordable units. It is also more profitable, and their businesses are set up to make a profit. Increasing supply generally lowers prices, but the lowered prices for market-rate units don’t usually “trickle down” through the market to significantly reduce prices of affordable units. Increasing the housing supply has the side-effect of inducing demand for market-rate housing by attracting more people to move to California. The hope, when widening a freeway, is that it will relieve congestion, but afterwards, congestion often comes back because drivers who were taking other routes switch to the freeway to avoid congestion. This is induced demand. Building more market-rate housing will work the same way: it will lower housing costs for a bit but then more people will move to California, attracted by the lower housing costs, and those costs will go back up.

California’s population would grow more, as Abundance points out, if housing costs were reduced in the big cities everyone wants to move to: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. Slowing the construction of new housing in those cities has the advantage (for me, anyway) of helping to keep the population from growing, but it also causes hardship for existing residents who are spending too high a proportion of their income on housing, who are overcrowded, or who endure long commutes to and from cheaper housing.

Nonetheless, I support low growth in general. Many developed countries are experiencing low growth or gradual population decline. Projections from California’s Department of Financeestimate 2025 California population at 39.5 million and project the state’s 2060 population at 41.7 million. This 5% projected growth over the next 35 years means the growth rates is expected to be about one tenth of one percent per year. I discuss California population in more depth on another post on this substack, but I’m glad to see that California’s population probably won’t grow much in the next few decades. Stabilizing our population is an important goal, and keeping housing prices a bit high helps with this.

Our failure to build housing is much less of a problem than our failure to build infrastructure that’s needed to help deal with climate change. Abundance mentions as examples both California high-speed rail, and the nation’s need to build out its power grid. Regulation significantly retards both of these efforts. I would support some exemptions from regulations, including environmental regulations, for projects that are important for the environment. When I was a member of the Sierra Club Board of Directors, we put in place a policy that local chapters, before bringing environmental litigation to stop solar-energy projects, must consult with the national environmental law program to balance the environmental pros and cons. Building out solar usually outbalanced the damages to local land and biota.

Abundance uses China as a foil; China can get things done because the all-powerful central government can cut through red tape. China is building six times as much wind and solar generation capacity per year as the US. And China is building around 1,500 miles of high-speed rail per year while California’s high-speed rail connection between San Francisco and Los Angeles pokes along for decades, stymied by finance, law, and regulation. But China’s ability to do this is like Hitler’s famed ability to get the trains running on time. China can build more rapidly than the US partly because it is a totalitarian society. I wouldn’t be willing to give up my civil liberties or my (minuscule) say in how the country is run in order to streamline infrastructure approvals.

Abundance is a nod in the direction of President Clinton’s “it’s the economy, stupid.” It’s always the economy. The book’s prescription for the Democratic Party is to embrace the politics of abundance instead of the politics of scarcity. I’m not a capable enough pundit to opine on whether this would succeed in attracting voters. But, from an ethical point of view, it seems like a cop-out. People shouldn’t always just put their economic interests first.

It’s ironic that MAGA harkens back to a day when America was supposedly great, presumably during the 1950s when the country was more white and Christian and there were many more manufacturing jobs for men. We were much poorer then: per-capita GDP (income) in 1951 was 26% of what it is now, adjusted for inflation. Both sides of this fact are worth looking at. Things are much better now economically for Americans than they were 75 years ago, the time the MAGA movement claims were “great.” And US people weren’t less happy back then even though their standard of living was much lower than it is now. Happiness isn’t just about money.

I’d like to see the Democrats embrace values other than money, and policies that benefit the whole economic and cultural gamut, such as inclusion, decent wages and economic security for all, universal health insurance, less economic inequality, and environmental and climate security. These issues differentiate progressives from the current administration, which sees everything as transactional economics; the MAGA leaders acknowledge issues other than money, but don’t really care about them, and assume that nobody else really does either, that everybody is just using those issues to score political points with the voters.

What we had back in 1951, and are missing now, is a sense of dynamism, growth and progress. The US became an adult country in World War II, where we showed the world and ourselves what we could accomplish if we set our priorities right. In the 75 years since then the US has passed through maturity into early old age. We’re no longer a “can do” country. We no longer have the vitality of a young country. This lack of vitality, rather than too much regulation, is the main reason why we can’t get things done and built the way we used to. The world has seen the rise and fall of many empires and countries in the last two thousand years and the US is not exceptional enough to avoid the same fate.

China is rising as the US declines. By some measures (purchasing power parity) it has surpassed the US as the world’s largest economy. It has the young, “can-do” dynamism we lack. That, along with the centrally managed economy, are the main reasons why China can get so much more done and built than we can.

Europe is in the opposite position. Many European countries had colonies and empires, and several countries were major world powers. Europe was militarily and economically dominant before the two world wars. Since then they’ve taken an approach which is the opposite of the abundance agenda—they put other values ahead of economics. They sacrifice personal income for a better life-work balance. They are heavily regulated, but can still build things. They’ve been building 360 miles of high-speed rail per year, and the European Commission adopted a plan in 2025 to build out a continent-wide high-speed rail system by 2040. They’re also ahead of the US in deploying renewable electricity generation.

We in the US should follow Europe’s example and take a balanced approach. We should streamline regulation for important infrastructure projects like high-speed rail and the electric grid, but we also need to protect the environment.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his almost two-hundred-year old book, Democracy in America, stated “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men...” He also presciently feared the rise of an “industrial aristocracy” in the US. Paul Krugman, in his substack posts, confirms that the US economy is doing pretty well, but many Americans, according to polls, think it’s doing badly. They tend to say things are OK for them, but not for most others. As Krugman frequently points out, we can’t change this by telling them things are really fine, even though they don’t seem fine. That’s not good politics.

We would all be better off if voters would focus less on the economy and more on other issues and values. The things in the US that most need improvement are not economic; they’re things that concern fairness for our residents, things like political and income equality, the ability to speak one’s mind, abortion rights, gun control, racism, and civil rights, the traditional litany of the left. This is probably not a good formula for winning elections, but Democrats should not give up on these important values.

Abundance is a dangerous meme, because it implies that we can increase the standard of living for everyone by relaxing regulation, especially environmental regulation. If we make a few tweaks we’ll have shared prosperity. The meme is dangerous because it is a concession on one of the pillars of the MAGA faith: abolish regulation because it hinders the rich from making money. How much of the supposed benefits will go to the non-wealthy? In this age of extreme economic inequality, most of the benefits would go to the rich.

Progressives are scrambling to come up with a vision to counter the MAGA vision that won the last election. But abundance is not the right vision for us.

The Trump Administration is Trashing Our Environmental Laws

April 22, 2026 will be the 57th time Earth Day is celebrated. The first time was in 1970, the year the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created. Richard Nixon was President. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) had been enacted the year before, requiring environmental review of major federal projects. Environmentalism was on a roll, and the next few years under Republican Presidents would see the passage of our most important environmental laws:

• Clean Air Act in 1970

• Clean Water Act in 1972

• Endangered Species Act in 1973

• Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974

• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976

• Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976

The Trump Administration wants to “make us great again” by taking us back to the days before these protections became law. Environmentalists are now fighting a rear-guard action to preserve our legacy in the US.

The US was the world leader in fighting pollution in the 1970s. NEPA was the first law in the world requiring environmental review before projects could be approved. The idea is simple and obvious. Prior to NEPA, government agencies would approve projects without knowing their environmental impacts. NEPA requires an environmental impact statement or, in some cases, a shorter version called an Environmental Analysis for federal projects that might have significant environmental impacts, so that the agency deciding whether to approve a project will know in advance its environmental consequences. Most states have enacted their own “baby NEPAs,” which apply to projects approved by state and local agencies. California’s Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, is California’s baby NEPA.

The Trump Administration has considerably weakened NEPA. By executive order, the President ordered the Council on Environmental Quality to rescind its regulations, which had served as binding standards for NEPA compliance since 1978. Last summer, many of the major permitting agencies across the executive branch updated their NEPA procedures to simplify the process, lessening public participation and eliminating requirements to address climate change and environmental justice. The Forest Service was directed to rely heavily on categorical exclusions, which bypass environmental review for projects like timber sales.

The Clean Water Act has been watered down as well. The Trump Administration has proposed new regulations reducing the scope of the “waters of the United States” that are protected under the act. It has also adopted rules limiting states’ abilities to block or condition federally permitted projects, has reduced the number of projects requiring CWA dredge-and-fill permits, and has rescinded prior limits on PFAS compounds in drinking water.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is under attack. The Secretary of Defense recently convened the Endangered Species Committee, which exempted oil and gas industry activities in Gulf of Mexico from the ESA, purportedly for national security reasons. This purpose of this committee is to consider whether a proposed federal action is of such great importance that it should go forward, even if it risks the extinction of a threatened or endangered species. Rice’s whales, among other species, are at risk in this case; only 51 of them remain, their ranks having been decimated by the 210 million gallons of oil that leaked from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The administration decided it was more important to facilitate oil and gas production than to preserve the whales.

In addition, the Trump Administration is using the regulatory process to narrow the scope of the ESA. It has redefined “harm” under the act to include only direct injury or killing, excluding habitat destruction. It has weakened protections for threatened species, which formerly were automatically protected like endangered species. It has tightened restrictions on listing species and made it easier to delist them, and has injected economic considerations into listing decisions for the first time. It has narrowed how “critical habitat” is defined, elevated economic and development concerns in habitat decisions and expanded agency discretion to exclude areas from protection. It has cut funding and staffing for ESA implementation and enforcement.

The Clean Air Act is also under attack. I’ll discuss the repeal of the Endangerment Finding below when I get to climate. But there are several other ways the administration has curtailed government regulation of air pollution. It offered exemptions by email. Businesses emailed the agency with a justification, such as national security or lack of available technology, and the President granted exemptions willy-nilly. 68 coal-fired power plants were exempted from mercury and arsenic pollution limits across 23 states, and more than 50 chemical facilities were allowed to turn off pollution controls or dodge recently strengthened emissions limits. The administration is also rolling back regulation of power plants, vehicles, soot, mercury, and coal-ash pollution.

Many of these regulatory changes are being challenged in court. During Trump’s first term, such changes were made using abbreviated or improper processes, which didn’t stand up in court. This administration is smarter about the process, so it’s hard to say who will win these challenges when the courts eventually decide.

Declaring Fake Emergencies

The President has proclaimed at least nine national emergencies since 2025 under the National Emergency Act, 50 U.S.C. sections 1601-1651. Most of these are for fake emergencies contrived to give the administration additional powers under various statutes passed by Congress.

A good example is the National Energy Emergency declared in Executive Order 14156. In the order, the President decries “the high energy prices that devastate Americans, particularly those living on low- and fixed-incomes.” It also references “a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid,” which “require swift and decisive action.” This is pretty obviously a fake emergency, especially in light of the recent attacks on Iran, which have driven up energy prices in this country. The President has boasted that we don’t need oil from other countries because we have a surplus here.

But, in a case decided in 2020, Center for Biological Diversity v. Trump, 453 F.Supp.3d 11, the D.C. District Court decided that CBD’s challenge to an emergency declaration “presents a non-justiciable political question.” “There is a general rule against inquiring into the mental processes of administrative decisions.”

Elections are supposed to check the President’s power and prevent his abuse of that power. It would have been inconceivable to the framers of the US Constitution that the nation would elect a madman like Trump to be President, when all he cares about is lining his own pockets and those of his billionaire supporters, and retaliating against every slight and insult he has suffered so far in his long life. I’m afraid we’re going to have to live with him being US President for almost three more years. Congress needs to start resisting.

Climate

The current administration’s depredations are most harmful in the climate area. Dismissing climate change as a “hoax,” the administration has been very hostile to efforts to fight it. They paid the French oil giant TotalEnergies a billion dollars to abandon its plans to build wind farms off the East Coast and to invest, instead, in oil and gas projects in the US.

In February the EPA issued a final rule rescinding the greenhouse-gas endangerment finding, which provided the legal basis for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. This has allowed major federal policy changes, such as eliminating federal greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles, and removing or reducing rules on power-plant emissions.

As I discuss at some length in my book, Earthling, the most important thing we need to do to stop increasing climate impacts is to stop burning fossil fuels. This administration has gone all out in the opposite direction, promoting fossil-fuel burning. “Drill, baby, drill” and “Burn, baby, burn.” Fracking has transformed the US from a net importer to the world’s largest oil and gas exporter. The President has been pushing deals requiring our trading partners to buy more fossil fuels from the US. The big oil companies are making record profits.

They know this can’t go on forever. Like so much else in MAGA-land, it’s a rear-guard effort to fight inevitable trends. Our country will get browner-skinned, less Christian. We will never get back the coal plants or manufacturing jobs we lost. And we will move from fossil fuels to renewables, because it’s cheaper. But the big oil companies want to go on making big profits for as long as they can. They’ve donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump and the Republicans in the 2024 election cycle, and they’ve gotten it back many times over in increased profits since then, due largely to the administration’s oil-friendly policies.

We need just the opposite: a strong federal climate bill that establishes a path to greatly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, to reach net zero GHG emissions by 2050. There has never been a political constituency for this. Neither the Obama nor the Biden administrations delivered such a bill; they made incremental steps to preserve the climate, such as the Clean Power Rule and the Economic Recovery Act, but fell far short of what’s required.

Time is of the essence for climate change. Temperatures keep rising as we keep pumping more CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. The CO2 will stay there for thousands of years. We are quickly transforming the world into a place that is less suitable for human life, and future generations will have to live on the new Earth. The way to stop making things worse is to stop burning fossil fuels.

The President pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord on his first day in office in 2025. And he started the process of withdrawing from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) early this year. This latter action is arguably illegal; the President does not have authority to withdraw from a treaty that has been ratified by the Senate without approval by the Senate. But it appears that his decision is not reviewable by the courts.

The rest of the world will continue to work on climate. China, the world’s largest GHG emitter, has become world leader in manufacturing solar panels, and is on its way to dominance in the electric-vehicle market. The EU’s per-capita GHG emissions are about 40% of ours and they’re working to reduce them further. As with so much else, the US has lost its leadership.

Overall, a Sad Earth Day

So this is a pretty sad Earth Day for those of us in the US who care about the environment now and for generations to come. But there are still things we can do to fight for the environment.

States Can Still Enact Strong Environmental Laws

Environmentalists in California have mixed feelings. On one hand, our state is officially opposed to many of the federal government’s environmental rollbacks. We have the strongest state environmental laws in the nation, which provide something of a bulwark against the administration’s attacks. But the legislature’s attention seems to be focused on affordability and abundance. The environment is not among the top five public issues in most opinion polls. The focus is on much shorter-term issues: the wars, consumer prices, the state of our democracy, immigration, and healthcare.

The legislature could help California fight for the environment if it would strengthen our environmental laws. It has lately been watering down the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to reduce regulation of construction projects, and should stop doing this. We currently have a good balance between environmental protections and our ability to build things.

The legislature could also help by adding a new human right to the Bill of Rights in the California Constitution, a right to a clean and healthy environment. Please support this effort by signing up for our mailing list on the issue at https://enviroright.org and by attending our Earth Day webinar on the subject. Register for the Webinar here. I hope to see you there!

The USA has changed a lot in the last 237 years. Many of our modern problems couldn’t have been anticipated during the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia in 1787. Ours is also a very succinct constitution, with many sub-issues left to interpretation by the US Supreme Court. Some of those interpretations are not in line with the desires of the majority of Americans.

Maybe a constitution cannot last 237 years. Maybe it’s time for us to rethink and redraft the US Constitution. Since the French revolution, which started around 1789, France has had 14 constitutions, the latest adopted in 1958.

I’d advocate for some key changes, most of them supported by a public-opinion majority in the US:

• Right to abortion;

• Overturning Citizens United case, which holds that the spending of money is a type of free speech protected by the First Amendment;

• Deletion of the Second Amendment, so that Congress and the states can freely legislate firearms restrictions;

• Elimination of the electoral college - election of US President by popular vote;

• Further limitations on the power of the Presidency;

• Cure for undemocratic nature of Senate, where states with small populations have as much power as those with large populations; and

• Right to a clean and healthy environment.

Conservatives have their own list, which includes:

• Balanced budget for federal government;

• Term limits for Congress and other federal officials;

• Prohibition of adding more justices to the US Supreme Court;

• Further restricting Congress’ enumerated powers so that it no longer has authority over civil rights;

• Congressional supermajority required to raise taxes;

• Restrictions on federal ownership of public lands.

When looking at the two lists, there don’t seem to be many opportunities for logrolling, where each side gives up something that matters less to them in exchange for something that matters more. In most cases, the changes that each side wants will be opposed vehemently by the other side.

How did we get into this pickle?

The Mormons and many US evangelicals believe the US Constitution was divinely inspired. This suggests that it shouldn’t be changed: would we amend the Ten Commandments or the New Testament to help them keep up with the times? Such superstitions shouldn’t affect our national policies.

There’s no question the US Constitution is a fine piece of work. It was hammered out over the course five months in the summer of 1787 by 55 delegates from 12 of the 13 states in existence at the time. (Rhode Island did not send delegates.) The states had many competing interests, yet they managed to cooperate and compromise enough to reach an agreement. It’s hard to imagine this happening at a constitutional convention we might hold today.

The delegates to the constitutional convention deliberately made the Constitution difficult to amend, and probably didn’t realize the consequences at the time.

