Absolute Zero

Prof. Julian Allwood

cam.ac.uk 

 

We don't need any more talking - just action!

 

 

As I'm sure most readers will know, carbon neutrality refers to that glorious time to come - presently projected to be 2050 in the UK - when we finally achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and make the radical transition towards a post-carbon economy in which all the major concerns of a modern state - transport, energy, agriculture, and industry - will be sustainable and environmentally friendly.  

 

Unfortunately, such an eco-utopia probaby won't be so great for the majority of people living within it: they'll be poorer, colder, less mobile, less free, and living on a diet of rice and dried insects. 

 

This becomes clear when you read a 2019 report from the UK FIRES consortium entitled Absolute Zero and published by Cambridge University. Authored by Professor Julian Allwood and colleagues, it sets out to answer the question of how Britain might achieve its net zero goal - to which it is legally committed thanks to the Climate Change Act - within 30 years.   

 

The report - which can be read by clicking here - basically says yes to electric cars, trains, heat pumps, and homegrown vegetables, and no to pretty much everything else: from steel and cement to beef and lamb; from aviation and shipping to gas central heating.

 

And you thought life in lockdown was grim! 

 

Well, brace yourself, for this has just been a trial run for what lies ahead: a revolutionary period in which our present lifestyle is abandoned in favour of a model that seems to have been borrowed from the Khmer Rouge ... It's tough, kid, but it's green ...         

 

 

Note: readers interested in this topic might like to watch a 25-minute video on YouTube in which Professor Allwood tries to sell us the notion of absolute zero, arguing that we can still enjoy a good life whilst reducing our energy consumption by 60%, providing, that is, we accept restraints in certain areas - such as what we eat and how we travel - in order to deliver zero emissions and secure a safe future: click here. 

      It's amusing how, on the one hand, Allwood says that the kind of drastic social and economic changes being advocated clearly require public debate, whilst, on the other hand, he insists that we don't need any more talking - just action (a view that all ideological fanatics ultimately subscribe to). 

 

 

Heide Hatry's Icons in Ice and an Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears

Dylan: the All-Singing Snow Bear with Guitar

Heide Hatry (2021) 

For more bears go to Instagram

 

 

There's no doubting the genius of Heide Hatry's Schneebären currently residing in New York's Central Park (near the Upper West Side entrance off 86th Street - hurry before the temperatures rise and they are gone forever). 

   

And, of course, I share her concern with environmental issues and animals threatened with extinction due to habitat destruction, etc. 

 

Having said that, I don't really buy into the idea of a climate emergency or worry about carbon footprints. 

 

And it might also be pointed out that the polar bear population is significantly larger than it was fifty years ago - thanks to a ban on hunting - even if melting Arctic sea ice might very well prove problematic to their welfare (and survival) at some point in the future; scientists project polar bear numbers will have fallen 30% by 2050. 

 

Presently, however, there are an estimated 25,000 of these magnificent creatures walking around and hunting seal pups - mostly in Canada - divided into nineteen distinct sub-populations; some of which are declining, some of which are stable, and two of which are actually increasing in size. 

 

So it's not all bad news; they're certainly not all starving to death and, again, let's remember that in 1971 there were only about 5,000 polar bears left in the wild.  

 

But keep up the good work Heide - and stay warm! Your snow sculptures bring much joy into what is a deeply depressing world right now and like many others I'm deeply touched by them.     

 

 

Sur la terre et le terrorisme: A Brief Sadean Response to Rebecca Solnit

According to the American writer Rebecca Solnit, it was no coincidence that the Christchurch mosque massacre took place on the same day and in close vicinity to a climate protest by youngsters with hope and idealism in their hearts: "It was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one".

Was it? Surely such perfect coherence - or synchronicity - is in the mind of the beholder ... 

But then Solnit is an idealist who specialises in discerning causal relations and meaningful connections between events; a woman who believes in harmonious global unity, which she describes as "the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems [...] on which that life depends".

Other than the murderous racism, the thing she really dislikes about white supremacists is that they refuse to care about climate change and thus threaten to destroy or disrupt the above systems, making the world not just warmer, but more chaotic, "in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships".  

This chaos, according to Solnit, is essentially an extension of terrorist violence; the violence not of guns and bombs, but of "hurricanes, wildfires, new temperature extremes, broken weather patterns, droughts, extinctions, famines" that the poor Earth is coerced or triggered into unleashing.

And this is why climate action, she says, has always been and must remain non-violent, in stark contrast to the actions carried out by men like Brenton Tarrant. For environmentalism is a movement to protect life and restore peace and harmony; protesting against global warming is "the equivalent of fighting against hatred" and disorder. In other words, it's a form of counter-terrorism. 

Personally, I think such claims are highly contentious, to say the least. But who knows, perhaps Ms. Solnit is right. After all, not only does she know a lot of climate activists, but she also knows what motivates them ... Love! Love for the planet, love for people (particularly the poor and vulnerable), and love for the promise of a sustainable future.

