Learning to Die in the Anthropocene

Finally, and most important, my gratitude to my best editor, my most critical reader, and my most tenacious and unrelenting interlocutor, Sara Marcus. Without her tough patience, dogged hope, and tender care, there would have been little reason for me to write through the despair that confronting catastrophic climate change induces. Any light this book might give off is only a reflection of her love

Jaron Lanier, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” Edge, May 29, 2006. http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism

“Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for death and dying.” Plato, Phaedo 64–68, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 46–50

Charles E. Cobb, Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Right Movement Possible

79. Mark Mills notes: “The information economy is a blue-whale economy with its energy uses mostly out of sight. Based on a mid-range estimate, the world’s Information-Communication-Technologies ecosystem uses about 1,500 TWh of electricity annually, equal to all the electric generation of Japan and Germany combined—as much electricity as was used for global illumination in 1985. The ICT ecosystem now approaches 10% of world electricity generation. Or in other energy terms—the zettabyte era already uses about 50% more energy than global aviation.” Mark Mills, The Cloud Begins with Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power, National Mining Association, August 2013, 3. http://www.tech-pundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Cloud_Begins_With_Coal.pdf?c761ac. Also see Gary Cook, How Clean Is Your Cloud? Greenpeace, April 2012. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/climate/2012/iCoal/HowCleanisYourCloud.pdf.

As Schelling points out, our use of the term “geoengineering” is peculiar: “‘Geoengineering’ implies something unnatural. I would suppose, for example, that if the Earth’s atmosphere had always had a large amount of sulfur aerosols in the upper atmosphere and the aerosols increased and diminished from time to time and the carbon dioxide increased and diminished from time to time, and we began to have a greenhouse problem, it would be referred to as an imbalance in the ratio of the infrared-absorbing substances to the light-reflecting substances; reducing CO2 and increasing the sulfur would both appear unnatural. If we put carbon black on the Arctic ice to make it disappear, that would be considered geoengineering; if we just let it disappear because of global warming, that is not geoengineering. If we learn to make it snow more in the Sierras and the Rockies to enhance the water supply of California and Colorado and improve the ski slopes in the winter, that is not geoengineering; if we learn to make it snow in Antarctica, in order to store water there to reduce the sea level, that is geoengineering.” Thomas Schelling, “The Economic Diplomacy of Geoengineering,” Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 45–50

Thomas C. Schelling, “What Makes Greenhouse Sense?” Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 27–44. 36. Thanks to Deak Nabers for bringing Schelling’s work to my attention.

Germany has recently, to much fanfare, produced as much as 27 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, including a mix of photovoltaic, wind, hydro-electric, and bioenergy. But this may come at a cost, which gives worry to economists and energy analysts as German industrial energy prices keep climbing. According to Daniel Yergin, “Germany’s current path of increasingly high-cost energy will make the country less competitive in the world economy, penalize Germany in terms of jobs and industrial investment, and impose a significant cost on the overall economy and household income.” Matthew Karnitschnig, “Germany’s Expensive Gamble on Renewable Energy,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2014. http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602.

51. “Substituting one form of energy for another takes a long time.” Vaclav Smil, “A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy,” IEEE Spectrum June 28, 2012. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/a-skeptic-looks-at-alternative-energy/0. See also Arnulf Grübler, Nebošja Nakićenović, and David G. Victor, “Dynamics of energy technologies and global change,” Energy Policy 27 (1999), 247–280

Roger Pielke Jr. calls this the “iron law” of climate policy: “When policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time.” Roger Pielke Jr., The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming (Basic Books: New York 2010), 46