How could we amend the Constitution?

According to Jill Lepore’s excellent article on constitutional amendment and originalism in The Atlantic, the US Constitution has been formally amended 27 times since 1787, even though 12,000 amendments have been formally introduced on the floor of Congress.

Article V of the Constitution sets forth the ways in which it can be amended:

• By a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, with the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures;

• By a Constitutional Convention, called by Congress upon the application of two-thirds of state legislatures.

In either case, the amendments must be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures.

It seems unlikely, in the current political climate, that substantial amendments to the US Constitution will be agreed upon by two-thirds of the Representatives and Senators in Congress.

A constitutional convention would be very risky for both sides. Article V contains no rules or limitations for the convention. Would each state get a fixed number of votes (as in the Senate), or would each state’s number of votes be based on the state’s population, as in the House Of Representatives?

Could the scope of amendments adopted in such a convention be limited somehow? The text of Article V provides no support for such limitations, but a petition proposed by the conservatives, and already ratified by 18 states, purports to restrict the convention to “proposing amendments that will impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress.” If Congress were to call the convention, would such a limitation by Congress be upheld by the Supreme Court? I think it would depend on the political climate at the time.

How do we adapt the Constitution if we can’t amend it?

Since the Constitution can’t be amended, at least for now, we rely on judicial interpretation, mostly from the US Supreme Court, to adapt it to current conditions. The Constitution’s text is quite telegraphic, so the Court has a lot of room for interpretation. For example, the Court has added rights that are not called out in the text of the Constitution, such as the right to privacy, and the right to abortion. These rights were added by the Warren and Burger courts: privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, and abortion by Roe v. Wade in 1973. Those who opposed those rights considered these decisions to be judicial activism, legislation from the bench, and beyond the scope of what the courts should do.

In 1971, Yale law professor Robert Bork advanced a new theory of constitutional interpretation that came to be called “originalism.” His nomination to the US Supreme Court failed, but his idea was taken up with a vengeance by Antonin Scalia, who came onto the court in 1986.

When interpreting statutes, the touchstone is, at least theoretically, the intent of the legislators at the time the statute was adopted. In practice, inquiries into the meaning of statutes rarely consider what the legislators were subjectively thinking when they adopted the statute because the statute’s plain meaning, if it’s not ambiguous, determines the interpretation. Even if the statute is ambiguous, there are many interpretative tools that can be used before trying to intuit what was in the mind of the legislators adopting the statute.

Originalism applies this method to the Constitution: it means what the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention meant it to mean at the time they signed the Constitution. There are a number of problems with applying this practice to the Constitution:

• The world has changed a lot since 1787. The founders would have been horrified at the idea of legalized abortion, for example, but a majority of the US supports it now. The US was primarily an agrarian economy in 1787, but we have moved forward. For a while we were primarily a manufacturing economy, but no longer; we’re primarily a service economy now. Slavery is gone. We mostly live in cities, while most people in the US in 1787 did not. Many modern problems were not present in 1787.

• The intent of the framers can be hard to determine, and different framers may have had conflicting intentions. The historical record can be skimpy, contradictory, or non-existent on some issues.

• If a court mis-interprets a statute in a way that offends the legislature that adopted it, the legislature can amend the statute. This happens fairly frequent in the statutory realm, but, as discussed above, is impractical for the US Constitution.

We need an amendment to the Constitution specifying how the Constitution is to be interpreted. I would propose that it require courts to follow the spirit of the Constitution while taking into account current conditions that may have changed since the text was adopted. This is the type of interpretation used by the Warren and Burger courts before originalism appeared on the scene. Supporters of originalism argue that such standards turn constitutional interpretation into legislation from the bench. But the alternative is to tether our interpretations of this country’s most important legal document to questionable interpretations of 18th-century history.

The current Supreme Court is very accommodating to the Trump administration, having granted many more emergency requests than past courts would have. Originalism gives the Court an additional set of interpretive tools it can use to come to the result it wants to. Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Barrett are avowed originalists, and justices Alito and Kavanaugh sometimes use originalist arguments. They employ originalism mostly to achieve outcomes favorable to Republican and conservative causes.

Republicans are trying to hold the line on social changes to the US. They want to revert to an imagined happy time when the dominant class was straight Christian white males. This will be a losing fight in the long term as demographic and social trends are against them. But they won’t go down quietly. The Trump administration doesn’t mind eroding political norms that have served us well for decades, taking actions that are clearly illegal, using the power of the federal government to pursue Trump’s political and business enemies, imposing what amounts to martial law to quell freedom of expression, changing voting rules to exclude those who might vote against them, and so on. These are stopgap measures, that won’t hold back the tide forever, but they are damaging the legal, political, and moral fabric of this country, contributing to its decline.

The situation is similar to climate change. We can hold back on taking action to mitigate it, but, as long as we keep emitting greenhouse gases, climate impacts, in the form of increased heat waves, rainstorms, hurricanes, drought, sea-level rise, and species loss, will keep increasing every year. The economic costs are already huge, as are the impacts to people’s lives. It will gradually get much worse, and when the impacts get bad enough we’ll take strong action. When we do, it will cost us a few percent of our GDP, but the US, and the larger world, are currently prioritizing short-term economics over long-term damages. A recent New Yorker cartoon summed up the situation pretty well. Cavemen sitting around a fire said “we destroyed the world, but, for a time, we provided significant value for our shareholders.”

The US is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China. Our per-capita emissions are much higher than China’s. China is taking the leadership on climate through its electrification campaigns. A strong majority of Americans think we should be doing more to fight climate change. If the US had the constitution that it deserves, a constitution that accords better with modern times and the needs and wants of our citizens and other residents, we could be responding more effectively to the most important problem of our time.

• In Greenpeace v. Mexico, the Mexican Supreme Court held that the legislature’s elimination of a Climate Change Fund violated the constitutional right to a healthy environment and ordered the fund to be restored.

• In Rede Sustentabilidade vs. National Environment Council, the Brazil Federal Supreme Court held that regulations revoking various environmental restrictions violated the plaintiffs’ fundamental right to an ecologically balanced environment.

• In Herrera Carrion et al. v. Ministry of the Environment et al., an appeals court in Ecuador held that the government’s authorization of gas flaring violated the plaintiffs’ right to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment.

The EU’s relatively advanced system of human-rights law does not include an enforceable right to a clean and healthy environment, though the Council of Europe is working to enact one. Wins in several marquee European climate cases have been based on the fundamental right to life provided by the European Convention on Human Rights.

The United States should amend its constitution to add an environmental right, though such an amendment would be hard to enact in the current political climate. But when we can’t get things done at the federal level, we can sometimes get them done by states.

Several states, including Montana, New York, Hawaii, and Pennsylvania, have amended their state constitutions to establish constitutional rights to a healthy environment. The provisions vary. Some are bare-bones, such as New York’s, which reads, simply “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and healthful environment.” It’s time that California add such a right to its constitution, but we can do better than this.

A constitutional environmental right should be self-executing, meaning that the right may be invoked in legal proceedings as soon as it is added to the constitution, and it doesn’t require the legislature to enact enabling statutes. This is the case with the Bill of Rights in the first 10 Amendments to the US Constitution; they may be invoked directly as legal authority and require no enabling legislation from Congress. Hawaii’s environmental amendment, by contrast, states: “Each person has the right to a clean and healthful environment, as defined by laws relating to environmental quality, including control of pollution and conservation, protection and enhancement of natural resources. Any person may enforce this right against any party, public or private, through appropriate legal proceedings subject to reasonable limitations and regulation as provided by law.” The references to “as defined by laws” and “as provided by law” make this constitutional provision non-self-executing and defers the decision on the dimensions of the right to the legislature. What’s the point of an environmental constitutional amendment if it is not self-executing? The legislature already has the power to enact environmental laws, and the amendment wouldn’t change the scope of that legislative power.

An important aspect of constitutional environmental rights is whether they can be invoked against private parties or just against the government. The rights in the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution apply only to the government. The First Amendment reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...” This is interpreted more broadly than the text would suggest; it restricts not just laws that Congress may pass, but also other actions the government might take. It applied originally just to the federal government; it now applies to state and local governments as well, thanks to the 14th Amendment. But it doesn’t apply to private parties; it doesn’t prevent an employer, for example, from restricting what an employee can say in public.

The Montana Environmental Right Amendment, in Article II, Section 3 of the Montana Constitution, applies to private parties because of additional language in Article IV, Section 1, which reads “the State and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” The Montana Supreme Court held, in Cape-France Enterprises v. Peed, that this provision resulted in a prohibition of a private party drilling a well on its property, when the drilling might contaminate aquifers.

The biggest difficulty with an environmental right that can be enforced against private parties, in my opinion, is that it is difficult to appropriately restrict the environmental harms to which it applies. For example, I harm the environment when I drive my gas-powered car down the street. It emits greenhouse gases, harming the climate, and also emits various other air pollutants like NOx and particulates. If the environmental right amendment was enforceable against private parties like me, my neighbor could, at least arguably, sue me for violating her environmental right. It’s difficult to draft language in the amendment that would restrict the amendment to appropriate cases. If this task is left to the legislature, then the amendment becomes non-self-executing. The task could be left to the courts, which are required to decide cases even when the legal authorities are unclear. But that would be irresponsible and unfair to the courts. It’s better if the environmental right is enforceable only against governmental entities.

The California amendment should support environmental rights by confirming and expanding the public-trust doctrine. Under this doctrine, established nationwide, but mostly a matter of state law, the state holds certain public resources in trust for current and future generations and must not take actions that harm the trust. In an 1892 case, Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, the US Supreme Court held that the doctrine applied to submerged lands in Lake Michigan, and that it prohibited the Illinois Legislature from selling those lands to a railroad. In California, the public-trust doctrine was expanded by the judiciary to include wildlife and some surface water in the trust. There is no principled reason why the doctrine should not apply to the atmosphere and climate. The environmental right amendment provides an opportunity to expand the public-trust doctrine to apply to the air in the state, so that it would require the state to safeguard the atmosphere and the climate.

Early in 2024, an environmental right amendment, ACA-16, was introduced in the California Legislature. It was not clearly self-executing and required that it not be enforced “in a manner inconsistent with duly enacted laws of the state,” which effectively allowed the legislature to overrule it. We can do better. My non-profit, Advocates for the Environment, has developed proposed language for the California Environmental Right and is building a coalition to support adding this language to the Bill of Rights in Article I of the California Constitution. If you’re interested in supporting or following this effort, please sign up for the mailing list at EnviroRight.org.

One of the main effects of a constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment would be that it would fill in the gaps between existing environmental statutes. California has a slew of environmental statutes that parallel federal environmental laws like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Protection Act, CERCLA, and RCRA. These siloed laws each focus on a different aspect of the environment, but there are lots of gaps between them, so the environment as a whole is not well protected.

The amendment would not create a sea change in California’s environmental law. It would not mean that protection of the environment takes precedence over everything else. It would instead function as a much-needed thumb on the scale when courts are assessing the proper balance between environmental and other policy concerns. We can get an idea of how the amendment would affect California environmental law by looking at how similar amendments in other states have affected the law in those states.

• In Robinson Township, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Environmental Rights Amendment required the state to balance environmental interests with other interests, and to act affirmatively to protect public-trust resources. The court held that provisions of the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Act requiring cities and counties to allow oil and gas production in all zones and to refrain from regulating it, were incompatible with the Amendment, and therefore unconstitutional.

• In Hawaii, youth plaintiffs sued the state, alleging that Hawaii’s transportation system violates the public-trust doctrine and infringes on the state constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. The state settled the case, agreeing that the Hawaii Department of Transportation would take specific steps to reach zero GHG emissions by 2045.

• In Held v. State, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that Montana’s State Energy Policy Act’s prohibition of the consideration greenhouse-gas emissions in environmental reviews violated the Montana Constitution’s right to a clean and healthy environment, which includes the right to a stable climate.

These are the sorts of legal benefits we could expect from California’s Environmental Right Amendment. In addition to its bolstering of environmental rights in litigation, adding the amendment to the State Constitution would send a strong policy message that the State demands protection of the environment. It could also be California’s way of standing up and protesting the recent evisceration of the federal government’s environmental protections.

Such a move would be very disruptive to our lives. Benita is a modern-dance choreographer and needs her company of five dancers to do her work. Moving to a new city would effectively end her career, since she wouldn’t have the resources to start a new dance company. I’m a lawyer, licensed to practice law only in California, and would have to give up this profession if I moved abroad. I’m too old to get re-licensed in France, or even in Vermont.

What does the election tell us about the USA?

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, for the second time, shocks me. After seeing what he tried to do in his previous presidency, and after his convictions for sexual assault and business fraud, how could anyone think this man is fit to be President? And yet he won the election. What does this say about my fellow Americans?

For me, Trump voters are like cosmological dark matter. I can tell they’re there by the effects they have on the universe around them, but I never see them. None of the folks I deal with daily voted for Trump, as far as I know, though I have a few acquaintances who did.

Oligarchs like Elon Musk are taking prominent roles in politics. This brings us closer to Russia’s political system, as does the Republican attempt to block opposition votes with gerrymandering, ID requirements, restrictions on mail-in ballots, and other maneuvers. They’re working towards a system where their party is permanently in charge, as in Russia and China. The mini-riot in the Capital on January 6, 2021, violently protesting Trump’s election loss, is another indicator of this intention, like Trump’s own hints that he may not leave the Presidency at the end of his second term. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision incorporated into constitutional law the right of corporations to spend money supporting candidates; most of this corporate money goes to Republicans. If they can change the system enough, voting will have a pre-determined outcome and won’t matter much, as in China and Russia.

The Republican Party has always been the party of the rich, who want low taxes and minimal regulation of their businesses. I was surprised in this election by the support the Republicans received from the other end of the economic spectrum, especially from young men without a college degree. Those voters apparently feel disgruntled, disaffected, and ignored; they want to shake things up and stick it to the system. I think they’re voting against their own economic interests, because the Republicans will increase economic inequality by cutting taxes on the rich and making the rest of us to pick up the slack.

Another Republican constituency is the Christian right, who openly advocate making the US a Christian country. They want to ban abortion and facilitate the teaching of Christian doctrines in public schools. According to a recent CNN article, “the idea is widespread that Trump’s victory demonstrates a divine mandate that resonates with the framework that they have been using to explain and promote Trump dating back to 2016. He is somehow God’s anointed one. He is God’s chosen leader for this particularly fraught, historical political moment.”

Religion should not play such a prominent role in public affairs. The French political concept of laïcité, enshrined at the beginning of the French Constitution, operates as a much stronger wall between church and state than the weak provisions of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The French have a strong cultural norm of keeping religion out of the public sphere, something we should adopt in this country.

The main reason Benita wants to leave the US is that she doesn’t want to live in a country where the majority of the people support Donald Trump and his values. I would be more comfortable living among Europeans than Americans. I especially dislike the large role that Christianity plays in this country.

Should you vote for your own self-interest or the good of the country?

My personal (non-Christian) ethics tells me that I should choose political leaders who will benefit this country and the world at large instead of leaders who will benefit me personally. The notion of sacrifice for the common good seems to have diminished quite a bit in the last eighty years. During World War II, meat, gasoline, butter, and sugar were rationed for the war effort. Young men were drafted into the army. The government forced industries to switch to producing goods needed for the war. The war was important enough that everyone was expected to pitch in and sacrifice.

My sense is that self-sacrifice for the common good has all but disappeared in the US. Economic issues were important in the election, and the vast majority of Trump voters--at both ends of the economic spectrum--seem to have voted for their own interests, or at least what they thought were their interests.

Those who purport to vote in the interest of the public at large have a duty to be sufficiently well informed, but I fear that much of the electorate doesn’t take this duty seriously.

Climate Change

Climate change was not an important issue in the election, which astounds me. We should be making the same sorts of sacrifices now to deal with climate change that we made for World War II. The climate crisis is much more important than the geopolitical issues in that war. Global warming is an economic issue, one of the most important, but it doesn’t manifest that way. As I write this, Los Angeles is experiencing the worst Santa Ana winds of the last thirty years, resulting in wildfires throughout the region. The intensity of those winds was boosted by the extra energy global warming has put into Earth’s climate system. The winds themselves will do a lot of damage, as will the wildfires caused or increased by those winds. The cost of climate change is mostly the extra damage caused by storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, and heat waves. Economic analyses show that the cost of converting our energy systems to use renewable energy instead of fossil fuels will be less than the climate damages that such a conversion will abate. But we’d have to spend now to avoid damages over a long period in the future. Polls show that most voters are not willing to take the economic hit, even though it’s in their long-term economic self-interest. So we kick the can down the road. Because of our evolutionary background, humans tend to be focused on the short term.

Global warming is also an ethical problem where the interests of others—specifically future generations—are at stake. By failing to take meaningful action we are condemning future generations to live in a physical world that will be less suitable for human life than the world we’re used to. In a thousand years, Earthlings will point to this time as the turning point that ushered in a big change for the worse in Earth’s climate.

Can I leave the human race?

Consider what the Holocaust tells us about German people. There have been many occasions in history, mostly in war, when one country has killed more people than the number that died in the Holocaust. But the Holocaust revealed new depths of human evil that hadn’t been seen before, a deliberate targeting for destruction of an ethnic group, aided by technology and great organizational skill. The matter-of-factness of such a large program with such an evil intent, carried out by a country with humane values and a high level of education and civilization, was new and shocking.

