I write in the quirky coffee shop, aware of my twitchy fingers and buzzy mind from the caffeine dose I ingested. My little table sits alongside a huge glass garage door. This shop is a repurposed Jiffy Lube. Where car mechanics once drained and refilled motor oil, now workers of the information age drain and refill coffee-themed beverages. Lubricants likely derived from below-ground deposits in the deserts of the Middle East have given way to beans likely plucked from the rainforests of South America as the engine of commerce at this site. To consummate the makeover, one interior wall of the coffee shop sports a mural of a montane Douglas fir forest to remind us environmentally enlightened customers of our home habitat in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
The transformation of this shop is a feel-good story during the era of climate change. After all, if we’re charged with ending our addiction to fossil fuels, then sunsetting Jiffy Lubes and other car-servicing sites constitutes a logical step. But as I survey the scene, I recognize it’s more of a “feel-decent” or “not-quite-sure-how-to-feel” story. Stools and chairs made of metal. Where was it mined? How did it get here? Exotic beans shipped from halfway across the globe. What’s the state of the habitat where they were grown? Who grew them and what are their living conditions like? Could a locally produced beverage provide similar smell, taste, and psychotropic effect? Lights, music, fans, and other electric devices. Cars in the parking lot. The remodel doesn’t exude sustainability either. Yet, the coffee shop offers a pleasant place to meet. Community abounds. Neighbors gather to discuss topics that matter to them. Others, working alone but enjoying the inherently social nature of the scene, enter words on screens for essays about humanity’s predicament or color-code critical cells in their spreadsheet models that track forest health. Some of us laptop jockeys even arrived here on bike, scooter, or foot. Maybe there is an aspect of neighborhood, local economy, and environmentalism in this space that bows in the direction of sustainability. Or maybe I’m seeing things through rose-tinted glasses—better that than constantly wearing shit-tinted glasses!
This sort of internal debate over what’s sustainable frequently occupies the terrain of my mind now that we’ve entered an era that could be called “the Great Unraveling.” That’s the term we’ve adopted at the Post Carbon Institute where we’re adjusting our messaging to better reflect what is happening to our planet and society. We used to be in the business of warning people about future calamities that would emanate from environmental abuse and the end of cheap fossil fuels. Now we are focused on explaining how humanity has entered a time of cascading environmental and social crises (think extreme heat coupled with political polarization or resource depletion coupled with increasing poverty) and suggesting how we can collectively respond. As my colleagues and I held regular discussions on the Great Unraveling, the phrase “need to grapple with…” kept surfacing, as in:
- We need to grapple with how to respond to the next crisis while we’re still dealing with the current one.
- People will need to grapple with the idea that times have changed, and we’re in a new normal.
- We need to grapple with the consequences of having delayed climate action for so long—if we couldn’t act when we had more time, resources, and political unity, how can we expect to act now?
At first, I felt trapped by the notion of grappling. What does it mean to “grapple with”? In the literal sense, “grappling with” means wrestling, fighting an opponent—body against body. I was on the wrestling team in high school where I regularly got lifted high in the air and slammed down to the mat. Getting slammed to the mat is a fitting metaphor for consistently engaging with modern news and data. Truthfully there are times when it might be more refreshing to take a physical thrashing instead of another mental beating at the hands of unrelenting reports of climate chaos, human suffering, and the lack of will to change our lifestyles. Over the course of my career, I have remained engaged in confronting aspects of unraveling, from trying to improve the network of conservation areas, to running a think tank dedicated to the steady-state economy, to writing a book about how to build such an economy, to making comments (and jokes) about humanity’s descent into Crazy Town. Even with this sustained effort at tackling humanity’s overshoot predicament, my attempts at “grappling with” have often felt clumsy and unproductive, and I continue to struggle with how to arrange daily life so that I can act in congruence with my knowledge and values. In other words, I still get slammed down to the mat.
I’ve recently done some work (oddly enough, an editing project) that’s helped me understand how to grapple more effectively. I edited our report Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown, and in the course of reading and re-reading it, I translated some of its lessons into a personal strategy. The key is to face reality without getting overwhelmed by it. It’s about making three choices. The first is to be willing to engage with big bad truths. For example: I live within an economic system that is inherently unsustainable and unfair, and there are huge obstacles in the way of changing it. The second choice is to process what I’ve learned as healthily as I can, sometimes by intentionally limiting my level of engagement. For example: Maybe I can plant a wildlife meadow in my neighborhood and commune with the bees and other pollinators to take a break from fixating on human hubris. The third choice is to respond by taking helpful actions in my community (for inspiring examples, I recommend scanning the accumulated articles on Resilience.org). It can feel relieving and even empowering to approach the Great Unraveling by making these three choices. Instead of focusing on how much I can change the world, I try to focus on who and how I want to be as we all face tough times.
