“Mitigation has had far more attention than adaptation…. So thanks to various people who alerted me to a new guide to the often-ignored subject of adaptation….” (- David Shukman, below)
The failure of climate mitigation policy grows ever more obvious. It was 36 years ago (1988) that the debate began on the front pages of the New York Times and other leading newspapers, and look where we are now. A tripartite fossil fuel boom … grassroot backlash against wind and solar installations … growing federal budget deficits with Green Energy bribes … and a significant divide in regard to nuclear and geoengineering as ‘climate fixers’.
If the crisis is upon us, then the ‘climate dollar’ must go toward resilience and adaptation (R&A), not mitigation that has no effect on global climate for decades. David Shukman, BBC News Science Editor turned “Independent Consultant/Storytelling Expert,” recently posted:
A good friend once said our bodies can travel by jet but our souls have to walk.
I felt something similar with the contradictions of Climate Week in New York – finding positives amid the traffic fumes and hot air. With the Amazon burning and northern Nigeria underwater, immediate dangers are getting more attention, as they should, giving the week’s insipid slogan “It’s Time” some meaning.
And dealing with those dangers is now edging into the mainstream, at last. It’s a good sign that Boston Consulting Group (BCG), spotting a commercial opportunity, could rustle up a dozen speakers to talk about adaptation. Or is it resilience? Or ‘A and R’? Actually who cares, I thought, gazing out from the 45th floor, as long as new investments save lives in future fires and floods.
One problem is that “prevention doesn’t have a business case” – credit to Dr. Ashwin Vasan for that memorable line, at a Reckitt Bupa roundtable on healthy cities at the Goals House.
Shukman continued:
You might think it would be screamingly obvious to use less fossil fuel not only to slow the rise in temperatures but also to reduce air pollution to cut asthma cases to lighten the burden on hospitals, a beneficial chain reaction. Apparently not, though the case is gaining ground.
As with the two billion people whose health and productivity would be immeasurably improved by access to clean water, a scandal that’s “unforgivable” according to – name drop – Matt Damon, co-founder of Water.org which enables millions to get micro-loans to fund new water connections.
Hearing this master storyteller, it occurred to me that specifics like water supply – at risk from higher temperatures and increasing drought – are the best way to describe the effects of climate change….
Before I left, I spent a few hours in Queens, an often forgotten side of New York that has a view of the Manhattan skyscrapers but feels like another planet. Yoselin Genao Estrella introduced me to victims of flooding. Rain was forecast, making everyone edgy, because the heaviest downpours fill their basement apartments with sewage and threaten lives.
This is where the acronym ‘A and R’ really matters, because getting it right will make people safer in a climate that’s becoming more hostile. Much more to follow.
In the comments, Shukman added:
… waking up to the realities of our new climate. So thanks to various people who alerted me to a new guide to the often-ignored subject of adaptation….
And: “Mitigation has had far more attention than adaptation.”
One reader asked:
So did all of the hashtag#climateweek high-flyers come up with the simple great idea of (deeds not words*) stopping flying to climate conferences, here on in? Pledging hashtag#flightfree
I hope so. Been waiting decades for you to come up with that one. You know, ‘being the change’ ‘walking the talk’ ‘leading from the front’ ‘teaching by example’ And acting as if the truth is real. ‘Flying to climate conferences’ was a sick joke 30 years ago. A good idea like this could go a long way. And save our souls.
Shukman (meekly) responded:
Totally fair point. I’m sure everyone there, like me, believed that somehow their presence was making a difference whether through a well-timed nudge or a revealing insight or providing something useful for others to take back to their bosses and help make a case for change. For each of us, there’s the unavoidable fact that others, like you, will judge us which is never comfortable and which rightly forces some serious self-scrutiny.
I commented:
Resilience and adaptation have been at the core of the free market, wealth-is-health ‘climate policy’ since the beginning. Substitute ‘weather’ for ‘climate’, and this is the argument for the beginning of humankind.
“Climate livability”
“The popular climate discussion … looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability … because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability.” – Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp. 126–127.
Final Comment
Climate mitigation policy is at war with itself. Extreme weather from whatever cause, natural or anthropogenic, calls for immediate relief–and resilience/adaptation for next time. Mitigation policies are a crap shoot and decades out versus the present. Many birds loose in the bush versus one in the hand, so to speak.
And with resilience/adaptation increasingly chosen, the ‘negative externality’ of manmade greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly internalized by anyone’s math. Added to the saturation effect ((diminishing returns)) of CO2 forcing, it is increasingly game-over for the climate activists. May free-market wealth-is-health policies win.
My exchange with David Shukman went further.
Shukman: “Rob, you’re right that mitigation hasn’t cut emissions so far but the effort has been hampered in no small way by the denial, distraction and doubt whipped by fossil fuel interests, you’d have to agree. Now, however, cost reductions for renewables are starting to change that picture. And on the question of living space, when did you last visit an oil field or open cast coal mine?!
Bradley: ” … the effort has been hampered in no small way by the denial, distraction and doubt whipped by fossil fuel interests…”
Far too simple and conspiratorial. Billions of consumers have strong preferences for the best energies–those that are the most affordable, available, and reliable. Those are the stock energies from the sun, not a very dilute flow that is intermittent.
Oil fields and coal mines produce very concentrated energies that are easily neutralized and covered up. Peter Huber made this point well (versus solar/wind sprawl):
“The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material than must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.”
Hans van der Loo commented to both Shukman and me:
at this moment we (wrongly) believe capturing trickle flows of solar energy with metal intensive rebuildables, somehow can replace multi-million years of stored ancient solar energy. However, Physics does not agree with that notion.
Farmers have successfully grown and harvested crops in places formerly deemed too cold or too arid, and most of the new fields were in the North. Remarkably, today’s average climate where wheat is produced is both drier and colder:
“The median annual precipitation norm of the 2007 distribution of North American wheat production was one-half that of the 1839 distribution, and the median annual temperature norm was 3.7 °C lower.”
Agriculture has demonstrated our massive capacity to adapt to changing conditions, whether it becomes warmer or cooler, wetter or drier.
The rational climate change policy has been proven successful: Don’t Fight It, Adapt.
Resilience and Adaptation This should be stressed more and more.