The Holocaust revealed aspects of human nature that are not specific to Germany. Conditions might have been ripe there to bring out these evils, but the potential is lurking in all of us. The same is true of Trump’s election. The short-term thinking, selfishness, contempt for government, and superstitious (religious) thinking of my fellow Americans appall me. But those characteristics are enabled by the nature of humanity, and are not specific to the US. My book, Earthling, analyzes the ways in which humans’ evolutionary psychology is not suitable for our modern age. We can’t get away from these characteristics by leaving the country because they are universal, always present, and brought to the surface by certain types of events.

There’s no viable solution this psychological problem, except to try, in one’s own life, to adopt a moral outlook that negates some of these inherited characteristics . We can be less selfish, more open to considering the needs of people who are different from us. We can think longer-term.

Leaving the country as a dramatic gesture might feel good. But I doubt that it would have any practical effect. People will not want to move abroad in response to Trump’s election in large enough numbers to make the news. And who’s really listening, anyway? Trump supporters—apparently the majority—will just say “good riddance.”

But I can understand moving to a cooler climate in response to global heating. Tucson, where I grew up, is unlivable now during the summer. The neighborhood in Los Angeles where I live had several months of above-100-degree temperatures last summer, enough to make me want to move further north, or closer to the ocean, to get more moderate summer temperatures.

And I live in California, which is large enough to be its own country. It would have the fifth largest economy in the world if it were a country. We have saner environmental (and other) laws than the rest of the country. But, due to our strange electoral system, my vote as a Californian in the presidential election had much less effect than my vote would have in a so-called “swing state.” We Californians will do our best to fight Trump’s excesses and wrong-headed policies.

So we’ll probably stay put. There’s a lot I can do here to fight for better political values and for the environment. Sometimes I wish I could leave the human race, but until the ETs land on the White House lawn humankind is the only game in town.

In the CEQA Net Zero program at Advocates for the Environment, my non-profit California law firm, we sue developers, mostly developers of warehouses in the “Inland Empire” east of Los Angeles, to compel them to mitigate their greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. Most of the cases settle before trial. We try to obtain a net-zero settlement. In most cases we require the developer to purchase offsets. In this article, I’ll use the terms “carbon offsets” and “carbon credits” interchangeably. Note that, in this context, “carbon” is a shorthand for types of gases that contribute to global warming via the greenhouse effect. Not all greenhouse gases (GHGs) contain carbon, and not all gases containing carbon are greenhouse gases, but referring to carbon credits or carbon sequestration is a useful shorthand.

Wikipedia defines an offset as follows: “A carbon offset is a way of compensating for the emissions of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. It is a reduction, avoidance, or removal of emissions to compensate for emissions released elsewhere. It represents an emission reduction or removal of one metric tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent.”

Mitigating a Warehouse’s GHG Emissions

The two largest sources of added emissions from a typical warehouse project are mobile sources and energy. Energy emissions are not difficult to mitigate on-site: just add enough solar panels and batteries to power the project. Mobile-source emissions result from the additional driving of cars and trucks caused by the new project. There is no practical way to directly mitigate a warehouse project’s mobile-source emissions. The energy emissions will eventually decline to zero as the share of the electricity supply produced by burning fossil fuels declines to zero over the next couple decades. And the mobile emissions will similarly decline as we switch to 100% electric vehicles, supposedly by 2045 in California. But until these things happen the project will result in the emissions of a high volume of greenhouse gases, and we want to mitigate these emissions.

The developer could, in theory, directly mitigate mobile emissions with a project that would provide rebates on the purchase of electric vehicles, for example. The emissions avoided by removing the fossil cars from the road would compensate for the extra emissions caused by additional driving induced by the project. There are two problems with this. First, warehouse developers aren’t in the business of administering such rebates. They’d need to set up special departments to publicize the program, process applications, and distribute the rebates after verifying the sale of the fossil cars. Second, it would be very expensive. If a typical warehouse’s annual mobile emissions are 8,000 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MTCO2e), and a typical passenger vehicle emits 4.6 MTCO2e/year, the project would need to remove 1,739 fossil cars to compensate. Assuming that a $1,000 rebate would be sufficient to induce the change, and the fossil cars would be scrapped, not sold, this would cost $1.739 million. The mitigation would cost $1.739 million / 8,000 MTCO2e = $217 per metric tonne. This is a relatively high cost per ton, suggesting that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Carbon Markets

Since we have a limited amount of money to spend on climate mitigation, economists suggest that we focus on the lowest cost-per-ton measures so that we can reduce emissions more. We should do all the mitigation we can at $3 per ton before moving on to measures that cost $5/ton, and so on.

Reductions are fungible. From a climate-science point of view, a metric ton of CO2 released into the atmosphere anywhere in the world, by any process, is equivalent to any other metric ton. It affects everyone in the world the same way that a different ton of released CO2 does. Similarly, the avoidance of the release of a metric ton is equivalent to the removal from the atmosphere of a metric ton. This fungibility comes from looking at the problem from a strictly climate-science perspective. There are related issues of social justice, economic distribution, local co-benefits and so on. But we should focus on fixing climate change. It is important that we do not unjustly harm anyone while doing this, but we can’t afford to try to solve all of the world’s problems on the back of climate change, especially when climate change itself is by far the most pressing of those problems.

Economists tell us that markets provide the best way to allocate scarce funds most efficiently. The simplest market-based carbon-avoidance mechanism is a carbon tax. Anyone emitting greenhouse gases would be taxed a fixed amount per ton of MTCO2e emitted. The amount of the tax should be set so that the emitter pays for the harm to the world caused by their carbon pollution. This might be around $50/ton now. The taxes would be collected centrally when possible. In other words, instead of you paying for the emissions caused by driving your fossil-fueled car, the refinery producing the gasoline would pay the tax and pass it on to you in the price of gasoline.

Markets do not currently take into account the harm done by GHG emissions. Polluters harm everyone, but currently don’t have to pay for this. Making polluters pay would change the market dynamics and incentivize emissions reductions. Driving an electric car would make economic sense for a lot more people, for example, if gasoline cost several dollars more per gallon.

A carbon tax would allow markets to allocate emission-reduction funds to the most effective uses. Should we spend our mitigation money on building solar-energy farms or on retrofitting buildings to make them more energy-efficient? With a carbon tax, market participants, acting in their own self-interest would make choices that would implement the economically optimal emissions-reduction policies.

Cap-and-trade is another market-based mechanism to make GHG polluters pay for the cost of their pollution. The California cap-and-trade program, for example, which applies only to certain sectors, has been successful in reducing emissions. To be allowed to emit a ton of GHG, an industry falling within the purview of cap-and-trade must purchase an allowance. The allowances are initially given away free of charge to covered entities, which may trade or sell them. The number of allowances is reduced each year, to force carbon emissions to decline. Allowing allowances to be traded means that they’ll tend to be used by industries where it is the most expensive to reduce emissions, so cheaper-to-mitigate emissions will be reduced first. The economic effect of cap-and-trade is very similar to that of a carbon tax.

The voluntary carbon market, which will be discussed below and is the main subject of this article, is another market-based mechanism for GHG reduction. Carbon offsets are bought and sold in this market. An offset represents a ton of CO2-equivalent emissions that is avoided or removed. Projects that mitigate GHG emissions can package their mitigations and sell them as offsets to companies that cannot inexpensively reduce their own GHG emissions. Airlines currently have no climate-friendly substitute for fossil jet fuel; cement manufacturers currently have no climate-friendly way to produce Portland cement at a reasonable price. They will have to eventually face these problems head-on, and develop zero-emissions fuel and processes, but for now it’s better if they offset their emissions rather than simply ignoring them.

Some environmentalists criticize market-based GHG reduction mechanisms. First, they claim that the market mechanisms are just “licenses to pollute.” Even if this is true, it is better for polluting industries to be forced to pay for the harm they cause. The alternative right now to polluting with a license is polluting with no license, which is what most industries are doing.

Some environmentalists would rather have ”command and control” laws and regulations prohibiting pollution than a market mechanism that allows the pollution to continue. But, in many cases, there is no viable alternative to the polluting activity. Airlines, for example, have no practical alternative to burning jet fuel to fly their planes. Prohibiting the burning of jet fuel is impractical. And government regulators can’t figure out as well as the market can which reductions will be most cost-effective; the costs can vary considerably. The IMF estimates, for example, that methane-flaring regulations will cost $20 for a ton of GHG reduction, whereas subsidies for home weatherization will cost $350/ton. Market-based mechanisms will choose to reduce methane flaring first, which will result in a much larger GHG reduction for the same cost.

The political climate in developed countries, especially the US, is not favorable for command-and-control laws restricting GHG emissions. The Inflation Reduction Act in the US, for example, is almost entirely “carrots,” such as subsidies for clean-energy projects, with no “sticks” requiring GHG reductions. I would favor sticks in the form of federal laws gradually prohibiting the burning of fossil fuels over the next 25 years, and gradually phasing out oil and gas production over the same period. This is what we need to be doing, but the chances of passing such laws now are nil. So we need to make the best possible use of the tools that are available.

The Voluntary Carbon Market

Our warehouse program, discussed above, provides a good example of where carbon offsets are appropriate. There is no practical way a warehouse developer can directly mitigate the increased driving of vehicles (VMT, or vehicle miles travelled) caused by the use of the warehouse. When our settlement with a developer requires them to purchase carbon offsets in the voluntary carbon market, the purchase provides funds that are used to reduce the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere, either by removing them or by avoiding their emission. We require developers to purchase credits from projects listed on one of the major carbon-offset registries, such as the UN Clean Development Mechanism or the Climate Action Registry. Those registries vet projects before listing them, to make sure they are well managed, based on established science, will actually result in GHG removals or avoidance, which would not occur without the project.

The registries have been criticized for failing to provide adequate oversight of the projects they list. For example, a widely cited article in the Guardian in early 2023 found that many of the credits approved by Verra, a leading registry, did not represent genuine carbon reductions. I asked a panel of experts at a recent climate technology conference the average actual GHG reduction I could expect if I bought 100 MT worth of offsets from an average supplier on one of the large registries. The answer was “60 MT.” This answer doesn’t discourage me from requiring warehouses to purchase offsets through the registries. It just means that I should ask for 67% more offsets to make up for offsets that are less effective than advertised.

A lot of attention is being paid to offset quality now. Organizations such as the International Emissions Trading Association and the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market are establishing principles to improve the integrity and efficacy of carbon-offset projects. Large companies that are attempting to offset all their GHG emissions, like Microsoft and Salesforce, not only purchase offsets through registries, they establish their own protocols for vetting new types of carbon-reduction projects. They are very concerned about offset quality and will push the market to increase quality. In addition, the UN is developing standards and processes under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism. The registries will want to comply with these standards when they come into force.

The voluntary carbon market provides substantial funding for projects that reduce GHG concentrations, either by avoiding emissions or removing GHGs from the atmosphere. According to one estimate, total funding up through 2021 was around USD $8 billion. This is a substantial contribution toward fighting global warming. Our warehouse project has resulted in about $8 million in offset purchases, and I’m proud of that contribution we’ve made towards fighting global warming. John Berger’s excellent book, Solving the Climate Crisis, tours the efforts being made in various industries to cope with the climate crisis. For many of them, an important part of the solution is the ability to sell carbon credits on the voluntary carbon market. Farmers and forresters changing their practices to sequester more carbon, and developers of low-carbon Portland cement and steel need these credits for their businesses to be viable.

The voluntary carbon market is not perfect, but it’s improving, and it has an important role to play in financing the measures we need to take to move to a net-zero world.

We’re failing to achieve the Paris-Agreement goals. Now, when we should be decreasing GHG emissions, on a trajectory toward substantially reducing them by 2030 and eliminating them entirely by 2050, they continue to increase.

The policy we need most mandates a phase-out of fossil fuels by 2050. But we couldn’t even get that phrase into the final COP28 report, due to vetos from Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries. Instead, we’re motoring along, pretty much business as usual. GHG emissions from the U.S. declined 3% in 2023, but the U.S. set a new record in 2023 for exporting oil and liquified natural gas, which will cause the same harms when it is burned elsewhere that it would cause if was burned in the U.S.

This is what failure looks like. Scientific reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) acknowledge now that we won’t be able to hold the global temperature increase to 2.0℃ without using carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The machines that have been developed to do this are very expensive, costing much more than it would cost to avoid emitting the carbon dioxide in the first place and they are unproven at anything like the scale that would be required to help with the problem. Relying on CCS is adding a fudge factor to the model calculations to make them balance out eventually to net zero. Our need for this unrealistic fudge factor shows that our efforts to curb climate change are failing.

Scientists have also been saying, in response to the 2023 temperature excesses, that the climate models they have been using to estimate future impacts are underestimating those impacts. As a result, we may be much closer to some of the important tipping points than we thought.

The Economics are Worse than We Thought

A recent economic study, published last week in Nature, finds that the world economy is already committed to a permanent income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years (only 11% in the U.S. and Europe, but higher elsewhere). It’s too late to avoid this economic hit. According to the study, damages by the year 2050 will be similar whether or not we drastically reduce our emissions before then. (Damages by the end of the century depend heavily on emissions reductions we make now, and those damages could go as high as 60% of GDP.) The 19% committed damages greatly exceed the mitigation costs of keeping the average temperature increase to 2℃.

My book Earthling discussed the economics of climate mitigation and damages, concluding that the mitigation cost to keep the increase to 2℃ would be about 2% of global GDP, and that damages resulting from a 6℃ would be 10% of GDP. The Nature-article forecast is much worse than this, and thus very alarming. A fairly crude way to appreciate a GDP decline of 19% is to expect that the income of everyone in the world will be reduced by 19%. Of course, the damages won’t be distributed so evenly. Corporations that are good at managing their risks will avoid most of the damages, and foist of their share on others.

Let’s Be Optimistic Anyway

A recent article in the New York Times, titled “Climate Doom is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism Is In,” says that the new fashion among climate activists is to be optimistic, because pessimism doesn’t lead to effective climate action. The world can be likened to a cancer patient. For climate change, as for severe forms of cancer, pessimism is more realistic than optimism. But optimism is more likely to lead to a better outcome.

I agree we should try to be optimistic, though it may be difficult. We should all do what we can to help with the problem. It will never be “too late to do anything,” because the problem will keep getting worse until we stop burning fossil fuels. Then we’ll have to live with the effects of a hotter world for hundreds of years.

Given that the current dire situation is not motivating much political action to save the climate, I expect that it will take a climate disaster of some sort to focus public attention on the issue, like the heatwave that kills 20 million people at the start of Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-term sci-fi novel, The Ministry for the Future. I’d like to say that I’m optimistic such a wake-up call will come soon, but I can’t wish for a disaster.

Large-scale reforestation and widespread changes in agricultural and forestry practices will help reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, but, again, won’t scale up enough to solve the problem. They will probably just reduce GHG emissions to a point where we can keep extracting and burning a small fraction of the coal, gas, and oil we’re burning today.

The problem is urgent. Global average temperature has increased 1.3˚C from pre-industrial times, causing a significant increase in wildfires, droughts, species loss, and extreme weather events. Experts say we’re on a path toward 3˚C or 4˚C of warming, which will cause impacts several times worse than those we’re seeing now.

California policy, Executive Order B-55-18, signed by Governor Brown in 2018, mandates carbon neutrality by 2045. Complying with this policy will require that we phase out the burning of fossil fuels. The biggest changes will be in electricity production, where we’ll have to rely on renewables and an enhanced grid with electricity storage to ensure reliability; the transportation sector, where we’ll switch over completely to electric vehicles; and the elimination of natural gas infrastructure and use in homes and industry. California’s policy is in line with policies enacted by dozens of countries aiming for net-zero emissions by around mid-century. These countries include the European Union, which mandates climate neutrality by 2050, and China, which is aiming for climate neutrality by 2060.

Time to stop producing coal, oil, and gas in California

If we stop burning fossil fuels, we should stop producing them as well. We need a California Climate Law now, specifying how we will ramp down our production of oil and gas to zero by 2045. It should immediately halt the issuance of permits for new oil and gas drilling and exploration, and then require that existing wells be systematically closed down and cleaned up by 2045. The Climate Law must provide help for oil and gas workers whose jobs are eliminated, and for cities and regions that are economically dependent on oil and gas revenue.

Each year, the United Nations Environmental Program, in conjunction with the Swedish Environmental Institute, produces a Production Gap Report, highlighting the difference between the limited amount of fossil fuels we can burn if we are to keep global heating below 1.5˚C or 2˚C and the much larger amounts listed in oil and gas production plans by countries around the world. The latest Production Gap Report, issued in December, 2021, shows a huge gap between most countries’ Paris-accord commitments to reduce their GHG emissions and their plans for oil and gas production. The world is planning to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5˚C and 50% more than would be consistent with 2˚C of warming.

These gaps signal to the business community that governments are not serious about effectively attacking climate change. If they were serious, they would make plans to ensure the planet ramps down its burning of fossil fuels to zero or near-zero by 2050, and concomitantly ramps down its production of fossil fuels. Enacting such plans into law would discourage businesses from building new infrastructure, such as gas-fired power plants and natural-gas pipelines, that will become stranded and useless by 2050. It would increase the urgency for auto manufacturers to develop new and better electric vehicles, and would encourage gas stations to switch to refueling with electric power instead of gasoline. It would force a faster upgrade of our electric grids so they can deal with the intermittency of renewable energy. It would make the business community realize that California plans in earnest to stop burning fossil fuels.

