WORLDFIRE - Chapter 6, Part II
Houston, We Have a Problem
View of Apollo 13’s crippled service module after separation (photo credit: NASA)
The climate breakdown we are witnessing is only the beginning. Because carbon emissions remain in the atmosphere for centuries to millennia, things are going to get worse before they get better. But the only way things will ever get better is if we stop feeding the beast. Yet most still talk about a carbon budget as if we actually have one that is safe to burn. We don’t. Burning less carbon only slows the rate at which things continue to get worse. We overdrew our carbon budget for a safe climate a long time ago. Too many climate-fueled disasters are already killing too many people at current levels of pollution. The Earth is already out of energy balance. It is too late for a fossil fuel diet. We need to go on a fossil fuel fast. We can either save the fossil fuel industry or we can save humanity. We can’t save both.
I appreciate how Stanford climatologist Ken Caldeira popped the carbon budget balloon in a 2013 email to climate blogger Joe Romm. Caldeira calls the concept “dangerous for two reasons: 1. There are no such things as an ‘allowable CO2 emissions.’ There are only ‘damaging CO2 emissions’ or ‘dangerous CO2 emissions.’ Every CO2 emission causes additional damage and creates additional risk… [and] should not be allowed. 2. If you look at how our politicians operate, if you tell them you have a budget of XYZ, they will spend XYZ. Politicians will reason: ‘If we’re not over budget, what’s to stop us to spending? Let the guys down the road deal with it when the budget has been exceeded.’ The CO2 emissions budget framing is a recipe for delaying concrete action now. We should be framing the issue around what we need to do today: stop building things with tailpipes and smokestacks and start retiring the things we have already built that do have tailpipes and smokestacks.” This is just common sense.
So how bad might things eventually get? James Hansen, one of the world’s leading authorities on global heating, warns that “burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice-free but human-free.” Hansen is right to call our knowing destruction of the climate “a moral issue of unprecedented scope, a matter of intergenerational injustice, as today's adults obtain benefits of fossil fuel use, while consequences are felt mainly by young people and future generations.” Instead of rising up to protect our children from the horrors of climate breakdown, we are shredding their atmospheric security blanket by pumping more, not less, carbon pollution into the air. We are saddling our children with a massive carbon debt, one they can never repay. By knowingly subjecting our kids and grandkids to a future of societal disintegration and climate chaos, we are perpetrating an unconscionable act of intergenerational injustice. As stewards of their future, we are shirking our moral duty to deliver future generations a planet that is healthy and habitable. In 2018, the World Health Organization warned that ongoing changes to the climate are expected to result in approximately 5 million deaths–many of them children–between 2030 and 2050. Let me repeat that. The road we are now on is projected to lead to five million people dying, many of them innocent children.
But it is not just about what will happen. It is about what is already happening. The World Health Organization reports that climatic changes may have caused more than 150,000 deaths globally in the year 2000. We know an estimated 52,000 to 70,000 Europeans died from a single climate-related heat wave during the summer of 2003. An underreported 2012 study commissioned by 20 governments whose nations are most threatened by global heating estimated that on average, 400,000 people (again, most of them children) are already dying each year from climate-related hunger and disease. Their report further projected that “continuing today’s patterns of carbon-intensive energy use” would lead to 6 million deaths annually, including almost 700,000 climate-related deaths. A more recent Harvard study found air pollution from fossil fuels killed a staggering 8.7 million people in 2018, one in five deaths worldwide. These aren’t just numbers. These are human beings. This is already a global humanitarian crisis of gargantuan proportions.
Climate justice demands that countries that have polluted the least be treated fairly by nations that have polluted the most. Given America’s outsized role in creating this humanitarian crisis with our legacy emissions–the U.S. has emitted roughly one-third of all carbon pollution currently in the atmosphere–it would be unconscionable for us to disregard the world’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens now dying from the impacts of climate breakdown. In the low-lying nation of Bangladesh alone, UNICEF in 2019 warned that the lives and futures of 19.4 million children are at risk from climate-related floods, cyclones, and droughts. In 2023, UNICEF reported that more than 43 million children have already been driven from their homes over the past six years as a result of extreme weather events, “the equivalent to approximately 20,000 child displacements per day.” It would be a monstrous act to ignore the plight of the children, including our own.