Everyone who jumps (and then falls) into the rabbit hole of observing our overshoot predicament must settle on their own grappling techniques. Hopefully most of us can avoid being repeatedly slammed to the mat, but realistically that might have to be part of the process. Get slammed, and then find a way to get back up. Steel yourself so that it doesn’t happen too often or too harshly. Then go do some things to help, even the smallest things. When you do get slammed again and the grappling gets extra rough, find some teammates. Grappling doesn’t have to be an individual undertaking. We don’t have to act like bruised and bloodied MMA fighters. Arrange a meetup at a coffee shop (repurposed or not) and share stories of “grappling with.”
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I highly recommend downloading and reading Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown.
Teaser photo credit: “The Great Unravelling” (detail) ©2023 Michele Guieu
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Great chart! It looks to me like even if the global average temperature increase linearizes after 2030, average temps will be increasing 0.4C per decade, meaning at least 2C increase over 1940 by 2050. I won’t be around then, but people in a lot of the world will be forced to stay indoors in air conditioned spaces all summer. Going outside could be deadly.
As for the Elites: they can’t react with any meaningful policy changes. They, and most of their countrymen, live in cities, which need continued high energy flows to keep themselves alive. Unless a magical energy transition happens without any transition carbon pulse, emissions are going to keep rising, mostly from coal I suspect. Got to keep the electric grids going for the air conditioners.
The real danger will be to agriculture, industrial or not. It’s going to have to move toward the poles rapidly to keep up with food production and I don’t know if there will be resources available to do that. If there are, a whole lot of northern forests are going away so the land can go under the plow. Even more CO2 emissions.
The only thing that can prevent emissions as usual is a rapid involuntary collapse of industrial civilization with its accompanying collapse of population. I’m still hopeful that can happen even without a nuclear war, but it’s getting late.
Jim Hansen, et al, think it’s already too late, based on paleo climate data. They believe that even if emissions went to zero today, existing concentrations of CO2 mean a 6-7C increase in the next century and 10C at equilibrium in a few hundred years. If they are right, only the extreme north and south latitudes and high elevations will be habitable for humans. Much of the earth will be above fatal wet-bulb temps. Natural carbon sequestration will gradually bring down the CO2 concentration and cool things off, but it could take thousands of years to get back to 350 ppm or so.
Ohhhh, ya, way too late, actually – Hansen is most likely correct; since if you get an older climate scientist alone, over some beer, they’ll manifest some grave concerns. Wadhams is very concerned about the Arctic and what it does in the near future – so I modeled (GISS ModelE) this, simply enforcing observed Arctic Amplification (below). Unfortunately, no current global climate model is good enough to reproduce what we’re already seeing at mid-latitudes! Evidently, the only thing we can do is triage human civilization at this point. How humanely that gets done is the main concern.
The Pentagon already knows that much of the rich oil deposits on the planet are located in places that will be too hot for human life in a few decades. But Heinberg (and many others) will question where the power for air conditioners will come from at that time. Only devout technooptimists ignore this in favor of some physics-fantasy power source.
Also, there aren’t a lot of great soils very far North of where farming is being done now. Inter-Elite competition (in the US) probably won’t rectify in time to stop some significant famine. I’m guessing the US, like China and others, will plunder food from other nations using the power of capital. Everyone will just have to learn to ignore billions of deaths over the next 20 years (?) or so. Ugh!
http://yavapaiweathertracks.org/PIOMAS_ModelE_08-2021.png
…but honest scientists have been saying, “Do it now or it will be too late!” for a couple of decades… Now, here we are in the “obvious phase” of “too late” – evidently the hottest summer in the history of civilization. Rahmstorf is finally speaking out strongly, and manifesting some positivity about this – that we can halt boiling in its tracks by halting carbon release (which we have not done – at all – yet). And we’ve known this.
https://youtu.be/PkAYnkpYADs
https://youtu.be/aP-fnv7DINw
I think a lot of horticulture can move north with the warming of the planet. Northern soils may not be great for industrial agriculture, but there is a lot of organic matter in them. The gelisols would have to do a fair amount of thawing to get the permafrost well below plant roots, but that thawing is coming.
https://news.trust.org/item/20200215072446-pl7ap/#:~:text=In%20a%20few%20more%20decades,farmers%20on%20a%20hotter%20planet.