Phasing out oil and gas production would have significant co-benefits. Production pollutes the soil, water and air. California has thousands of wells located near to where people live and work. They are concentrated in disadvantaged communities and communities of color. They damage the health of those nearby, causing headaches, upper respiratory illness, nausea, nosebleeds, and possibly increased cancer risk. Methane leaks from oil and gas production are major contributors to the climate crisis. And many oil and gas wells in California are fracked, threatening water supplies with contamination from toxic fracking fluids. These problems would be mitigated somewhat with the 3,200’ setbacks that most Californian environmentalists are pushing for, but phasing out oil and gas operations would be much more effective in the long run.

California should take the lead on banning oil and gas production. Unlike France, which recently banned oil and gas production as of 2040, California produces a significant amount of oil and gas, so a ban in California would not just be symbolic. But oil and gas production accounts for less than 2% of California jobs, so phasing out those activities over a 25-year period would not cripple our economy. California has a history of leadership on environmental reform, and we should assume the leadership on this very important issue. Doing so could encourage other states and countries, including the federal government, to follow suit, and thus push the world toward the tipping point for climate action.

Actions to curtail fossil-fuel supply

An excellent article by Rutgers economists Mark Paul and Lina Moe, entitled “An Economist’s Case for Restrictive Supply Side policies: Ten Policies to Manage the Fossil Fuel Transition,” suggest 10 policies that we should adopt to phase out the production of fossil fuels. It’s focused on the US, but the policies could easily be adapted for other countries:

1. End Fossil Fuel subsidies

2. Ban new leases and permits on federal lands

3. Reject all new fossil fuel infrastructure

4. Build local fossil-free zones

5. Tad windfall profits

6. Enact a Carbon Cap and Dividend

7. Disclose climate-related financial risk

8. Monitor, fix, and enforce methane leaks

9. Ban fossil fuel exports

10. Nationalize the fossil fuel industry

Most of these suggestions are clear, but more explanation of each is available in the article. But I’d like to discuss the last one a bit more, as it’s a somewhat radical suggestion.

Why we should nationalize the fossil-fuel industry

A History of Nationalization in the United States, by Thomas Hanna, shows that the US has nationalized industries vital for the national interest many times in the past, especially during the two world wars. It has been done by Presidential executive order, and by Congress, but in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), the U.S. Supreme Court held that, in the circumstances applying in that case, the President did not have the legal authority to nationalize the steel mills during the Korean War. So Congress would probably need to authorize any such nationalization, which would be politically difficult to achieve right now, given current political realities in the US.

In past nationalizations, the government sometimes took ownership of the corporations being nationalized, and sometimes just took control of them, leaving ownership to existing stockholders. It would make more sense for the US to take ownership of the oil majors, like Exxon, than to try to control them without obtaining ownership. Exxon’s current market capitalization is about 1.5% of the current national debt, so the federal government could afford to reimburse current stockholders for the taking.

The idea would be for the government, once it controls the oil, gas, and coal majors, to wind down operations gradually, so that there are no more fossil fuels being produced in the US by 2050. The government would start out making a profit on its investment, since the industry is currently quite profitable. This revenue could be used to retrain industry workers as they’re laid off, and transition them to new jobs in renewable energy. The nationalized corporations would stop building pipelines and other fossil infrastructure. They would also stop exploring for new sources of oil and gas. They would need no further subsidies from the government. And they would stop promoting the idea that they can transition into the carbon-removal business. The oil majors have spent big, trying to persuade the public to allow them to continue business as usual. Nationalizing them would stop this flow of disinformation.

In my view, the climate emergency is much direr than the conditions that got us into the two world wars. We should be on a war footing, worldwide. Nationalizing the fossil-fuel companies in this country would show that the US is serious about, and taking the lead on, climate. It would not, in itself, guarantee that the US would become net-zero by 2050, so we would eventually have to prohibit the burning of fossil fuels, except in rare circumstances. But it would be a big step in the right direction.

The Declaration not only created a new country, but it started the trend of dissolution of European colonial empires. A steady series of countries started breaking away from their colonial masters around 1810: Serbia, Colombia, Venezuela, Norway, Argentina, and Chile declared independence by 1820, with many more to follow. Most of the European colonial empires reached their maximum territorial extent in the early 20th century.

It’s too bad that the Declaration contains references to God, in the introduction (“the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”), the preamble, and the conclusion (“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence...”). These allusions to a divine creator started us off on the path of insufficiently insulating our government from the direct influence of religion.

Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s primary author was a deist, a believer in a creator whose presence could be confirmed by reason. He did not subscribe to any organized religion, though he admired Jesus as a moral teacher. Such a belief was fairly radical at the time. In a letter to John Adams, he talked about the design he saw everywhere and concluded that, “it is impossible ... for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion...” In my opinion, this was a reasonable conclusion at the time, before Darwin and the big-bang theory showed that biological design and the structure of the universe at large could be explained in scientific terms.

The preamble’s statement that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” is the most important, and most-quoted, sentence in the Declaration. It’s too bad that it alludes to the Creator.

Other than separating the thirteen colonies from Britain, the Declaration of Independence has no legal effect. The preamble does not, for example, create a legal right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration is mostly an indictment of British rule, a list of British injustices toward the colonies that were sufficiently inequitable to justify the US’ secession from the British Empire. It does not define the character of this country, a task that was left to the US Constitution.

US Constitution

It would make more sense to celebrate the adoption of the US Constitution than the Declaration of Independence. The world’s first written, codified, constitution, it set the tone for the country, and established its federal government and overall legal framework. It was drafted at a constitutional convention in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, and went into effect following its ratification by state legislatures in 1789.

The first French constitution was adopted two years later. It was prefaced with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was drafted primarily by the Marquis to Lafayette, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, who had been appointed by the US government as a minister to France. Jefferson hoped that the US constitution would include a bill of rights like France’s, but he was in France during the US constitutional convention, and couldn’t strongly influence the outcome.

The biggest defect in the US Constitution is that it is so difficult to amend. In my book Earthling (pp. 172-175), I point out that the US Constitution has not kept up with the times. For political reasons, it has become impossible to amend. There are important issues of public policy, such as abortion and firearms, that the US Supreme Court is deciding in ways that the majority of voters disagree with. They decide based on their interpretation of the US Constitution using a variety of legal theories. But the interpretations are shaky when the constitution says nothing on the topic, e.g. for abortion. This is not the way the US should be deciding important public-policy questions. The country would be more democratic if we could amend the US Constitution to remove these barriers to laws supported by the majority.

France has had 14 constitutions since 1791, and has amended the latest one, which was adopted in 1958, 24 times. As a result, it is much more able than the US to keep its constitution in line with current conditions.

Political polarization in the US makes it impossible to amend the constitution. Polarization also prevents us from enacting statutes to change public policy in areas where the Constitution allows it, such as a statute guaranteeing a right to abortion. According to polls, such a statute would be approved by a majority of US voters.

Because of this polarization and the difficulty of amending the US Constitution, the country is in a political straitjacket, unable to take action to deal with current problems. And we’re in a critical time. The US is the country that has emitted the most greenhouse gases, so the US has primary responsibility for leading the world in solving the climate crisis, the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced. And China is gradually overtaking the US as the world’s dominant country; it’s important that we manage that transition well.

Jefferson’s criticism that the US Constitution lacked a bill of rights was remedied by the addition of the Bill of Rights, 10 amendments, approved by Congress in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791. It’s unfortunate that the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights are negative rights—they prohibit the government from interfering with free speech, for example, but don’t guarantee the right of free speech. They do not prevent private parties such as employers from suppressing their employees’ free speech. This contrasts with France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which guarantees positive rights, such as the right of assembly, and the right of free speech.

And the First Amendment has insufficient protections from religion. Jefferson advocated for a “wall of separation between Church and State,” but the First Amendment prohibits only “the establishment of religion” (i.e. a state religion) and requires the government to allow “the free exercise” of religion. This text has not been sufficient to prevent prayer in the schools or the placement of the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms.

The French Constitution evolved over the centuries to include the concept of laicité, which is essentially Jefferson’s wall of separation between Church and State. It’s a much stronger prohibition of religious influence in government affairs than we have in this country. It can be hard to draw the lines, though, because individuals’ religious beliefs influence their positions on public issues, and some people manifest their religion through their appearance. Some Muslim schoolgirls in France, for example, want to wear head scarves to school, but some controversial French laws have prohibited this. In public settings, the French state wants to bar religious symbols in order for its people to be citizens of France first and foremost.

In Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction Foundation series, a scientist named Hari Seldon developed a method of accurately predicting the future course of history. He set up a foundation at the edge of the Empire to preserve knowledge through the dark age he predicted after the fall of the Empire. But a mutant known as the Mule, born hundreds of years after Seldon died, had the power to change others’ emotions, which he used strategically to disrupt Seldon’s plan. The Mule couldn’t have been predicted by Seldon, so the course of events diverged from Seldon’s plans and predictions.

James Madison and the other framers of the US Constitution were in Hari Seldon’s position: trying to develop a constitution that would set the new country on a good path to the distant future. They couldn’t have predicted many of today’s public-policy issues on which their constitution still has a huge influence. In retrospect, we can see they made some important mistakes.

We can’t blame them. Instead, we should fix the problems they created. But we seem to have lost the “can-do” attitude we had in this country after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. World War II provided the US with a second set of founding myths. The Declaration of Independence announced our birth; World War II brought us to maturity as a major player on the world stage. If we’re to continue in that role, we need to find a way to get beyond our partisan bickering, and fix our government so it acts in accordance with the will of the majority and the needs of the US.

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center examines Americans’ opinions about climate change and correlates those opinions with religion. The opinion that climate change is not a serious problem because God is in control of the climate is held by 29% of evangelical protestants, and 11% of US adults. 17% of evangelical Christians also agreed with the statement that “there is no solid evidence that the Earth is getting warmer,” and 38% of them feel that climate change is not a serious problem. Republicans overall mirror these opinions. One positive result from the poll: few of any religion or political stripe agree that “new technologies will fix problems caused by climate change.” Let’s delve a bit deeper into how and why the Christian religion in the US impedes efforts to fight global heating.

Providence

In Hillary Mantel’s book about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, Maximilien Robespierre says “But if we are not under Providence, what is everything for?” Camille Desmoulins answers “Surely it is to bring us to the kind of society that God intends? To bring us to justice and equality, to full humanity?” The US Declaration of Independence similarly ends with a pledge of mutual support among the signers “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

Providence refers to God’s intervention in the universe, and can include miracles. Providence “involves more than mere vision or knowledge, for it implies the active disposition and arrangement of things with a view to a definite end....All things, whether due to necessary causes or to the free choice of man, are foreseen by God and preordained in accordance with His all-embracing purpose” (Divine Providence, in The Catholic Encyclopedia.)

The idea that God is guiding the course of history on Earth takes agency away from humans. If God has a plan for us, surely it will be fulfilled. God won’t let things get too bad.

A 2009 article in the Christian Science Monitor on “Climate change and the providence of God” stated that “creation under the providence of God is not subject to global warming, either as a relatively sudden phenomenon or as the result of climatic cycles. It is securely maintained by spiritual laws whose harmonious operation is not subject to change or disruption. In my prayers, I recognize this spiritual creation as the only one, and that we can see evidence of God’s government here and now.” This amounts to a denial of climate change on religious grounds. Christian Scientists, in spite of their name, are notoriously un-science-friendly. The article goes on to extoll the virtues of prayer, and to advocate for faith, which “can have a profound and lasting effect on the physical environment.” This “all we need is prayer” attitude is similar to the advice given in Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, which is to look inward and develop a stronger personal spiritual practice. It’s hard to see how this will fight climate change.

Calvinists and Presbyterians believe that God guides government toward the ultimate divine purposes, though “he does so through cooperation with those who seek the divine purposes and will for the creation.” If I were an adherent, this doctrine would signal to me that I have a role to play in helping God fight climate change, but I don’t have to worry about it too much, since God will take care that things don’t get out of hand.

Some Christians interpret the Book of Revelation to mean that the “end times” are coming soon. There’’s been a cottage industry for hundreds of years trying to correlate current events with the prophesies in the Book of Revelation concerning the rapture and second coming, including a book named Don’t Miss the Rapture by Cynthia Wallace, a cousin of mine. James Watt, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, believed in the end times, and stated “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” According to an article in the L.A. Times, Evangelicals’ apathy toward climate change “is driven not only by their well-documented distrust of science but also by a specific eschatological belief that Jesus is coming soon to bring history to a rather climactic end.” Maybe the climactic end will also be a climatic end—God will bring about the end of the universe through climate change.

Personal morality can come from a variety of sources, including religious beliefs. But those religious beliefs should stay in the private sphere, and not be brought into public policy. It’s difficult to know how much these sorts of beliefs in divine providence are behind climate denialism or how much they affect climate policy in the US. But it’s unquestionable that they take agency away from people. In my opinion, the late James Watt’s views that life on earth will end in the next few generations should have disqualified him from public office.

American Civil Religion

Sociologists have a theory “that a nonsectarian quasi-religious faith exists within the United States with sacred symbols drawn from national history.”

According to Catherine L. Albanese’s 1976 book, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution the American Revolution produced these religious properties: a Moses-like leader in George Washington; prophets such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine; apostles such as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin; martyrs such as at the Boston Massacre and in Nathan Hale; devils such as Benedict Arnold and Hessian "mercenaries"; sacred places such as Independence Hall and Valley Forge; rituals such as raising the Liberty Pole; symbols such as the Betsy Ross flag; sacred holidays such as Independence Day; and a holy scripture based on the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Some of the tenets of this civil religion are that freedom comes from God through government, governmental authority comes from God, that God can be known through the American experience, America’s prosperity results from God’s providence, and that America is a “city on a hill,” a beacon of hope and righteousness. This “civil religion” is conceived as interdenominational, though it obviously leaves out atheists.

The US Constitution as a Sacred Text

Last year, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas said that “we were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God because he wrote the constitution.” The belief that the US Constitution was divinely inspired, and that God has chosen the US to lead the world, is a belief in Providence, and is apparently common among US evangelicals. It is also the official position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons.

We fetishize the Constitution. Tom Paine, in Common Sense, said we do not need a king as a symbol of nationhood. Instead, we should frame a “charter of fundamental law” (i.e. the Constitution) which they would parade in public and crown on a solemn occasion to inform the world that, in America, law is king.

The belief that the Constitution is divinely inspired ties into originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation used by some US Supreme Court justices, especially Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The theory of originalism is that the intent of the drafters of the Constitution, and the meaning the words in the Constitution held at the time of their drafting, is the touchstone for interpreting the Constitution. In some ways, it is to be interpreted as a sacred text, like the Ten Commandments. The idea that God wrote the constitution means that we should treat it as a sacred text.

We have no good way of knowing how much the US Supreme Court justices’ religious beliefs influence their mode of interpreting the Constitution. Six out of the nine justices are Catholic. The other three are Protestant (Jackson), Jewish (Kagan), and Episcopalian, but raised as a Catholic (Gorsuch). Such predominance of Catholics sheds light on the court’s position on abortion. Divine providence has been an important thread in Catholic theology since St. Augustine in the 4th century. It was developed extensively as a doctrine by Thomas Aquinas, and has continued to this day as part of Catholic belief.

Article VI, Section 1, Clause 3 of the US Constitution requires public officials to take an “oath or affirmation” to support the Constitution, and, since 1790, all nationalized citizens must take an oath of allegiance to both the USA and its Constitution. The taking of this oath is akin to a religious ritual, as suggested by the Constitutional wording: Clause 3 says the oath is required, “but no religious Test shall every be required...” The oath substitutes for the religious test required for public office by the English church. According to Thomas C. Grey’s, article, “The Constitution as Scripture” in the Stanford Law Review (37 Stan. Law R. 1), Clause 3 suggests that “America would have no national church...yet the worship of the Constitution would serve the unifying function of a national civil religion.”

Under the current oath, specified by Congress in a statute, a public-office oath-taker swears or affirms that he or she “will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and will bear true faith and allegiance to the same...So help me God.” It’s unclear from this text or the constitutional text just what the oath means, but a reasonable interpretation is that the oath-taker promises not to undertake political reforms outside the constitution, and can’t support a rebellion or overthrow of the constitutionally established government. But, still, an oath of loyalty to a text suggests that the text is sacred. Another indication that some folks consider the Constitution to be a sacred text comes from its inclusion, along with the Declaration of Independence, in the “God Bless the USA Bible.” 

Just like the belief in divine Providence or the imminence of the end times forecast in the Book of Revelation, the belief that the US Constitution is a sacred text deprives humans of agency. Should we amend the Constitution when it was originally written by God? This is similar to the Christian question about Providence: Should we worry about climate change when God is charge of the big picture? These sorts of questions should not be shaping national policy, but they are.

Facebook, Twitter, and yellow journalism

I no longer participate in Facebook or Twitter, because I don’t want to be complicit in their spreading of falsehoods. A.J. Liebling said, in the New Yorker, in 1960, that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Twitter and Facebook are like newspapers (the “press” Liebling was referring to). They have a much larger reach than any newspaper, almost 3 billion for Facebook, and 450 million for Twitter. Unlike newspapers, they deny responsibility for the content they publish, because it is generated by their users. But this denial is disingenuous when their bans, controls, and algorithms determine which posts each user sees. They make money by showing ads to their users. They make money when their users view ads along with other (user-generated) content, so they have an incentive to present content that will cause users to read and post more. One of the best ways of doing this is to get users angry about some issue.