How many people at the opposite end of the political spectrum from herself and her friends she also knows isn't clear. Presumably not many. But that doesn't stop her from dismissing them all as irresponsible climate change deniers, unwilling to acknowledge that "actions have consequences", and full of the kind of libertarian machismo and entitlement that ultimately ends in violence.    

What Solnit doesn't seem to consider is that the Earth is a monster of chaos and indifference; that it's not a living system or self-regulating organism and is neither sentient nor morally concerned with the preservation of life.

I think it's mistaken to think of the planet as some kind of home, sweet home and to ascribe the world with some sort of will. But, if we must play this game, then it's probably best to take a neo-Gnostic line and accept that all matter and events are imbued with the spirit of evil.

Indeed, push comes to shove, I'm inclined to think that human agency and geological catastrophe conspire not because innocent Nature has been groomed by terrorists or provoked into taking her revenge due to man-made climate change (as some followers of Lovelock like to imagine), but because they are both expressions of what is a fundamentally immoral existence. 

Finally, Solnit might like to recall this from Sade writing in Justine: "Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."

See:

Rebecca Solnit, 'Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy', The Guardian (19 March 2019): click here to read online. 

Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips, (Oxford University Press, 2012). 

See also the excellent essay by David McCallam entitled 'The Terrorist Earth? Some Thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard', in French Cultural Studies 23 (3), (SAGE Publications, 2012), 215-224. Click here to access as an online pdf via Academia.edu.

Amongst other things, McCallam indicates how eighteenth-century discourses on revolutionary politics and the aesthetics of the sublime provide the conceptual framework for the contemporary idea of the Earth as terrorist; an idea, developed by Jean Bauadrillard, that allows us to think terror attacks and natural disasters interchangeably.   

Note: The photo of Rebecca Solnit is by John Lee: johnleepictures.com

Two Inconvenient Truths

Poster by Stanislav Petrov 

deviantart.com 

I: Habitat Heterogeneity Leads to Greater Biodiversity 

According to the ecologist and evolutionary biologist Chris D. Thomas, paradise hasn't been lost because we never had it to begin with: "The harmonious coexistence of humans and the rest of nature in the distant past is a romanticized and largely fictional notion" [59].

Thus it is that the relationship between man and nature remains an often violent one, involving environmental destruction and species extinction. Having said that, human beings have also (inadvertently perhaps) created a "world of new opportunities for those animals and plants capable of seizing them" [59].

Already I can hear the obvious objection from the green lobby: There were once huge areas of land covered by dense forest. Animals and plants wouldn't need new opportunities if only we conserved what remained of these primordial environments.

And, yes, it's true, ancient woodland does contain a great number of trees and many rare species.

However, it's only by converting it into a mixed landscape consisting of a patchwork of forest and various human-created habitats, that the number of species significantly increases: "This is because new species move into human-created habitats faster than the previous residents of the region die out." [67]

This, obviously, is an inconvenient truth for those who oppose all deforestation, for example, and dream of protecting pristine nature as they imagine it. But it's a truth, nevertheless, that if you want to maximise the number of animals and plants, then accelerating habitat heterogeneity is the way to go.


II: Life Prefers Warm and Wet

To say that the world's climate is getting hotter is to state a scientific fact. But to claim that global warming will prove catastrophic for life on Earth is a moral and ideological interpretation of that fact - and a misinterpretation too. For most animals and plants like it warm and wet and will exhibit enhanced physiological performance if the global thermostat is nudged up a degree or two.

Of course, there will be climate change casualties; "at least 10 per cent of all species that live on the land are expected to perish, and possibly double this number" [78]. But the rest - being naturally more dynamic and adaptable - are likely to survive and prosper by migrating, if necessary, to where the conditions best suit them.

Conservationists may not like it, but life is chaotic and in a state of constant flux. Nothing has ever stayed the same and as soon as you begin to think on grand timescales you realise that species are essentially nomadic: "Biological communities are transient. ... That is how species survive climate change. They move around. ... Any attempt by humans to keep things just as they are is utterly pointless." [84]

Thanks to human activity, it's going to get warmer. And wetter. Warmer and wetter than it has been for three million years. But, amazingly, around two-thirds of the species that researchers have studied in recent decades have already wised up to the fact and "shifted their distributions in response" [91].

At the present rate of movement, within just a few centuries we will have a "new biological world order" [92] as subtropical species, for example, move into the temperate zones and former inhabitants of the temperate region "try their luck in the polar world" [92-3]. And this will very likely increase biodiversity, even if the total number of species on Earth is likely to be lower.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with Al Gore or cause Vivienne Westwood to get her knickers in a twist by pointing out this inconvenient truth concerning global warming; I'm not even advocating that we should stop thinking seriously about climate change and its likely consequences.

I'm simply saying - in agreement with Chris Thomas - that we need to accept the reality of the world we live in and encourage the movement of so-called invasive species "because botanical and zoological world travellers will form the basis of the world's new ecosystems, just as they have when the climate has changed in the past" [94].

See: Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (Allen Lane, 2017). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read a related post to this one - on biodiversity in the Anthropocene - click here.