In 2012, the National Wildlife Federation issued a groundbreaking report called “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States.” An outgrowth of a 2009 conference in Washington, DC, the report cautioned “America’s 70 million children will not only suffer long-term effects from climate change but will also experience acute reactions to natural disasters and extreme weather events. Some children are already anxious about global warming and begin to obsess (understandably) about the future, unmoved by the small reassurances adults may attempt to put forth.” The report’s goal was “to fill in the gap in our awareness of the psychological impacts of climate change, and by exposing the emotional side of the issue, to find the place in our hearts that mobilizes us to fly into action, forewarned, determined, relentless. It also is a call for professionals in the mental health fields to focus on this, the social justice issue of all times, with their capacity to work through denial and apathy, to bring insight and commitment before it is too late.” It warned: “If we continue the adolescent-like disregard for the dangers we are being warned of, driving green house [sic] gasses up with only casual concern, there will be consequences. As our world begins to unravel and our role is undeniable, all eyes will be on us. Questions beg to be asked:
What will the rest of the world think of us?
Where will we be safe?
How will we feel about ourselves?”
In my mind, these questions go to the very core of who we are as individuals. They also drill down to who we are as a nation. Consider these three key report findings:
“The United States is increasingly disliked, worldwide, as a global warming villain. Though representing less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. emits about 25 percent of the world’s green house [sic] gasses.”
“The American mental health community, with its combination of clout and expertise, could help confront public policy leaders with the full implications of inadequate action on climate change. As experts in breaking down denial, and dedicated to bringing reality and rational thinking into decision making to help people get off destructive paths, mental health professionals should be in the vanguard of the fight against global warming.”
“In the final analysis inflicting the burden of climate change on the vulnerable is an immoral act that puts future generations in mortal danger.”
Being viewed as an immoral villain is not something I think most Americans would be okay with, yet this is how we are now seen by many around the world. A 2021 global survey of 16-25 year-olds found 75 percent of the respondents frightened of the future, with more than half going so far as to say they believe humanity is doomed. So much for idyllic, worry-free childhoods like the one I was so blessed to have. It angers me that children growing up today are saddled with the fear that they may not even have a future. Instead of patronizing our kids with platitudes or putting the burden on their generation to turn things around, shouldn’t every parent in America be picking up the climate banner and fighting like hell to protect them? By enlisting in the battle to safeguard their future, we might even regain their trust.
Many climate activists, including me, have suffered from what report co-author Lise van Susteren, a DC-based forensic psychiatrist, calls Pre-Traumatic Stress disorder. As reported in Grist in 2014, it is “a term she coined to describe the mental anguish that results from preparing for the worst, before it actually happens.” In 2018, she amended her diagnosis to “Pre-Traumatic Stress condition,” explaining that “given how late the hour is, and how grave the consequences, the abnormality now is not having Pre-Traumatic Stress condition.” What haunts me the most is her assertion that by leaving our children “a future that is uncertain at best,” our generation is displaying “unconscious aggression” toward future generations. Naming this destructive behavior is the first step toward putting a stop to it. Beyond needing to mentally and physically prepare for the cascade of climate disasters to come, we need to acknowledge the harm we are already inflicting on our children and posterity by our collective failure to act. By copping to the unconscious aggression being manifested through our inaction, we can transform that knowledge into action by becoming fierce protectors of those in our charge.
In just a few generations, we have managed to dig up and burn much of the fossil fuels the Earth took eons to create, heating the atmosphere to levels not seen in eons. But not all of that heat stays in the air. About 90 percent of it has been absorbed by the oceans. How much heat is that? As reported in Scientific American, “if the heat generated between 1955 and 2010 had gone into the Earth’s atmosphere instead of the oceans, temperatures would have jumped by nearly 97 degrees Fahrenheit.” Think of that excess heat as a gigantic engine fueling hurricanes. Oceanic carbon dioxide levels have similarly soared, leading to an increase in ocean acidification that could result in the horrifying prospect of marine organisms no longer being able to form calcium carbonate shells. In recent decades, scientists have also seen a marked decline of microscopic marine algae called phytoplankton. Why should you care? Phytoplankton not only comprise the base of the marine food chain. They produce half the world’s oxygen and naturally remove about 30% of our carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. 22 prominent marine scientists, referencing a mass extinction event, have warned that “CO2 from burning fossil fuels is changing the chemistry of the seas faster than at any time since a cataclysmic natural event known as the Great Dying 250 million years ago.”