Social media’s ability to provoke users is enabled by a key difference between newspapers and Facebook and Twitter: the social-media services’ algorithms tailor content individually for each user. Items are shown to users not necessarily based on their interests, but rather based on the likelihood that the items will cause users to click on them and generate more ad revenue.

In some ways, Facebook and Twitter are like the New York World and New York Journal, newspapers published in the 1890s by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. These were the quintessential yellow-journalism papers, which exaggerated news events, and highlighted scandal-mongering and sensationalism, to increase circulation. They tended to focus on sensational accounts of crimes, sports, and scandal. Their journalistic methods were questionable: they relied heavily on unnamed or paid sources, faked interviews, misleading headlines, and pseudoscience. They used these devices to compete for circulation, at 2 cents per copy. These are akin to the tactics used by Facebook and Twitter to increase their ad revenue.

I don’t want to support Facebook and Twitter. They do more harm than good. Their propagation of untruths and their use as organizing hubs for whackos touting preposterous conspiracy theories outweigh their value in connecting people for legitimate discourse. I’ve moved to Mastodon, a non-profit, distributed service with a neutral content algorithm, but the user base, and consequently the community there, are much smaller.

Degrees of Complicity

The first definition of “complicity” in my Oxford English Dictionary is “the being an accomplice; partnership in an evil action.” But how deeply does one have to be involved, in order to be complicit in something? Does it require that one actually facilitate the evil action, or just acquiesce? The point of complicity is that one is at least somewhat responsible for the evil actions in which one is complicit. This responsibility is the touchstone of complicity. There’s a spectrum of complicity, from directly supporting something bad, to participating in an organization or movement that somehow provides indirect support.

When I participate in Facebook or Twitter, either by posting, or just visiting the sites, I am being served ads, which provides revenue for the sites. When I eat meat that I have purchased, I provide revenue for the animal agriculture system, which provides bad living conditions for animals and contributes substantially to climate disruption. I’m complicit because I take actions that provide revenue sustaining the system. I am therefore partially responsible for the system. This is a direct, active complicity.

Am I complicit in the actions of the US because I’m a citizen of that country and live there? My intuition says “yes,” because I influence how the US behaves through voting and political action. But am I not forced to participate? What are my alternatives⏤give up my citizenship and leave the country? Am I complicit in US policies that I don’t support? I remember traveling in Europe during the Trump years and feeling like everyone was judging me by my country’s bad choices.

Another example of semi-passive complicity is religion. If I were a Catholic, I’d probably want to remain in the church in spite of any disagreements I might have with church policies and positions, such as the church’s opposition to abortion. This is very similar to my wanting to stay in the U.S. for personal reasons, even though I don’t support all of its policies. And work provides yet another example. For decades I worked as a computer programmer for big New York banks, mostly building payment systems. I helped Chase and Citibank succeed. There are a host of policies and actions those banks take that I do not support, for example, their funding of fossil-fuel projects. Should I have refused to work for them? Even though I needed the work?

Am I complicit in racism, just by being white? I’m not actively doing or choosing anything which makes the situation worse, but I have obtained unearned advantages from being white. This is a borderline case, but I’m probably somewhat complicit in racism, even though I try hard not to engage in racist behavior.

Another example of passive complicity is economic. I was brought up in a middle-class home and was well educated. As a result, I have multiple options for earning a good living doing work that I enjoy⏤legal work or computer programming. A child growing up in a poor area of Los Angeles would have to strive and struggle for years to get into either of those professions, though doing so was relatively easy for me. And for an average Somalian child, whose family has a tiny fraction of the economic resources of a poor Los Angeles family, the goal of a professional career is completely out of bounds. I have unfair advantages stemming from my luck in being born where and when I was born. I am complicit in a system with an unfairly high level of economic inequality.

There’s a gradation, from active to passive complicity. I deserve to feel a bit guilty the few times I eat meat, because I know I am contributing to climate disruption and the unhappiness of animals. I would feel guilty if I participated in Facebook and Twitter. For these active complicities, I weigh the benefits I or the world get against the harms done and decide what to do. I bear the responsibility for my decision.

But what can I do to avoid the more passive forms of complicity in systems I don’t like? Disaffiliating with the US might absolve me of complicity in the nation’s policies and actions, but it would be a huge disruption in my life. And, as I argue in my book Earthling, I might be doing more good by living here and influencing policies in the US than I would by living in Europe, where the environmental policies and separation of church and state are more to my liking.

Perhaps a Buddhist monk could avoid being complicit--she doesn’t participate in the economic system and mostly lives a life that avoids doing harm. If she lived in Tibet, that would avoid most of the bad-country complicity: Tibet contributes little to global heating and other environmental harms, and isn’t aggressive toward other countries. She wouldn’t have to worry about the policies of her church, because there is no centralized Buddhist church that might be doing harm. The Buddhists think that, by perfecting their spiritual selves through meditation, they are doing maximal good in the world. I might disagree with this, but I acknowledge they do little harm. However, I want to have some effect on the world. I want to do some good, not just not do bad.

Most of us can’t avoid being complicit in a lot of wrongs. The most we can do is to consider how our actions and decisions affect others, and to try to take some action to reverse the conditions, like racism and poverty, that give us unfair advantages over others. We can also speak out against actions we disagree with when we’re part of the group performing the action.

That won’t suffice for climate change. It’s already fairly famous, but it’s not being treated as the genuine emergency that it is. I’m terrible at figuring out popular taste. Something that seems like a fascinating idea to me often elicits nothing but yawns from others. So I don’t understand why we are not all running around saying the sky is falling. But I do understand that human nature is not set up to focus on things that will gradually harm far-away strangers, many of them in the future.

I don’t think we need a reminder about climate change nearly as much as we need good information and informed discussion. Extrapolations fails miserably at this. It is more misleading than informative. Nowhere does it suggest that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, for example.

One of my pet peeves is fiction that misrepresents facts. When I was much younger I assumed that the facts in any published novel would have been carefully researched and correct. That was a somewhat naive assumption, but my general impression is that the standards in this area have declined quite a bit over the last fifty years. I’m always complaining about implausibility and incorrectness when I’m watching movies and series in the evening with my wife, to the point of being a bit of a crank.

Extrapolations’ first episode, “A Raven Story” begins in 2037 with worldwide climate protests at the time of COP42 in Tel Aviv. The main issue they seem to be considering was whether to change the limit for temperature increase from 1.5 to 2 degrees. It would be great if the world could agree on an enforceable temperature limit, but there are so many contributors to global heating that a simple limit won’t be very effective. Look at the Paris Agreement, in which the world set a goal of holding temperature increases to 1.5˚C and “well below” 2˚C. We’ve missed the 1.5˚ goal. It’s not that we’ve passed that limit now--global average temperature has risen about 1.1˚C above pre-industrial levels. But we’re on a socio-economic path that will result in more than 1.5˚ of warming. The implication in the first episode id that we can make meaningful changes to our global temperature trajectory just be declaring a temperature limit; this is wrong.

In the second episode, “Whale Fall,” the last humpback whale goes extinct in 2046. A character played by Meryl Streep converses with the whale using an AI system that translates between human and whale speech, a sort of extended Google Translate. Two rival corporations are fighting over the last whale. One wants to capture it for a zoo; the other wants to kill it and collect its DNA so it can be reconstituted in the future, when the global warming crisis is over. Showing the death of the last humpback whale is one way to dramatize species loss, but it continues our unfortunate focus on “charismatic megafauna.” It simplifies the problem too much by ignoring the loss of thousands of less charismatic species and the harm these losses cause to habitats of all kinds and species that aren’t glamorous, but are very important in their ecosystems.

Episode 3 takes us to Miami, which is being flooded due to sea-level rise in 2047. It focuses on the local politics of saving a Miami synagogue. The drama here, as in most of the episodes, is only tangentially related to climate. A young congregant asks whether God is using climate change to punish us for misdeeds. The government is offering “relo deals” for those moving to places like Milwaukee or Winnipeg, where climate impacts will be smaller, or even beneficial.

Episode 4 takes on geoengineering. A rogue corporation sends dozens of large cargo planes and thousands of smaller drones to sprinkle calcium carbonate in the atmosphere, to reflect sunlight and cool the earth. I can’t see what incentive a corporation would have to do this, since it doesn’t make money. In one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels a rogue country that has had too many bad heat waves sprays sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere from planes. Countries may, in the future, have incentives to take such actions, which is one reason we need a stronger international global-warming treaty, which would, among other things, prohibit geoengineering without the approval of the international body overseeing the treaty.

Episode 5, which also takes place in 2059, focuses on India, which has a daytime curfew. Most people venture out only at night because it’s too hot during the day. Poor people pay small amounts for oxygen at a public stand. This makes no sense: climate change won’t reduce the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. There’s visible haze in the air, which also is not an artifact of climate change, though I suppose that conventional air pollution could get a lot worse if India continues its spree of building coal-fired power plants. The main action in the episode is the illegal transport rom Mumbai to the Indian town of Amritsar of drought-tolerant seeds stolen from the Svalbard seed vault. Alpha, the big Google-like corporation, sends an assassin to stop the transport, but we don’t know why. It’s an engaging episode, mostly because of the banter between the two men transporting the seeds, but I can’t see that it has much to do with climate change.

Episode 6 takes place in 2066, and deals mostly with a tech service called CacheCloud that seems to be a social-media storage service for memories. The protagonist has a role-playing job pretending to be his clients’ friends and lovers. He’s losing his memories, because of physical stress from too much heat, but he’s having trouble coming up with enough money to keep his memories on CacheCloud, and has to delete some of them. This all has little to do with the climate.

In 2068, in Episode 7, Auggie, a character played by Forest Whitaker, is holding a new year’s goodbye party for himself. The guests arrive wearing oxygen tanks, protection against the high level of smog in San Francisco. Again, this is not good climate science. California is currently doing well on ridding itself of fossil power plants and switching to EVs. Conventional air pollution is likely to be greatly reduced by 2068, even if global heating proceeds apace. Auggie is about to be scanned for upload to the cloud so that his mind can be reconstituted in software once the climate crisis is over. His departure comes as a surprise to his dinner guests, who include his wife, played by Marion Cotillard. She is none too pleased about being left behind. Though it is championed by tech luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, this idea of becoming immortal by transferring the mind to a silicon-based computer has always seemed far-fetched to me. It makes an assumption that the operation of the human brain can be accurately simulated in silicon-based computers, but the brain is a completely different sort of device. It’s not a Turing machine. The idea will probably never work.

In the last episode, in 2070, Nicolas Bilton, the CEO of Alpha, is tried by the International Criminal Court for the crime of ecocide, because of his company’s contributions to climate change. The court proceedings make no sense. It turns out that his company has been sitting on effective direct-air carbon capture (DAC) technology for years. Bolton goes to prison for this, his technology gets deployed, and the series ends with his adoptive daughter strolling on a beautiful sunny beach with no pollution, saying “I think we’re going to fix it now.” This sends a very harmful message: that DAC will be developed to pull CO2 from the atmosphere at the necessary scale at an affordable cost. If we were certain this could be done at a lower total cost than phasing out the burning of fossil fuels, it might be a viable solution, but there is no evidence to support this. I realize it’s a better story arc for Extrapolations to end on a positive note, with climate change fixed by 2071. But ending the story this way plays into the hands of the new climate deniers, who have given up arguing that climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t caused by humans, and have switched to the argument that we should avoid taking drastic action on climate because it would harm the economy too much. They’re saying it’s better to just wait for the technological fix that human ingenuity surely will provide. The problem is that the fix may never come.

The Extrapolations series is well produced and entertaining to watch. The episodes all contain a climate element, such as sea-level rise, species loss, or geoengineering. But the climate elements were awkwardly grafted on to the stories, which do not integrally involve climate change. And some of the science is wrong, such as air quality bad enough to require oxygen tanks.. But, worst of all, the show promotes a solution, direct air capture, that is unlikely to solve the problem.

This is an ideal state of affairs from an environmental perspective because it is sustainable. Any sort of exponential growth-any percentage annual increase- is unsustainable. But zero population growth is bad for business. More people means more customers and more business. And some businesses, such as homebuilding, depend on adding people. With no new people, we won’t have to build new houses. We can just maintain and perhaps replace some of our existing housing stock.

Growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can be broken down into two components: population growth and productivity growth. When the population stops growing, GDP growth will come exclusively from the increase in workers’ productivity. This must happen in the long run, since the population can’t continue increasing forever.

Zero or negative population growth is happening in many developed countries. Fertility rates in such countries tend to be below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. In California, official projections are that the number of deaths per year will become larger than the number of births in the state by 2037. Immigration from other states and countries will sustain the population.

Fertility rates in many developing countries are still high, and will continue to drive the growth in world population, which the UN projects will level off at around 10.4 billion in 2100, up from its current 8 billion. It’s very good news for the environment that world population growth is projected to stop by the end of this century.

California housing

California’s official position is that there is an acute housing shortage in the state. This shortage results in high housing prices, which in turn cause overcrowding and homelessness. There are economic impacts as well, such as reduced spending on housing construction and reduced consumer spending because money spent for housing isn’t part of discretionary disposable income. The high housing prices also reduce the number of people wanting to move to California.

It’s difficult to determine the degree to which homelessness in California is caused by high housing prices. California has one of the highest rates of homelessness: 402 per 100,000 residents, or about one person in 250. Only New York and Hawaii have higher rates. New York might top the list because, unlike in California, 95% of the homeless live in shelters, compared with 30% in California. And the other states with the highest rates of homelessness, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, have, like California, climates and government policies favorable to the homeless. About 25% of homeless adults in Los Angeles County have severe mental illnesses and 27% have long-term substance-use disorders. With all these other factors, increasing the supply of housing generally would have only a small impact on homelessness. Studies have shown that the increase in supply of market-rate housing doesn’t “trickle down” to increase the availability of affordable housing. To do that requires construction of low-cost housing, including housing for the homeless with government subsidies and other incentives, which are available.

Except for the homeless, people living in California are housed; they have places to live. So the housing shortage doesn’t mean that people can’t find housing. But the high cost of housing is an important contributor to overcrowding. Los Angeles County has been the most housing-overcrowded large county in the US for the last three decades. 11% of homes in the County are overcrowded, as defined by the federal government: more than one person per room, excluding bathrooms.

Another consequence of higher housing prices is longer commutes. When housing near one’s job is prohibitively expensive, one finds cheaper housing in a more distant location. This results in long commutes, which degrade one’s quality of life and have significant environmental impacts, such as increasing GHG emissions from more driving.

More people are moving out of California than are moving into it. High housing prices are an important factor, but not the only factor causing this exodus. California has high rates for income and sales taxes. We also have disasters: wildfires, droughts, and floods. And of course people move for jobs.

How do we balance these negative consequences of high housing prices with the positive ones? For me, the positive ones win out; I’m in favor of what’s sometimes called “smart growth.” Let’s manage the planning of our cities so that we don’t keep sprawling them out. We can gradually remake them so they are denser, and walkable, with transportation options other than cars.

In Oregon, cities are required to designate urban growth boundaries - planning lines which prevent cities from expanding out onto farm and forest lands. Urban development is allowed only within the boundary. Boundaries are reviewed every six years, to make sure they keep pace with population and employment growth. It would be great if we could adopt a similar system in California.

Allowing housing prices to stay high will help keep California’s population stable, but the high prices have a larger effect on those at the lower end of the economic spectrum. This means that the high prices disproportionately affect people of color. As mentioned above, studies have shown that building more market-rate housing is an ineffective way to increase the availability of affordable housing--the “trickle down” in prices is very limited. A better alternative, which the State and certain cities are implementing in California, is to directly incentivize the production of affordable housing through subsidies and reduced regulation.

Limiting the supply of housing helps keep the state’s population in check. It’s more important to stabilize the state’s population than it is to reduce overcrowding and long commutes, and to obtain extra GDP growth from an expanding population. We have a great opportunity to do this now that the population of California is projected to remain stable for the next few decades.

Talking about population

The Sierra Club recently produced an Equity Language Guide, whose purpose is to remind Sierra Clubbers to “demonstrate our commitment to equity, justice, and inclusion...by using respectful, thoughtful language in all of our communications.” The Guide does not prohibit outright any discussion of population, but it indicates a strong preference in that direction, based on the statement that “environmental groups, including many members and leaders of the Sierra Club, have used concern about ‘overpopulation’ as a pseudo-scientific justification for racist and xenophobic policies to limit both immigration and reproductive freedom.” The Guide goes on to say that the “Sierra Club has made an intentional shift away from this legacy with our current focus on gender equity and rights.”

The intent of this section of the Guide is to suppress discussions of population as a contributor to environmental harm. But it’s important to have those discussions, and a language guide is not the right place to prohibit them. Adding more population, especially in the US, where the average person uses environmental resources at a rate several times the world average, has huge environmental impacts. Whether or not to have a child is one of the most consequential environmental decisions most couples will ever make. We should be free to point out that one result of the US Supreme Court’s recent dismantling of Roe v. Wade will be to increase population by limiting the availability of abortions. There are policy options available to limit population that are neither racist nor xenophobic, such as educating women and providing access to contraception and abortions.