That’s probably not actually a trustworthy article – for instance, Lester Brown pointed out that sea level rise (Bangladesh and Mekong delta) will be unable to produce about 1/3rd of global rice. That’s really huge. Globally, families already have to plan for “foodless days.” (Lester Brown, Smithsonian Institute [2012] – conveniently, we in the West ignore this) So, we’re running at the limits of what we are able produce right now – we have been for decades. Lots of simple Ag models exist, and even the IPCC (Working Group III) is guilty of misrepresenting the brutal nature of what’s coming, or even possible, during Climate Breakdown.
If you read the IPCC WGI report (the science facts), it sounds like the Apocalypse, but the WGIII tone it completely down (because or reasons), to the point of fantasy – for instance, with carbon capture…
To move everything in farming north would be a massive undertaking, on the level of moving entire coastal cities, meaning lots of time, on top of Climate Breakdown and unpredictable weather, and that would mean, essentially, food shortages in the West. I’m guessing to fund such a thing via “capitalism” they’d remove even more of the essential protections on foods (to encourage profits by Ag) – probably to the point of poor food safety for what food is still available.
I never meant that we would move everything north, only that remnant human populations would be able to migrate north and establish small farms there as the climate warmed. They would still have to deal with the effects of Rossby waves, which would make farming more difficult, but could probably still eke out a living.
there has never been social breakdown without social violence
the violence itself is just a matter of degree
if families breakdown you get domestic violence
if nations break down you get national violence
history, as far back as you care to go, confirms that
breakdown is always someone else fault—marriage or nations, the rule holds good.
but now we are in a new ballgame.
this time it’s global breakdown—-now what??
We are seeing that breakdown happening—mass migrations, wars, extreme politics of collective insanity—all demanding and promising a return to the way things used to be, A return of the “American Dream’…with no comprehension of what that dream was, or where it come from
.
Just the denial that it has become a nightmare for all of us.
That is what the ‘great unravelling is.
We stitched together a lifestyle on threads of finite energy, with the certainty that we could wear it forever.
Well, it is now definitely threadbare. But we have nothing else to wear.
We are therefore going to freeze or fry..
The tailor who made our Emperor’s clothes has gone out of business.
https://medium.com/extra-extra/the-american-dream-what-it-really-cost-9fab37c44b0b
Good advice here. I’d put more emphasis on having a natural place to retreat to and likely to work, to grow at least a small part of your own food–because that’s the way we’re going and it’s good to prepare, to gain skills and tools, and to begin withdrawing support from the ugly monopolistic elements of the corporate global food system described in another article posted today. on the concerns about the coffee shop, you could agitate for a switch to Fair Trade coffee–at least as an option. I get coffee beans ten pounds at time from Higher Grounds, which sources it from several countries, mostly collectives, and works with the farmers to use the improved income to improve their lives. It’s all organic and shade grown. I don’t have a problem with this trade–Europeans have been drinking coffee for several centuries, originally brought north by sailing ships (as some still is, via the Tres Hombres ship). As for the parking lot outside, that’s another system that needs to change, to make yours a people-centered rather than car-centered city…
Sorry Rob – I thought you should know this – but please don’t be upset… you guys need to keep doing Crazy Town. And… is it on you^ube? Should be, before some superrich boy buys it and screws it up like twitter…
So, the “scientists” at CNN today published an extremely naive plot – a linear fit (black line) to Global Summertime temperature data, entirely misrepresenting clear 2nd-order trend. So I did a much more accurate fit (thick blue line) that’s still conservative. The prediction, such as it is, assumes at least a continuation of observed heating, so that by 2030, every summer will be like this summer (2023), but with all the “extra” heat waves piled on top of that!
http://yavapaiweathertracks.org/2030_Summers_Prediction_JUL2023.png
Install drip lines and shade cloth where possible. Paint roofs white.
Oddly enough, for the last few weeks, I’ve been having nothing but early morning nightmares about people fighting, wars, etc. It’s not terribly scary – maybe at my age my amygdala has atrophied… ;^}}
The UN Chief is right; the Great Boiling is here, and the Elites have less than a decade to react.