Then there is the worsening humanitarian crisis of climate migration. In 2018, the World Bank analyzed expected climate migration from three regions of the world: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Their report “projects that without concrete climate and development action, just over 143 million people… could be forced to move within their own countries to escape the slow-onset impacts of climate change.” This is just internal migration in those three regions of the world. Think about the billions of global climate refugees unabated global meltdown will create. A 2023 study estimated the 2.7°C temperature rise we are on track for by 2030 driving 2 billion people out of the “climate niche” in which humanity has thrived. According to Oxfam, climate-fueled disasters have already forced an estimated 200 million people from their homes since 2008. In the U.S., more than 3 million Americans lost their homes to climate disasters in 2022. We need a global plan for this. If you’re a human being, you’re part of the human family. And what do families do? They take care of each other. Families may squabble, but in the end we’re all in this together. Either we unite as one human family and survive, or we are headed for a hellish, Mad Max-type dystopian future.
Driving some of that migration will be worsening food shortages. Without food, people die. One 2017 study predicts that global heating could result in wheat, soybean, and corn yields in America’s breadbasket plunging by up to nearly 50 percent by century’s end. Absent adaptation, the World Bank projects similar wheat yield declines for Central America and other regions of the world at about 2°C (3.6°F) of heating. In Africa, extreme drought is already wreaking havoc on pastoralists and livestock. The geopolitical implications of all of this are staggering, yet that same World Bank is still investing billions in the fossil fuel industry. Unless we course correct quickly, we are headed for mass starvation, economic chaos, and a future filled with mass migration and conflict. We’ve already gotten a taste of this in Syria, where human-caused changes to the climate have been implicated in the conflict.
Also driving that migration will be sea level rise. It might alarm you to learn that the grandfather of climate science, James Hansen, who has consistently been ahead of the curve in foreseeing climate impacts, is predicting a sea level rise of six to ten feet by 2065. Six to ten feet would make ghost towns of coastal cities like New York. As it is, cities like Annapolis, Maryland; Charleston, South Carolina; and Miami, Florida are already experiencing sunny-day flooding often one to two feet deep. Other scientists are warning that rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could result in a global water rise of up to six to 15 feet by century’s end. A single glacier in Greenland called the Zachariae Isstrom glacier that is currently breaking up into the ocean has enough water in it to raise sea levels one and a half feet globally. Another collapsing glacier in Antarctica called the Thwaites “Doomsday” glacier could itself raise sea levels by up to three feet. All told, the Greenland Ice Sheet has enough water in it to eventually raise the world’s seas 23 feet. Greenland and Antarctica have been losing ice at a rate six times faster than that observed in the 1990s, putting us on track with what top climate authorities consider to be a worst-case scenario.
A haunting expression of Greenland in meltdown mode was caught on film thanks to acclaimed photographer James Balog, founder of Extreme Ice Survey, an on-the-ground photographic study of the world’s rapidly retreating glaciers. Balog, who lives near Boulder, starred in an award-winning documentary called Chasing Ice that features unforgettable footage of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed. The image is seared into my mind: a Greenland glacier the size of the lower tip of Manhattan topples like a row of skyscrapers, several times taller than real ones, tumbling and crumbling. At one point, a massive chunk of dark ice resembling a giant whale rises out of the deep, before the leviathan drops back down into the polar depths, with the water around it exploding into plumes of icy white froth. Glaciers worldwide are now melting and calving at an alarmingly rapid rate.