A stable population

It’s very good news for the environment that the California population has stabilized, and is not projected to grow significantly in the future. California has an opportunity to be a world leader in developing a sustainable economy, an economy that continues to grow and prosper without population growth.

For more information about population and the environment, especially climate change, see Chapter 3 of my book Earthling, available from Ethics Press.

“The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.” (p. 27.) This highlights the fact that the 2020s are a critical decade for the climate process, and what we do will affect many future generations. The Report concedes that it will be very difficult to limit global warming to 1.5°C. now. (p. 10.) In fact, we’ll have to radically increase our mitigation efforts if we’re to keep global warming below 2°C, as shown on the following Figure SPM.5 from the report:

The current trajectory, based on “implemented policies,” is for emissions to remain at their current high level through 2100. But, in order to limit global warming to 2°C, we will need immediate, drastic reductions in GHG emissions. We need to reduce total emissions by two-thirds by 2050 on our way to net-zero, or close to it, by 2100. But emissions continue to increase. To get to net zero, we’ll need “a substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use.” (p. 30.)

“Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 m between 1901 and 2018.” (p. 5.) This is about 8 inches, and doesn’t sound like much, but it has huge implications for coastal communities, when increased storm surges and increased hurricane intensity are factored in. The current rate of rise is about 3.7 mm per year, which will add up to around 15 feet of sea-level rise in the next century if we don’t take drastic action now.

“Public and private finance flows for fossil fuels are still greater than those for cli- mate adaptation and mitigation.” (p. 11.) This is amazing and terrible! But we can see the dynamic in the US’ Inflation Reduction Act, which commits to major investments in sustaining fossil fuels. We’ve got to stop subsidizing fossil fuels. In fact, we should be doing the opposite - prohibiting additional fossil-fuel development, to avoid locking in the infrastructure, which will result in stranded assets.

“Some hard-to-abate residual GHG emissions (e.g., some emissions from agricul- ture, aviation, shipping, and industrial processes) remain and would need to be coun- terbalanced by deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods to achieve net zero CO2 or GHG emissions.” (p. 22.) But CDR has not been developed in a way that reaches the needed scale in a cost-effective way. The 2022 California Scoping Plan for Achieving Carbon Neutrality also relies on CDR to achieve net-zero GHG emissions. The reason for including CDR, in both cases, is that the climate modeling doesn’t foresee reaching net zero without it. But this is how we fail in trying to reach the goal, when our strategy to get to the goal starts including requirements we know we can’t meet. The following graphic from page 7 of the Report shows how climate change will affect young people more than oldsters like me:

What’s missing is the stuff to the right of the diagram. What will things look like in the year 2200, or 3000? Future generations will be affected, for hundreds or thousands of years. As I explain in my book, Earthling, the number of people in future generations harmed by global heating will likely be many times the 9 billion that are currently in- habiting our planet.

The 36-page SPM is a high-level summary of the longer AR6 Synthesis Report, which hasn’t been issued yet. The previous, AR5, Synthesis Report dates from 2014, and is 169 pages long. The AR6 Synthesis Report will probably be the most reliable summary of the state of the climate when it is issued. It, in turn, summarizes three very lengthy Working Group reports:

• WGI: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (2409 pages)

• WGII: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (3068 pages)

• WGIII: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (1991 pages)

These Working-Group Reports, even though they’re lengthy, are themselves summaries. They each reference thousands of sources in books and scientific journals.

I will probably send out another post like this when the full AR6 Synthesis Report is released. In the meantime, if you are interested in climate change, please read my book Earthling, which is an ethics-focused tour of many climate issues.

The Earthling book is a comprehensive overview of climate issues, with chapters on climate science, sustainability, climate economics, law, and politics. It’s unique in that it discusses these different aspects within an overall framework of ethics. It’s available for pre-order now on the Ethics Press website.

There are many climate-related ethical issues, but the two most important are future generations and non-human animals. Some arguments pooh-pooh the idea that we should seriously take the interests of future generations into account. One such argument is based on economic discounting. With a high discount rate, economic models essentially ignore impacts in the distant future. Another argument is based on the so-called “non-identity problem,” a philosophical stance holding that humans who haven’t been born yet don’t have identities, so they aren’t real people and therefore can’t be harmed. I counter these arguments in my book.

Non-human animals have also been left out of the moral equation for climate change. At best, we tend to see them in instrumental terms, in terms of their usefulness to humans. They have no economic interests, so they are omitted from economic analyses. And, according yo some religions, they have no souls, they’re essentially machines, and don’t count. But I think they should have some moral standing; they deserve to be given ethical weight of their own, less than humans, but still significant.

I believe that climate disruption is by far the most significant problem we humans face today. I would love it if Earthling could help you think about it and find the inspiration and means to fight harder to save our planet.

Arctic Dreams is my favorite non-fiction book. It evokes a sublimely beautiful but strange world teeming with life, relatively inaccessible at the top of our planet. Ever since I read the book thirty years ago, I’ve wanted to go see the Arctic. But I haven’t managed to travel there. It’s hard to get to the far north; there are few commercial flights to Baffin Island or Ellesmere Island. Svalbard, a Norwegian island just as far north, can be reached by a series of flights, at a reasonable cost. But getting to Iqaluit, for example, capital of the Nunavut Province of Canada, is expensive.

And seeing the Arctic backcountry is dangerous. I’ve been an avid hiker for over thirty years, and have led numerous Sierra Club local hikes and backpacks in the Sierras. I’m confident hiking by myself in the lower 48 in summer or winter. But the dangers in the Arctic are different, and I wouldn’t hike there without a guide. Grizzly bears and other wild animals can kill you, so you have to carry a rifle and know how — and be willing — to use it. It’s very cold much of the time. And the changing conditions of ice, snow, and water can kill you in a variety of ways. It is a very dangerous environment for those not trained to live in it.

Of Wolves and Men

Lopez seems to have travelled the Arctic mostly with groups of scientists doing research. He also spent time hunting and working with Eskimos and other natives. He seems to have developed his methodology, and his philosophical outlook, while researching and writing Of Wolves and Men. That book came out when Lopez was just 33 years old, eight years before Arctic Dreams. It’s a great book and was a National Book Award finalist.

For the wolf book, Lopez spent hundreds of hours watching wolves in the far north (where most of them live now, since we’ve hunted them to near extinction in the lower 48), alone, and in the company of wolf biologists and Inuit hunters. In his view, the hunters understand wolves the best, because the wolves make a living the same way the hunters do: by knowing and carefully observing the landscape and the plants an animals in it. Eskimos do not eat wolves, for the most part, but observing their behavior can provide vital clues to the location of animals the wolves and men both eat, such as caribou. The wolves usually know where the caribou are, or are likely to be.

_Of Wolves and Men_’s first half explains the wolf. The second half deals with the relationship between wolves and humans. Indigenous people know wolves best, in an anecdotal sort of way, though scientists tend to ignore their knowledge. Indigens, as hunter-gatherers, see themselves as part of the animal kingdom, intimately related to the landscape. Non-indigens see themselves as separate, outside. For the former, the land is the universe they inhabit for the latter, the wild landscape is to be dominated, controlled, adapted to human use.

A chapter titled “The Beast of Waste and Desolation” recounts the systematic killing of almost all the wolves in the lower 48 states — hundreds of thousands of them — and the underlying attitudes. Why were wolves hated so much in 19th-century America? It was partly due to the frontier mentality–the idea that the wilderness was savage, pagan, dark and evil and needed to be tamed and domesticated. Wolves were part of the wild and preyed on sheep and cattle, so they had to go. I can understand that ranchers had a strong economic incentive to reduce their livestock losses, but the antipathy towards wolves went way beyond that. Duty, manhood, civilization, sport, and conquest of evil were all cited as justification for wolf killing. And the fun of shooting dozens of them from an airplane in a day.

The book’s final section considers the history of Western attitudes toward the wolf, and wolf literature and mythology, going back to the Middle Ages, when the wolf was seen as a companion to both saints and the Devil, and a symbol of mankind’s inherent bestial nature. “Throughout history man has externalized his bestial nature, finding a scapegoat upon which he could heap his sins and whose sacrificial death would be his atonement. He has put his sins of greed, lust, and deception on the wolf and put the wolf to death — in literature, in folklore, and in real life.” Werewolves were taken seriously in the Middle Ages, representing all that was base in human nature. The Inquisition burned those suspected of werewolfry at the stake.

Arctic Dreams

After an introductory chapter, the first three chapters of Arctic Dreams each focus on a place and an exotic Arctic beast: the muskox on Banks Island, the polar bear on the sea ice north of Alaska, and the narwhal in Lancaster Sound. It would be worthwhile traveling to the Arctic just to see these amazing animals. Many other more-common types of wildlife, like wolves, caribou, Arctic foxes, and birds, are considered in other chapters. One reason I want to go to the Arctic is to see the extraordinary wildlife.

The next chapter is about migration. Because of the extreme winters in the north, many species migrate out for the winter. Millions of snow geese, for example, fly more than 3,000 miles from their Arctic breeding grounds to wintering grounds in the U.S. and Mexico. They spend about half their year migrating to and fro. Arctic terns migrate 44,000 miles round-trip to the Antarctic. Caribou, walrus, and whales also migrate significant distances annually. Lopez “came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breach of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall.”

The migration chapter also discusses the first coming into the Americas of humans, via the Arctic. I suspect that the science on this issue has changed in the 35 years since Arctic Dreams was published. But the basics remain the same: Asians crossed the Bering land bridge during the Wisconsin glaciation, between 30,000 and 11,000 years ago when sea levels were around 100 meters lower than they are now. The Dorset culture that existed between 500 BCE and somewhere between 1000 and 1500 CE is mysterious. Their masterly miniature ivory and bone carvings are dark and unsettling. The Thule culture, which came after the Dorset, spread from Alaska east to Greenland between 1100 and about1400 CE. The Thule people were accomplished hunters of bowhead whales and other animals. They are the ancestors of the present-day Inuit ( Eskimos), who adapted to the cooling that started around 1100 CE. All of these people were hunter-gatherers, feeding themselves mostly by hunting.

My favorite Arctic Dreams chapter is the one entitled “Ice and Light.” I want to see the grand Arctic icebergs even more than I want to see the Arctic wildlife. Lopez felt something similar: “If I had a desire simply to be with anything in the North, it was to be with icebergs. I do not know if I had had this wish for years or if it only intensified as the prospect of the voyage loomed. But when I saw them, it was as though I had been waiting quietly for a very long time, as if for an audience with the Dalai Lama.” He describes in scientific, but fairly ecstatic terms, the varieties of types of ice floating in the Arctic: sea ice, freshwater ice, grease ice, nilas (an elastic layer of ice crystals about an inch thick), gray ice (young sea ice), ice islands up to 300 square miles in size, which scientific expeditions can camp on for decades, and tabular icebergs up to 50 cubic miles in volume, the largest objects afloat in the Northern Hemisphere.

Even relatively flat ice has a lot of configurations, which are always changing, adding to the dangers of traveling on the ice. There are pressure ridges that can be difficult to cross, and the network of leads — open water between expanses of sea ice — is changing all the time, under the influence of winds and currents. Walking on the ice, it’s easy to get trapped when an adjacent lead opens up. It’s dangerous for ships, too. The moving ice can crush ships and boats traveling in the leads. Ships can get frozen in place for the winter if they aren’t careful. But there are large areas that stay open all winter amidst the ice, called polynyas. They can harbor huge numbers of overwintering seabirds and marine mammals.

There’s something transcendent about all this ice. In _Magic Mountain_’s “Snow” chapter, the everyman protagonist, Hans Castorp, reaches the pinnacle of awareness in an ecstatic vision during a whiteout, as he almost freezes to death in a snowstorm. Lopez likens icebergs to gothic cathedrals, based on their shared “architecture of light,” and the mystical experiences they engender. I hope for an Arctic voyage someday to spend transcendent time amid icebergs and nilas and sea ice.

The rest of “Ice and Light” talks about light in the Arctic. With constant night in the winter and the sun circling around the horizon but never setting during the summer, there are all manner of exotic optical effects: mirages, solar arcs and halos, and, of course, the aurora borealis. Another set of spiritual experiences I can hope to have when I visit the Arctic.

The next chapter, “The Country of the Mind,” is about attitudes toward the land. For the Inuit, hunting is a spiritual exercise, and the goal is to become one with the land. For them, the land is everything. It includes plants and animals in a unified whole. It is much more than just a place to live. It is their source for food and tools. And their mythology and spiritual practices are based on the land. A spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape. “The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.” Westerners, coming into the Arctic, see the land in much more instrumental and utilitarian terms. For them, it is mostly a repository of natural resources to be exploited for profit.

The remaining chapters of Arctic Dreams mostly recount the history of European exploration in the Arctic. Europeans were interested in the Arctic as a possible route to China, but it took hundreds of years of exploration to find the Northwest Passage. The first complete passage by ship wasn’t made until 1903, about four hundred years after the English started exploring the Arctic for a way through to China.

The other principal European interest in the Arctic was resource extraction. Whales were killed for their blubber, which could be rendered into whale oil, to light lamps. Whalebone (baleen) was used to make umbrella staves and Venetian blinds, portable sheep pens, window gratings and furniture springing. Seals and cod were also commercially important. But the biggest fortunes were made from furs. In 1670 the Hudson Bay Company was essentially given sovereignty to all lands drained by rivers emptying into Hudson Bay — a huge territory. A century later, its main business became the fur trade. In the century beginning in 1769 it sold at auction in London 891,091 fox, 1,052,051 lynx, 68,694 wolverine, 288,016 bear, 467,549 wolf, 1,507,240 mink, 94,326 swan, 275,032 badger, 4,708,702 beaver, and 1,240,511 marten furs.

Europeans saw the new world as an essentially unlimited source of resources they could expropriate for profit. Annie Proulx’s wonderful 2016 novel, Barkskins, recounts three hundred years of exploitation of the New World’s timber and fur. The resources were there for anyone to take, and take they did. The characters in Barkskins exclaim repeatedly that the forests are so huge as to be inexhaustible, but, of course, they were eventually cut down. We still have the attitude, at least in some quarters, that resources on public lands should be available for private exploitation with little or no compensation to the public. Ranchers in the western U.S. pay very little for the right of their cattle to graze and destroy ecosystems on federal land. Loggers pay way below market value to cut timber in our national forests. Oil and gas companies pay very little to extract fossil fuels. Oil and gas appears to be the resource that nation-states and oil companies are currently fighting over in the Arctic, even though, to deal with climate change, we must stop burning fossil fuels within a few decades. I’m sure Lopez would agree that it would be short-sighted to despoil rare and beautiful Arctic landscapes for oil and gas production that will never be allowed.

Horizon

Lopez organizes his last book, Horizon, like the first chapters of Arctic Dreams: each chapter after the first introductory one deals with a trip to a specific place, most likely a place where he’s already been, where Lopez works with a group of people. In the introduction he sums up his mission: “I wanted to see and write about landscapes I thought I could have an informing conversation with, and about the compelling otherness of wild animals.” His other focus is on indigenous people, hunter-gatherers, who have relationships with the landscape similar to those of wild animals. This trio of landscape, animals, and indigens, provides Lopez’ moral map. Lopez explains the title in terms that are easily translated into metaphor: “When a boundary in the known world — say, a geographical one for Thule people migrating eastward from Alaska, moving farther into an inhospitable world than anyone had ever gone — becomes instead a beckoning horizon, the leading edge of a farther destination, then a world one has never known becomes an integral part of one’s new universe.”

The first chapter recounts Lopez witnessing a storm at Cape Foulweather in Oregon, a couple hundred miles from his home. He is drawn to the site because it’s where the explorer James Cook made his first landfall on the west coast of North America. Lopez recounts visiting several Cook-related sites, such as Botany Bay in Australia and Point Venus in Tahiti. The chapter is all about exploration — through telescopes, undersea, and by closely observing the landscape. It’s also about explorers’ and immigrants’ interactions with native peoples, one of Lopez’ most prevalent themes. He alternates descriptions of the storm and the setting from which he is observing it with ruminations on exploration and the interaction of cultures. It’s a meditation, searching for transcendence in the storm while trying to understand what happened in that particular place.

The next chapter recounts Lopez’ return to the Arctic — Skraeling Island — a few years after completing Arctic Dreams. He walks around observing the landscape and works with a team excavating Dorset and Thule sites. The beauty and strangeness of the Arctic come alive in this chapter, which is especially poignant because the Arctic, more than any other place on Earth, is being radically affected by climate change. The average temperature in the Arctic has increased 2.3˚C — about twice as much as the planetary average — since 1970.

Lopez moves next to the Galápagos Islands, which have an astonishing range of endemic species. They partly inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s a big tourist site because of the unusual animals. The government of Ecuador preserves 97% of the islands’ land as a park, but there are enduring conflicts between the local residents, many of whom are poor and live by hunting and fishing, and the park service, whose mission is to preserve the park in as close to a natural state as possible. There are a lot of feral dogs, pigs, and goats, as well as invasive plant species, but it’s difficult to come to an agreement on which species should be removed and which “natural state” would be best. Lopez describes a number of intense animal encounters there. He ends the chapter with a discussion of Darwin’s theory, lamenting that humans’ lack of care for the environment will result in genetic harm to them. But he doesn’t take into account that natural selection has mostly stopped for humans, because, once we’re born, we pretty much all survive, even the unfit.

