ecospirit

In May, 2000, I taught my last college class as a tenured interdisciplinary humanities teacher, retiring early from exile in the Northern Plains.  I returned to the NC mountain land trust where I had first raised my sons, trained with Joanna Macy, and started working as a climate educator with North Carolina IPL, then a facilitator of Macyesque groups working on values, feelings, and the key issue of personal will around climate disequilibrium.  The carbon count was 370.

That fall came the pivotal election between the most consummate climate politician we have known, Al Gore, and the junior George Bush.  We all know the heartbreaking result, which issued in eight years of gentle nudges, trusting the market would do what was needed, while Big Fossil profits continued.  With the rise of China as an economic power, and its admission to the WTO, emissions began to rise more precipitously.  Admission to that key club and driver of CO2 emissions happened during my training with Joanna and her husband Fran that fall in California.  A poet in our training group of thirty broke into sobs as Fran conveyed the news.  She knew what this would mean.

Despite Gore's loss, Republicans during the next eight years agreed that climate change was a real threat.  They just differed with Democrats on how to approach it.   Their platform in 2008 affirmed the following: "The same human activity that has brought freedom and opportunity to billions has also increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. While the scope and long-term consequences of this are the subject of ongoing scientific research, common sense dictates that the US should take measured and reasonable steps today to reduce any impact on the environment. those steps...will also be good for our national security, our energy independence and our economy." By the 2008 election, CO2 stood at 392 ppm. 

In 2008, I remember the electricity in the air as I attended an Obama rally at a stadium in Asheville, NC, my older son Jacob at my side, tears of disbelief in his eyes at having a candidate he could be proud to vote for. Sitting on her bed with my mother in her retirement home apartment,  I watched the vote from Eastern NC on election night that put him over the top.  She grew up there, and was proud and elated. It was a truly memorable moment with one of the key persons in my life.

I was impressed with almost everything about the new rockstar president, both in terms of style and tone, as well as  policy. My, could that fellow speak with authority, intelligence  and charm!  But when I saw that his number one priority was health care, and not climate change, I felt deep in my gut that this was the beginning of the end of the global civilization which had given me and my family our extraordinary privilege, living like kings. Not to mention an earth where a reasonable number of species might survive for evolution to work her forces of renewal. By the 2012 election, the Republican Party had been captured by Big Fossils, who harnessed the same public relations team that the tobacco lobby had employed to mislead about smoking and cancer.  Rather quickly, the current anti-science, anti-climate stance took hold, and  Mitt Romney ran as a climate know-nothing, making moderates yearn for John McCain. As for Obama, climate was now his  biggest priority, but it was too late, for he had lost the legislative branch, and lost the moment in earthtime to act . In 2014, the usually-cautious International Energy Agency announced we had 5 years to make substantial progress on emissions, or face a cascade of irreversible feedback  mechanisms. In 2012, CO2 stood at 393.

When Trump won the presidency, things could not look worse on the climate front.  But my blog at the time tried to put this into perspective. In the early part of his presidency, I tried to respond to his assaults on the climate, at least taking the time to disparage his acts.  But by the end, and surely this must be the end, I had long ago stopped reading. By the end of his assault on the earth, he had overturned over a hundred climate regulations and installed hundreds of conservative judges for whom the earth and any non-industrial denizen had no standing.  The culmination of this anti-environmental assault came with Trump's nomination of a Supreme Court Justice who said in her rushed hearing that climate change was “controversial.”  There is “settled law,” Judge Barret, and one hopes that Roe v. Wade is a prime example of that (though she would not say so), and there is also settled scientific fact.  “Controversy” in this case comes from the rightwing disinformation machine, to which her Catholic Right subscribes.

A year ago, during the battle for the Democratic nomination for president, I agreed with Naomi Klein that a Biden presidency would "doom the human race." In other words, no matter what other policy differences with Trump, the result for the climate would be the same. Some say that, if Biden wins, he has the chance to do more on the climate than any other president.  But that possibility hinges on the Democrats taking the Senate, which is not a done deal. 

As a consummate political animal, Biden has responded to the the forces within his party, pushing him far beyond his lackluster position last November, when he declined the Weather Channel's invitation to join their program on saving the planet . Today's reality in the Democratic Party is that the Green New Deal is pushing all office holders to either join those who crafted this comprehensive, expensive program, or present a viable alternative. Of course, politically viable and viable in terms of a livable planet are not the same thing.  Not at all. On the eve of the election, CO2 ppm reads just under 412.

As I have outlined in this blog, the time is past to halt climate catastrophe through emissions reduction alone.  CCS, carbon capture and storage, is needed, though no economically viable method has yet been discovered. Further, we still must not omit geoengineering from the equation.  I will update my previous series of posts on that topic in upcoming posts.