In 2013, Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, then commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, raised eyebrows when asked about “the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region.” Locklear said “significant upheaval related to the warming planet ‘is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen… that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about… You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level.’” By 2016, five of the Pacific’s Solomon Islands had already vanished beneath the waves. Entire island nations like The Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and The Maldives are also drowning. In its analysis, “Disaster Alley,” Australia’s National Centre for Climate Restoration reported: “A one-metre sea level rise would flood 20% of the area of Bangladesh and displace 30 million people. India has already surrounded Bangladesh with a double strand ‘climate refugee’ fence patrolled by 80,000 troops, in anticipation of a migration crisis.” Closer to home, the Florida Keys, where I once lived, are slowly being swamped. Much of south Florida will likely have to be abandoned in the not-too-distant future. Think about how many climate refugees that will create. Picture a managed retreat from Atlantic coastal cities as seas continue to rise. It is projected that rising seas could create up to 2 billion climate refugees globally by 2100.
I know what it is to be a climate refugee. I have experienced how disorienting it is to be instantly uprooted from your home and community, fleeing with little more than the clothes on your back. I know what it feels like to be traumatized, stumbling around in the fog of shock. What I cannot imagine is the shock and trauma of being uprooted from your country and culture. As a privileged white American male, I enjoyed advantages most climate refugees do not, but this does not change the fact that what helped me regain my footing so quickly was a vast outpouring of compassion, concern, and support from friends and family, my community, local charities, and federal, state and local government agencies. The hard times coming present us with an opportunity to rediscover our common humanity by truly loving our neighbors, and uniting as one human family. The gift is our chance to evolve.
You have probably heard the saying: “There is nothing like the prospect of one’s own impending execution to focus the mind.” Now that we know it is humanity’s head on the chopping block, the question becomes, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to meekly surrender to a grisly fate–as the sponsors of the suicidal status quo would have us do–or are we going to free ourselves? Will we continue rushing headlong to our own destruction, taking down much of the rest of creation with us, or will we wake up and make peace with the planet? As I see it, our choice is really quite simple: either we make an evolutionary leap in consciousness and get to keep living on this animated blue marble of a planet or we decide not to evolve and we don’t. Either we make a climate breakthrough or we succumb to climate breakdown. It’s not much more complicated than that. The good news is we still have a choice in the matter. The bad news is we keep putting off making a decision. The longer we wait to decide, the more needless suffering there will be. If we choose not to make a decision, the decision will ultimately be made for us.
Experts are sounding the alarm that we must stop what we are doing, but instead of turning down the heat, we just keep cranking the burner up higher. Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, Michael Mann, warns: “We are increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere at rates far greater than any of the most rapid events that happened in the deep geological past.” Professor Mann further asserts: “There is no precedent for what we are doing to the atmosphere. It is an uncontrolled experiment.” By radically altering the climate, we are playing a deadly game, one we can’t win. You can’t fool Mother Nature. We are almost acting as if we have some sort of collective suicide pact. Or could it be that we have somehow unconsciously created the climate crisis to spur our own awakening as a species?
Because humans have so fundamentally altered the atmosphere, many scientists are now saying we have entered a new geological age, with some projecting “potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.” They call it the Anthropocene, meaning the Age of Humans, and they don’t intend that as a compliment. The Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene,’ describes it as “the period of Earth's history during which humans have a decisive influence on the state, dynamics and future of the Earth system,” including the worldfire we have lit. In a 2017 National Centre for Climate Restoration report, climate expert Hans Joachim Schellnhuber declared: “[C]limate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.” Astrophysicist Adam Frank drove this point home in a 2018 interview with journalist Chris Hedges: “The idea that we’re destroying the planet gives us way too much credit… Certainly, we’re pushing the earth into a new era… in the long run, the earth is just going to pick that up and do what is interesting for it. It will run new evolutionary experiments. We, on the other hand, may not be a part of that experiment.”
In her book, This Changes Everything, award-winning author Naomi Klein asks “what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”
All but the most obtuse climate deniers can see that we are in peril, but just how much peril does not seem to have yet sunk in for most Americans. The reality is that spaceship Earth is critically crippled and unless we get back on the free return, and do it soon, our crew is not going to make it home alive. Just as with the Apollo 13 mission, where men and women of science saved the day when technology broke down, so do we now need women and men of science to help us safely navigate the asteroid field of climate chaos. Just as a carbon dioxide crisis almost doomed our Apollo 13 astronauts, so do the crewmembers of spaceship Earth today have an existential carbon dioxide crisis. The first step to solving any life-threatening emergency is acknowledging that you have one. Only by honestly grappling with the severity of the threat we face can we harbor any hope of surviving it. Had the crew of Apollo 13 pretended everything was fine, or had Ground Control been blasé about their plight, all three astronauts would have perished, their lifeless bodies left to drift forever through the dark void of space. Instead, the courageous crewmembers got focused on doing what they had to do to survive and the tireless Mission Control operations team–the average age was late 20s–did what they had to do to bring our astronauts safely home. As crewmembers of spaceship Earth, we–every one of us–must get similarly focused on doing what must be done to salvage our crippled craft.