In the following chapters, Lopez works with Africans in Kenya surveying for early human fossils; he wanders around Australia visiting mining sites, indigenous people, and former penal colonies; and he is part of a team searching for meteorites in Antarctica.

Morality

Lopez brings ethics into practically every page of his writing, though he does it gently. A common thread throughout his books is the European invasion of the Americas, and the attendant horrors: the killing of around 90% of the native human population, some 20 million people; a similar holocaust of wildlife, killed for fur, oil, meat, and other uses; heavy extraction of timber and other resources that laid waste to millions of acres of wilderness. He recounts in passing countless instances of casual cruelty, such as the shooting of a pair of polar bear cubs from a ship in the Arctic, just for fun, to see how the mother bear would react.

The indigenous peoples were hunter-gatherers and the incoming Europeans were from agricultural/industrial societies. This invasion caused a clash of cultural systems, which the invaders were bound to win. There is a thread running below the surface of much of Lopez’ writing: a nostalgia for the hunter-gatherer life. Numerous writers such as Yuval Noah Harari have suggested that hunter-gatherers had a better life than we do. They had more leisure, more variety in their days, much closer contact with landscapes and nature. Even so, we can’t go back, largely because the human population has grown so large it greatly exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet’s land, for hunter-gatherers.

He mourns how resource extraction hurts locals: “The seductive power of this system of exploitation — tearing things out of the earth, sneering at the least objection, as though it were hopelessly unenlightened, characterizing other people as vermin in the struggle for market share, navigating without an ethical compass — traps people in a thousand exploited settlements in denial, in regret, in loneliness. If you empathize with the [indigenous people] over their losses, you must sympathize with every person caught up in the undertow of this nightmare, this delusion that a for-profit life is the only reasonable caring for a modern individual.”

Lopez is interested in things we can learn from landscapes. “The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression — its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.” This relationship of an individual to the landscape is built into our human genome. For hundreds of thousands of years before we invented agriculture we lived off the land; that’s what we evolved to do. There is a primal satisfaction in walking through the pristine landscape.

Indigens are conduits for landscape knowledge because they are so strongly rooted in the land. We are still encroaching on the few remaining pristine wilderness landscapes left, e.g. by proposing to extract oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And we are reducing the scope of indigenous lives in those landscapes, through regulation and continuing assimilation. We could certainly do more to protect landscapes, as the recent push to preserve 30% of the land by 2030 suggests. And we should strive to protect indigenous customs , languages, and ways of life, even when doing so provides few immediate practical benefits to the rest of us.

Conservation

Lopez comes from the mold that made Thoreau and Muir. They write in ecstatic terms about their excursions into “nature.” Their ethos is traditional conservation, which is out of fashion among environmentalists now. Thoreau and Muir wrote primarily for city-dwellers whose lives encompassed little natural beauty. Muir wrote mostly of the majesty of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Thoreau wrote primarily about the woods and streams within an afternoon’s walk from his home in Concord, Massachusetts. Their writings are implicit pleas to keep beautiful landscapes in their natural state so they can be enjoyed by those who have the time and means to visit them.

Lopez’ travels are much broader and more culturally cognizant. For me, Arctic Dreams served in part as a Thoreau/Muir-style paean to the natural beauty of the Arctic. It makes me want to go there and see it. But most of Lopez’ writings concern problems he finds at his destinations — cultural, ethical, and environmental problems. And he is much more tuned-in to the people, especially indigenous people, he finds and works with at his destinations. His plea is to preserve natural landscapes as a reservoir of primal knowledge, and as the root of the human psyche.

Thoreau and Muir are the left-side bookends, writing to inspire interest in the largely unexplored natural landscapes opening up in a young America. Lopez is the bookend on the right, mourning the demise of such landscapes world-wide.

Climate Change in the Arctic

Lopez barely mentions global heating in his books, but it’s lurking there, out of the limelight. He recounts a voyage into a strait that, a couple hundred years ago, was iced in most of the year; it was completely clear of ice when his ship passed through it. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. The average temperature in the Arctic has increased by almost 4˚C (7.2˚F), a huge increase. The extent of sea ice is rapidly shrinking — it’s down by around 50% at the sea-ice minimum in September. This shrinkage is part of a positive feedback cycle — the open water that’s replacing the ice absorbs much more heat than the ice did, resulting in the loss of yet more ice.

Global heating is causing huge changes in Arctic ecosystems. Polar bears depend on sea ice for their winter hunting, so their habitat is shrinking; this is one reason why they were listed in 2008 as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Temperature increases are forcing many species of plants and animals in the rest of the world to move toward the poles in search of cooler temperatures, but this is impossible in the Arctic — there’s nowhere further north for them to go. Permafrost, which underlies much Arctic soil, is thawing, and will release formerly trapped methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as it thaws. The methane will increase the amount of heat the Earth retains, leading to more permafrost thaw, another positive feedback.

In its last few months, the Trump administration rushed through the opening of oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We don’t need the oil and gas; indeed, we have proven reserves of fossil fuels that are much larger than the quantities we can afford to burn if we intend to keep global heating below 2˚C. We should be closing, not opening, public lands in the U.S. to oil and gas drilling. It’s particularly galling that the administration should propose to invade pristine lands in the Arctic, lands with thriving but sensitive ecosystems, lands that are the most affected by global heating, with an activity that hastens the climate disaster.

Lopez is not a climate crusader, but much of his writing goes to heart of the moral and ethical choices we collectively make in connection with landscapes and the environment. Climate change is, in my opinion, the most important issue we’ve ever faced as a species, and it is, at the bottom, a moral and ethical issue. Lopez’ voice, urging us quietly but firmly to pay attention to landscapes, ecosystems, and indigenous people, is a timely reminder of our natures as animals and our strong animal connection to the planet on which we live.

About 140 million people are born every year. If births continue at this rate, 140 billion people will be born in the next thousand years. We expect the birth rate will have to diminish, in order to stabilize the global population, so a reasonable assumption is that about 100 billion people will be born between now and 3030. This is 14 times the current population of Earth, which is about 7 billion. Long-term environmental degradations such as climate change and nuclear impacts will affect a large fraction of the 100 billion who will be born during the next millennium.

We will presumably have reached an environmental steady state. Even a small yearly increase, compounded a thousand times, becomes large. For example a 1% yearly increase, compounded a thousand times, becomes a factor of almost 21 thousand. By 3030 we will have realized we cannot keep increasing the resource demands we make on the planet. We will have become net-zero for GHG emissions, we will have stopped using more land for human purposes, we will have balanced fresh water supplies with demand, we will have stopped the wholesale erosion of topsoil, etc.

How Different will it Be?

Some would say that the differences in human life and living conditions between 2020 and 3030 will be much greater than the differences between 1010 and 2020, and that, in 1010, we could not have predicted how life would be in 2020.

Computers, the Internet, television and radio, airplanes, and other technological innovations have changed our lives, and these inventions could not have been specifically predicted in 1010. Given the rate of recent tech change, it’s likely that innovations will change human life much more between now and 3030 than technological innovation has changed life between 1010 and now.

However, history gives another perspective. Reading about life in ancient China, India, Greece, and Rome, one can see that human concerns and human life were remarkably similar to life today. People now care about family and friends, business and money, religion, and politics, just as they did in 1010 or the year 1. For those of us in the middle class, I’d say our lives are 75% the same as those of folks one two thousand years ago. We can expect that the same will be true in a thousand years.

Intertwined with our technical progress since ancient times is our increased prosperity. GDP was fairly constant for the last two thousand years until the industrial revolution, and then it shot up to around 30 times what it had been before. U.S. GDP, adjusted for price changes, has increased by approximately a factor of four over the last fifty years. These increases bring economic benefits: we can buy more things, eat better, live in bigger houses, take more expensive trips, drive nicer cars, etc. But how much does that really improve our lives? I live in a nicer house, and spend more on things and travel than my parents did, but it hasn’t given me a huge increase in well-being compared to them. For well-being, relationships with other people and satisfying work are much more important than income, once you get above a certain middle-class level.

The benefits of a higher GDP are not shared equally, of course. Thomas Pikettty and Bernie Sanders have recently spotlighted economic inequality, which is increasing now, just as it did in that other gilded age before the Great Depression of the 1930s. But I’m not sure income inequality is greater than in the Ancient Greece or Rome of 2000 years ago. They had a lot of slaves, and freedmen, second-class citizens who together did most of the labor. And a thousand years ago, when the economy was still mostly agrarian, feudalism kept peasants bound to working the land. Why don’t the working people vote to redistribute the wealth? It’s been tried several times since the Roman Revolution two thousand years ago, and hasn’t worked yet.

It’s safe to forecast that, in 3030, there will be technical advances we can barely dream of today, and average incomes will be at least an order of magnitude higher than ours. But, as I discuss at more length in my column on Climate Sustainability, a lot of our current GDP growth comes from the unsustainable use of resources, which will have stopped by 3030. We won’t have economic growth that comes from population growth, or from unsustainable increases in consumption. Economic growth will come mostly from productivity increases. There’s no reason to think that economic inequality will be less in 3030 than it is today.

Climate Change

By 3030 we will have reached net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The global average temperature will keep increasing as long as GHG concentrations in the atmosphere keep increasing. We’re seeing wildfires, heat waves, droughts, seal-level rise, and stronger hurricanes in our world, where GHG emissions have pushed the average temperature up just 1˚ C. These and other artifacts of global heating will continue to grow, causing huge economic and personal damages, until we stop emitting GHGs. We appear to be on a path to a 4˚ C-increase world, and the impacts will be much more than four times the impacts of our current 1˚ C-increase world.

It’s difficult to get GHGs out of the atmosphere. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is several hundred years, so a good proportion of CO2 we emit today will be warming the planet in 3030.

There’s always a group of people who say, about virtually any problem, “don’t worry — as technology improves, we’ll invent a technical fix for the problem, so we don’t need to take drastic measure now, which would hurt the economy.” They’ve said it about population, and they’re saying it about the climate crisis.

The perfect solution would be a little box that could be built cheaply, and which would separate CO2 molecules from the air into two atoms of oxygen and an atom of carbon. The carbon would come out of the machine as a flow of diamonds. The separation would require energy, which would need to come from renewable sources. Why can’t we stop all our worry and fuss about the climate crisis, and put money into research to develop the negative-carbon box? Because we don’t have any assurance that such a box can be built. When we’re unsure, the precautionary principle says that we should err on the side of protecting the environment, not the current economy.

Climate activists often talk about climate change being an existential threat to the human race, which means that it could cause our Homo sapiens species to become extinct. The only scenario I’ve seen where that seems plausible is James Hansen’s Venus Syndrome, which he discusses in his book, Storms of My Grandchildren. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and the atmosphere of Venus is hotter than water’s boiling point, so most of the planet’s water is in the atmosphere there. If temperatures on Earth increased past 220˚ F, our water would boil, causing a positive-feedback loop where the boiled water in the atmosphere, a powerful GHG, retains more and more of the outgoing radiation, increasing temperatures even more. It seems plausible to me that a global temperature over 220˚ F could lead to extinction of our species.

But such a huge increase is very unlikely, so I can’t see global heating as an existential threat for humans. But global heating could make a lot more of our planet uninhabitable, as outlined in my Medium column on Whom does the Climate Crisis Harm?. Increasing impacts from the climate crisis will lower the carrying capacity of the planet, and will lower the quality of life for those who survive.

Nuclear

Nuclear weapons are, however, an existential threat, though this threat is out of style among environmentalists and the general public. From a long-term perspective, the fact that the Cold War with Russia is over now doesn’t make much difference in the seriousness of the threat.

Something that has a 1% chance of occurring each year has a 63% likelihood of occurring during the next hundred years, and more than a 99% chance of occurring during the next thousand years.

We still have approximately 14,000 nuclear warheads in the world, mostly belonging to Russia and the U.S., but also possessed by China, the U.K., France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. A crazy leader of any one of these states could, during a crisis, initiate a nuclear missile attack, which could result in a series of nuclear counter-attacks, escalating to the point where most big cities in the world are obliterated, and a lot of Earth’s land becomes uninhabitable. This seems likely to occur before 3030, unless we take steps to reduce the risk.

Nations

Since the year 1010, there have been a lot of changes in the status and boundaries of nation-states. Countries have come and gone. It’s unlikely the U.S. will be the dominant world power in 3030. It’s impossible to predict which country will be strongest then. The U.S. seems to be in decline. We rose to a challenge when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and astonished the world with our production capacity and willingness to sacrifice. Those qualities seem to have abandoned us now; we just want comfortable lives with as little work as possible. China is obviously on the rise. Several historians have theorized that nations go through life-cycle stages like individuals: they’re born, they have a lot of energy as they go through adolescence and early adult life, then settle into complacency in later middle age, and eventually die.

Conflicts between nation-states have caused individuals a lot of grief and hardship in the 20th century. I’d hope that, by 3030, we will have found a better way to resolve the conflicts than war, even though we’ve been trying in vain to do that for several thousand years. The best hope is a world government. The European Union is a good model for how such a government could develop. The EU started as an agreement on coal and steel, and was gradually extended into many other areas of government by treaties among the member states. There is already a network of hundreds of multilateral treaties, and we could gradually build a world government like the EU by adding to them. The biggest obstacle now is the U.S., which has declined to participate in many of the existing multilateral treaties, and has a right-wing fringe virulently opposed to a world government.

Conclusion

Life in 3030 will be very much like it is today, if we don’t destroy the planet with nuclear war. We will have harmed Earth significantly through global heating, and will have lost a large percentage of our plant and animal species because global heating will have destroyed their habitats. We will be richer, but that won’t necessarily make us happier. We can hope we will have improved our institutions to reduce economic inequality and the risk of international conflict.

Unions were set up, starting the late 1800s, to give workers some leverage in bargaining with their employers. A large company can mistreat workers and keep wages low when there are more job-seekers than jobs. Unions allow workers to negotiate collectively with employers, and to strike when negotiations reach an impasse. Unions’ focus is on improving pay and working conditions for their members.

Union membership has been declining in the U.S. for some time. The percentage of workers belonging to a union (called “union density”) in the U.S. has declined from 20.1% in 1983 to 10.3% now. It is high in Scandinavian countries, e.g. 65% in Finland, and low in undeveloped countries. Union membership in countries like China (45%) and Cuba (81%), where the unions are controlled by the government, provides many fewer benefits than in most countries, where the union can negotiate from a position of strength and solidarity with employers on their members’ behalf.

The environmental movement, especially large organizations like the Sierra Club, NRDC, World Wildlife Foundation and Environmental Defense Fund, has aligned itself with labor unions. The BlueGreen Alliance is a U.S. umbrella organization set up by the “Big Greens” and major labor unions to coordinate action.

Environmentalists feel akin to labor unions, partly because they are both positioned on the left side of the political spectrum. They support organized labor politically, even when labor is seeking results that harm the environment. The support doesn’t seem to go both ways. Organized labor never supports the environment when it goes against the economic interests of union members.

Unions Support Fossil Fuel Production

California has been a leader in fighting climate change. It has adopted numerous laws and policies to reduce the demand for fossil fuels in the state, including a cap-and-trade program, and an executive order requiring GHG emissions to be reduced to zero by 2045. A reasonable next step would be to start reducing on the supply side as well: to start phasing out oil and gas production in the state. Reducing GHG emissions to zero by 2045 means, in effect, stopping the combustion of coal, oil, and gas by that date. If we’re not using fossil fuels, then we should stop producing them. Putting a policy in place to stop producing them by 2045 would send a strong signal that the state is serious about dealing with climate change.

But there is an unholy alliance of labor unions with oil and gas producers in California. I’ve been told by staffers in the California Legislature that there is no chance of the Legislature passing a measure to curtail oil and gas production because it would be fought by both labor unions and oil companies, both of which give significant campaign donations to legislators and strongly oppose any measures to curtail or regulation oil and gas production.

Labor unions and oil companies opposed a recent California bill, AB 345, which would have imposed a 2500-foot setback between oil operations and homes, schools, and other sensitive sites. They claimed that it would result in the loss of 7,000 high wage, blue collar, and union jobs. Unions fought this measure even though it provided significant public-health benefits for those living near oil and gas production sites, mostly disadvantaged people of color.

Labor unions are dug in, focused on the past; instead, they should be envisioning a future that’s different from — and better than — the past. Unions have a major role to play in the transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy. There can be as many high-paying blue-collar union jobs in renewable energy as there are on oil and gas rigs now, and unions can help ensure the transition is just and equitable for their members. Oil and gas workers need to be retrained so they have skills that will be marketable after we stop producing fossil fuels. The transition is inevitable, and unions will get a better deal for their members by cooperating and facilitating the transition than by fighting it.

Environmentalists must part ways with labor unions on this issue. It’s too important for there to be a compromise.

Unions Block Police Reform

Black Lives Matter organizers have called for defunding the police, a slogan with an unclear meaning. The literal meaning would be the abolition of police departments. That is unrealistic and impractical. A more nuanced version is that city and county governments should reduce their police budgets, and handle many situations, such as domestic violence, with social workers or other, non-police, non-violent personnel.

Police unions are fighting such reductions. They don’t acknowledge that the unjustified killing of black men is an important enough problem to justify such reforms. They’re stuck in the past.

But, more importantly, police-union contracts block effective enforcement of use-of-force rules. Removing police officers who use deadly force when it’s not needed should be the highest priority now. Given the importance of the problem, we should be erring on the side of dismissing officers who use too much deadly force rather than allowing them to remain. Police unions, stuck in the past, are not going to voluntarily agree to this; their mission is to get as much money and job security for their members as they can.

How can we solve this problem? We need to force the unions’ hand. We can’t afford to wait until it’s time to renegotiate each police-union contract, especially since the unions are politically strong enough in many jurisdictions to prevail in negotiations. We need a law at the state or federal level that makes police investigation information more transparent and renders void police-contract terms unduly protecting officers from investigation and public scrutiny.

Unions Help Workers

Unions play an important part in protecting workers’ rights and in allowing workers to negotiate on equal terms with large companies. These functions are especially important in this age of extreme income inequality and declining job security. But the unions should be more flexible and willing to adapt to changing conditions, such as the climate crisis, and the police’s violent treatment of minorities.

Global heating is a global problem that affects every human, and most plants and animals. Carbon pollution is different from conventional air pollution in that its effects are not localized around emissions sources. The classic environmental-justice scenario locates a polluting coal plant in the middle of a low-income community of color. The plant emits mercury, particulate matter, NOx, and particulate matter, which directly harm human health. These emissions raise the concentrations of these pollutants in the vicinity of the coal plant, so the resulting harms are felt most directly by those living near the coal plant who are, in many case, low-income people of color.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are different. That same coal plant emits large quantities of CO2, but the emissions don’t significantly raise the CO2 concentrations around the plant and CO2 isn’t toxic, anyway. The plant’s GHG emissions affect everyone on Earth, but they don’t affect those living near the plant any more than they affect folks living halfway around the globe.

Location is key for understanding how climate disruption will affect people, but it’s the location where the impacts will be felt, not the location of the emissions causing the impacts, that matters for this purpose. A small percentage of the population lives in a cool place that can accept a few degrees of average temperature increase, far enough from the shore that they won’t be affected by sea-level rise or more-intense hurricanes, in a place where wildfires don’t spread, and with a dependable water supply, so there’s no risk of drought. The climate crisis won’t have much direct effect on these people, but they constitute a small percentage of the global population. Most people will be directly affected.

Direct Impacts

Effects will be felt in the Arctic, where global heating has caused temperature increase twice the global average. Indigenous persons, whose livelihoods depend on hunting and fishing, will be affected the most, because the temperature increases are affecting wildlife habitats.

But billions of people living in other parts of the globe will be forced to move because temperatures where they’re living now will increase enough to make their current locations uninhabitable. Two degrees of global heating will not just raise the temperature everywhere by two degrees; the effects will be more sporadic and extreme, and will include more frequent heat waves where the temperatures are several degrees above the old normal.

Sea-level rise and storm surge will affect the billion people who live on land whose elevation is within 10 meters of sea level. Sea level is projected to rise between 40 and 80 cm (1.3 to 2.6 feet) this century. One to three feet of rise doesn’t sound like a lot, but it will subject land where hundreds of millions of people live to permanent inundation or annual flooding. Many of them will become refugees. The increased sea levels also exacerbate the effects of storms, which themselves will be intensified by all the extra energy global heating has put into the Earth’s climate system. When storms hit land, they can bring storm surges, pushing more water onto land, greatly increasing storm flooding. An increase in the sea level will also contaminate fresh water in aquifers near the shore, by forcing salt water into them.

Let’s consider a hypothetical situation: a rich woman owns a $5 million house on the coast, and a poor woman squats in a shack next door. Sea-level rise is encroaching, and eroding the coast, and the local regulators won’t allow the rich woman to build a sea wall. Without that sea wall, both houses will be undermined and become uninhabitable in ten years. On whom does the impact fall most strongly? Obviously the rich woman will lose her $5 million investment in her house. She can’t continue using it and won’t be able to sell it. The poor woman will bear the cost of moving, but that won’t be much. The economic costs in this case fall squarely on the rich. But the rich woman has many more resources to help her deal with the loss of her home. Money makes a big difference, both practically, and for reducing stress and emotional hardship in the situation.

Wildfires are another type of climate-increased disaster that deprives people of the homes they live in. They constitute a climate feedback in that burning a lot of wood emits CO2, which contributes substantially to global heating. And the fires pollute the air with particulate matter that’s harmful to breathe. They destroy homes and force the inhabitants to move. Just as with seal-level rise, the economic impact of destroying homes falls mostly on the rich, while the non-economic impacts such as stress and insecurity fall mostly on the poor.

A million people die of malaria every year; there are 300 million new infections annually. Malaria is spread by a mosquito that requires warm and wet conditions. The disease is confined mostly to the global south, and is very prevalent in equatorial Africa. Increased temperatures will allow the anopheles mosquito to expand its range into what are now more temperate regions. The ranges of other infectious diseases, such as dengue fever, will expand or move as well. Rich areas will be able to afford public-health measures to keep down the mosquito populations, so the burdens of an increased range for tropical diseases will fall mostly on the poor in the marginal areas into which the diseases will spread.

Agriculture and food security will be impaired. Temperature increases may boost productivity in some locations, but the global net effect will be a decrease in agricultural output, leading to food insecurity for many. For the rich, global heating will raise the price of food. But those who grow their own food, or depend on locally grown food, may face catastrophic food insecurity.

The climate crisis threatens freshwater supplies in many places. Droughts are likely to increase in hot places, and water quality will decline.

Direct impacts of the climate crisis depend mostly on geographic location. There are many types of impacts, and they have different patterns, e.g. temperature increases are highest in the Arctic, and seal-level rise will affect mostly low-lying coastal regions and river deltas. The rich will lose more assets and will accrue higher money damages, but the poor have fewer resources for adaptation, so the emotional and physical costs to them will be higher.

Indirect Impacts

In addition to the direct impacts of climate change on individuals and corporations, there will be indirect impacts. The degree of a direct effect’s impact depends mostly on the geographic location of the impacted person. This is much less true for indirect impacts. The two most significant indirect impacts are species loss and economic impacts.

Species Loss

Biodiversity is declining on our planet, and the decline is accelerating due to the climate crisis and other stressors, such as toxic pollution. The background extinction rate for mammals and amphibians is on the order of one species of mammal going extinct every 700 years. Our current extinction rate is thousands of times higher than this; we’re losing species quickly. Climate change changes ecosystems, making the places where plants and animals live uninhabitable by them. They need to move to survive, but plants move very slowly, and animals need a compatible ecosystem into which to move, which may be unavailable.

Who is affected by species loss? Everyone, now and in the future. It takes several million years for evolutionary processes to generate a new species, so the species we lose today will be lost for all foreseeable generations of humans on Earth. There may be some practical consequences, such as the loss of potential new drugs that could come from plants that go extinct. But the main consequences will not be practical or economic, but spiritual. Biodiversity is an important of the world we live in. The plants and animals that are our companions on this planet enrich our lives in countless ways.

Indirect Economic Impacts

I discussed above some of global heating’s direct impacts, and they may have economic impacts, such as the cost to replace a house built on land that’s flooded due to sea-level rise. But there are a lot of costs that will be paid by governments, and those costs will be passed along to individuals. How they affect individuals will be determined not by the physics of climate change, but by the politics and economics governing how governments and large corporations recover these costs.

We need to phase out oil and gas production by 2050, and to build a renewable-energy infrastructure to replace our current fossil fuel-based systems. Even when a wind farm produces electricity at a lower cost than the gas-fired power plant it replaces, decommissioning the gas plant before the end of its life costs a lot. Somebody will have to pay this cost, and who pays will be determined by politics and economics. Replacing all the gasoline-powered cars and trucks with electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles will cost a lot. Most of the cost is in abandoning gas-powered vehicles before the end of their useful lives.

Few environmentalists acknowledge that it will cost anything, economically, to deal with climate change. They point out that the marginal cost of new renewable energy sources of electricity is lower than the cost of new natural gas plants, that building out a green infrastructure will generate millions of jobs, and allow businesses to profit from the work.

But the major studies of the economics of climate change show that there will be very significant costs. I will write a column on this subject soon, but the quick version is that mitigation (reducing GHG emissions and agricultural and forestry emissions) will cost more if we do it soon, as we should, and that adaptation (adjusting to the new warmer planet) and damages from global heating will cost more if we delay the mitigation. There is an optimal point from an economic perspective, which minimizes the sum total of mitigation and adaptation costs.

According to the graphs on pages 140 and 177 of William Nordhaus’ The Climate Casino, limiting global heating to 2˚C would cost about 1% of global income, and 2˚C of heating would result in damages amounting to 1% of global output, for a total cost of 2%. With heating of 4˚C, mitigation would cost only 0.25%, but the damages would be much higher: around 4%, for a total cost of 4.25%. These are large amounts of money. Global GDP was about USD $81 trillion in 2017, so 4.25% is $3.4 trillion, or about $453 per person per year, globally. The rich in developed countries will pay much more than this average, and the poor will pay less.

The economic burdens of the climate crisis will fall mostly on the rich, because they own the assets that will need to be replaced or repaired. For a just transition, we need to ensure that the rich pay most of the mitigation and adaptation costs. They have received the economic benefits of ignoring the climate crisis so far, and they can afford to pay.

But it is unfair to see the climate crisis in only economic terms. When a family in Bangladesh is forced out of its home due to flooding related to sea-level rise, the impact may be small when expressed in dollars, but the hardship on that family is huge. And all future generations of humans and other animals will be affected by how we deal with the climate crisis this century.

One of the biggest challenges is developing a framework for making the required tradeoffs, based on shared ethical values. Economics must fit into this framework, but economics cannot provide the overall framework, because extra-economic factors like species loss and non-economic hardship are important.

Bottom line: who is affected by the climate crisis? Everyone. The direct effects depend on geographical location, and the indirect effects depend on how we decide to distribute the burdens, through political and economic processes.

There are many environmental increases that are not sustainable: the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the amount of land that’s used for human purposes, and the population of the planet, just to name a few.

Businesses profit from these increases. We keep building more housing and developers make big profits. We keep burning oil and gas and the oil companies make big profits. Businesses know that the status quo is not sustainable and therefore can’t last; they just want to be allowed to continue making money for a while longer — as much longer as possible. They’re like the fat guy who eats enough to gain a pound a month. He knows he has to cut back, but keeps putting off the date when he’ll start his diet in earnest so he can enjoy good eating a bit longer.

Sustainability seems to be still somewhat in fashion among environmentalists, though it’s getting a bit passé. Environmentalists are herd creatures. The Chief Development Officer of one of the world’s largest environmental organizations told me that foundation funders follow trends and fads like 13-year-old girls. And big environmental organizations tend to do what the foundations want them to. A lot of the issues that were once front-and-center, and from which the environmental community has largely moved on, are still important issues, like preservation of public lands, population, and nuclear weapons. Environmentalists seem to be moving on and not talking much about sustainability, though it’s an important lens through which to view many environmental issues.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by all UN member states at the 2015 Sustainable Development Summit in New York. They include social and economic goals, such as ending poverty and hunger, in addition to environmental goals such as clean energy and climate action. In typical U.N. fashion, an entire mini-industry has sprung up around the effort, with conferences, synthesis reports, and sessions at the climate-change COPs. But the SDGs are wonderful goals, and they have my wholehearted support.

Growth Cannot Continue Forever

Even small yearly increases turn into huge increases when compounded over a long period of time. As mentioned above, a one-percent every year will compound into a 20,959-fold increase in a thousand years. So we can’t afford, over the long run, even small yearly increases in our impacts on the environment.

If our depletion of Earth’s resources was at a low enough level, we could afford to wait to start ramping our impacts down to a sustainable level. But that is not the case. We’re already using more land than we should be using, for housing, agriculture, and other development. We’ve depleted supplies of fresh water to the point of scarcity in many parts of the world. And we’ve already emitted enough greenhouse gases to seriously harm the planet. This is an emergency! We can’t instantly cut all these impacts back to the required level (zero, in the case of GHGs), but we can plan to ramp them all down to a sustainable level over the next few decades.

The two main drivers of human environmental impact are population and per-capita consumption. The product of these two numbers is roughly proportional to humans’ environmental impacts.

Population

It used to be OK for environmentalists to discuss population, but recently it’s become fraught with racial implications and thus taboo. The idea seems to be that rich white environmentalist men in developed countries shouldn’t be telling poor women of color in developing countries how many babies they can have. When framed this way, I agree. This formulation also gets to the other aspect that make the issue uncomfortable: if we decided that global population needed to be reduced, how could we do this in a way that is fair, equitable, and non-racist?

Religions traditionally oppose population control, for doctrinal reasons, and because they extend their influence by increasing the ranks of the faithful. They encourage their believers to breed. The basis for this seems to be that they want to leave the decision whether to create a new human life to God. This reasoning should have no place in formulating public policy.

World human population is about 7.8 billion as of this writing. The UN’s medium projection is that this figure will increase to 10.9 billion by 2100. Much of this growth will be in Africa. The 2100 projection exceeds most estimates of the carrying capacity of the Earth — between 4 billion and 9 billion persons. The good news from the UN’s report is that they expect population growth to slow down considerably by the year 2100. The bad news is that the population level projected for 2100 may be unsustainable.

Why shouldn’t we consider what would be the optimal population for this planet? If we could gradually reduce the population to 5 billion, say, we would put a lot less strain on Earth’s limited resources, and everyone could have a better life. Is there a downside to such a plan? We need to stabilize the population because growth can’t continue forever. At some point, if we keep growing, we will exhaust the Earth’s limited resources.
My upcoming book, Earthling, will have a chapter on the many ethical issues relating to population.

Economic Growth

The other factor in causing environmental harm is consumption. We all consume too many resources, at a rate that is not sustainable. This is much truer for folks like me who live resource-heavy lifestyles in developed countries. GDP is a good proxy for consumption, though not exactly right, since some income is saved and not spent for consumption.

Worldwide, GDP has grown by roughly a factor of 20, since 1950, roughly a 4% average annual increase. That’s a big benefit for us — our lives have been improved by all the extra goods and services we’re receiving. Economists and politicians consider GDP growth the leading measure of economic health. The economy is strong when it is growing.

But economic growth, to the extent it’s based on population and consumption growth, is unsustainable. Developers make a lot of money building new houses on vacant land. Where I live, in Southern California, developers are sprawling out huge developments into river valleys and grasslands, which should be left as open space. In a sustainable world, we would not allow new houses to be built on vacant land because we can’t indefinitely increase the land we use for housing. If the population weren’t growing, we wouldn’t need any new housing anyway — just replacement housing.

In a sustainable world, economic growth will come from increases in efficiency; we can get more outputs from the same inputs if we are more efficient. Other than that, the economy will be steady-state, and the yearly GDP increases will be very modest. This would be bad for business, but good for humans and the planet.

Will Technology Save Us?

There is a school of thought holding that we ought not to worry so much about the environment, because technology will save us. Look how much we’ve advanced in the last thousand years, with the invention of cars and planes, TV and the Internet, steel and skyscrapers, and computers. There is no way a person in the year 1010 could have envisioned all this or anticipated how this technology would solve long-standing problems. Just trust that technology will take care of everything.

As an example those who think technology will save us point to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb. They call out its prediction of worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. But the agricultural green revolution came along and allowed farmers in developing countries to greatly increase their yields, so Ehrlich’s dire predictions never came to pass. As technology saved the day for agriculture, they expect it to fix the climate crisis and other environmental problems.

The oil and gas companies are touting negative-emissions technologies, as they claim that carbon management will become an important part of their business. We shouldn’t worry, they say, because they’ll come up with technology to solve the climate crisis, so we don’t have to stop burning fossil fuels. This is pretty pie-in-the-sky. The IPCC refused to consider negative-emissions technologies in their Production Gap Report, due to “multiple feasibility and sustainability constraints.” (p.14). Until a negative-emission technology is proven to be effective and affordable, there is no technological solution to climate change in sight, and we must assume that none will be developed. The precautionary principle says we shouldn’t count on uncertain solutions to environmental problems.

Reversibility

Human’s ability to do long-term harm to Earth came with the industrial revolution, starting in the 19th century. Before that, we’d changed the planet through agriculture, but that change is easily reversible: leave the fields alone for 50 years and they’ll revert back to close to their natural state. During thousands of years before the industrial revolution we became accustomed to exploiting Earth’s resources without worrying about whether it would harm the planet, because we saw those resources as inexhaustible. We didn’t need to even think about sustainability.

But now we do. Now we are pumping enough carbon into the atmosphere that we’re heating up the planet, with all the follow-on consequences: increased storms and droughts, the loss of many species of plants and animals, and sea-level rise, among others. These changes are, in effect, irreversible. Species take millions of years to regenerate. CO2 cycles out of the atmosphere very slowly; it takes hundreds of years.

When people in 3030 look back a thousand years to 2020, they will see a critical time when we could have stopped burning fossil fuels and therefore stopped the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. There is no question we will stop burning fossil fuels eventually, because burning them is not sustainable. We have already caused over 1˚C of heating; this is the global average, and warming in the Arctic is already twice this. The impacts and costs will keep getting worse until we stop. At what point will we stop? We seem to be on a path to 4˚C of heating, which would be catastrophic, not just for us, but for many generations to come. There’s still time to limit the heating to 2˚C if we act decisively now.