There has never been a clearer need for a modern-day Mission Control to coordinate the rescue of our dangerously compromised spaceship Earth. Let no one say the United States lacks the genius or resources to mount such a global rescue mission. Similar to what the Apollo 13 mission dramatically demonstrated, we can save ourselves by dedicating our best and brightest to solving this life-and-death emergency. Just as the space experts at Mission Control found a way to bring our courageous astronauts safely home long ago, so can experts operating a Climate Mission Control bring the crew of spaceship Earth home today. Just as tragedy yielded to triumph then, so can we find a way now, but we must focus on this mission as if our lives depended on it because for many of us, they do.
Our safe and stable climate is gone. The world is on fire and we lit the match. Temperatures keep going up while humanity’s prospects keep going down. The survival of civilization hinges on containing the raging worldfire we ignited. If there is a silver lining to be found in the peril of climate breakdown, it is the potential, indeed the imperative, for a new age of global cooperation. The threat to every person alive today is so overwhelming as to demand such cooperation. By honestly facing our fear together, we can find our way to common courage. United, there is hope that we can actually solve this global emergency. Humans know how to halt polluting carbon emissions. Mother Nature knows how to safely draw them down.
Lest you find the grim news I have shared in this chapter paralyzing, many scientists share my hope about humanity’s prospects. One who especially caught my attention is cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, who is part of a growing group of scientists working to bridge the gap between spirit and science. In a wide ranging interview with the UPLIFT Media channel, Lipton explains how our current behavior finds us trapped in an old story “so destructive that we’re facing our own extinction,” before showing us a way out of the trap: “It’s the story that is creating the world, and by necessity, we have to change the story… We don’t need to try to fight the old story. We simply need to walk outside the old story and build a new story. People will leave the old story when they see a new story working.” This book is my modest attempt at adding a few bricks to the building of that new story.
We are not lacking for visions of Earth-honoring ways of living. In fact, this wellspring of conscious creativity may well be our richest resource. Here are bricks other creative souls have laid to that foundation: bullet trains; light rail; car sharing; car-free zones; depaving; bike infrastructure; bike sharing; living buildings; bio-asphalt; bacteria bricks; zero carbon cement; hemp houses; bamboo flooring; low-flush toilets; composting toilets; natural lawns; zeriscaping; green roofs; white roofs; solar-shaded parking lots; rainwater harvesting; drip irrigation; tiny houses; little free libraries; repair cafes; thrift stores; Styrofoam bans; plastic bag bans; municipal utilities; smart glass; smart thermostats; smart grids; solar gardens; community gardens; community supported agriculture; food co-ops; farmers markets; credit unions; barter economies; local economies; bioregional economies; eco-villages; transition towns; regenerative cities; community land trusts; urban homesteading; living laboratories; wildlife corridors; algae fuels; methane digesters; sail transport; marine permaculture; kelp farming… I could keep going forever because there is literally no end to the list of climate crisis solutions available to us. Nor is there any shortage of individual actions we can take, regardless of our station in life. Here are just a few to help prime the pump: buy less, fly less, maximize trips, minimize waste, eat less meat, turn down the heat, grow a garden, compost your food scraps, ride a bike, climate strike.
Yes, we live in perilous times, but it is also an exciting time to be alive, for the dangers we face are matched only by the opportunities they present to reset our relationship with our vibrant, living Earth. For the work before us is not just to ward off climate calamity. It is to build a richer, more resilient, future on Gaia. This is where the vaunted human capacity for creative imagination comes into play. This is where everyone gets to play.
Now let’s get back on the road.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.