The Biggest Threats Before Us, and Why We'll (probably) Beat Them -- Environmental Collapse

An article by Kevin D. Williams called The World Keeps Not Ending struck me as fairly insightful, and made me reflect on the fact that pretty much every day of my life I've lived under the threat of an imminent apocalypse. 

I'm old enough that I remember taking part in nuclear preparedness drills. I attended a school that had a bomb shelter. It was full of boxes of rations that, in my memories, were covered in dust. The shelter was in the basement and I recall it as poorly lit and shadowy. A lot of public spaces had fallout shelters back then. I assume some must still be around, but I can't recall the last time I saw one. Still, I grew up during the waning days of Vietnam and, while I was too young to understand much of the world, I remember nuclear annihilation being the overarching apocalypse I was raised to expect. 

But, it was hardly the only apocalypse looming. I'm just barely old enough to recall the televised Watergate hearings. There was a sense then that our government was on the verge of falling apart. I remember the Oil Crisis and the Iran Crisis. I was in my late teens, and that's when I started reading the front parts of the newspapers every day instead of just the funny pages. (For readers under twenty, ask your parents about newspapers and funny pages. It would take me too long to explain them.) I remember stagflation and the misery index, the sense that the American economy had gotten old and fossilized and that Japan was going to run the world with its supreme efficiency and advanced technology. There was AIDS, which could take out a quarter of the US population in under a decade. Then a string of other diseases, like ebola, that could spread through our connected world as a runaway plague and cripple the world. There were other dooms of the week. Swine flue! The China syndrome! Killer bees! A looming ice age! Supervolcanos! Comet impacts! Gay marriage is going to bring down God's wrath! Robots will steal our jobs! We're going to run out of food! Out of oil! No, wait! We grow too much food, creating an obesity crisis, and burn too much oil, frying the world! 

Well, okay. Actually, that last one doesn't seem to be mere hysteria. And a few of the others on the list weren't either. AIDS didn't wipe out a quarter of the US, but it did create real havoc in Africa. Robots did steal a lot of jobs, but it turns out we can and do make new jobs. There are jobs today that didn't exist when I was born. Twenty years from now, there will be jobs we currently aren't imagining. If Yellowstone decides to erupt, or a comet takes aim at us, at the moment there's not a lot we can do about it. But as for most of the other potential dooms, I'm going to write a few articles taking at look at how risky they actually are, and why and how I think we'll avoid them. 

Environmental Collapse. I don't want to limit this only to climate change, because, honestly, I worry that term is too limiting in capturing the full range of dangers to our environment. I also think the vast majority of climate change won't be avoided, but find the notion that this will lead to an apocalypse to be overblown. Humans were around during the last Ice Age. Following the last Ice Age, they spread to every continent except Antarctica. During this time frame, sea levels rose 400 feet. It didn't lead to our extinction. We also survived mega-draughts, deforestation, and species depletion. It's true that, on local levels, certain civilizations were wiped out by climate change. But, the whole arc of human history shows that we're a durable species who adapt to just about anything. In the future, because of climate change, there will be droughts, floods, superstorms, blizzards and heatwaves. And, if our climate were utterly stable, there would be droughts, floods, superstorms, blizzards, and heatwaves. We'll adapt. There will be misery, there will be costs, but, honestly, I just don't see a clear path to human extinction or any significant danger of the total collapse of civilization. 

Yes, it's going to suck to lose your whole nation if you live on some coral atoll, but, in the US, we've wiped away 1500 square miles of coastline in Louisiana. This is an area larger than Rhode Island! Seriously, we've erased an entire state's worth of land because we change the environment... not by warming the world, but by trying to control flooding on the Mississippi, stopping the continual replenishment of the delta. It's an environmental catastrophe worthy of any SF dreams of an apocalypse, taking place in a nation with a free press that has the resources to report it and an audience with a proven taste to read about disasters. Yet, while I can definitely find plenty of information about it, it's a weirdly invisible crisis. I've never heard it mentioned in a presidential debate. I've never heard of a movie star or famous singer adopting it as a cause. I can't think of a big budget film talking about the American Atlantis, nor point to Oprah featuring an author who's written a novel about a family displaced by the disaster. 

The Louisiana example is far from my only example of severe climate catastrophes failing to have much of an impact on the overall survival and prosperity of mankind. We've drained seas--Google the Aral Sea. We've accidentally created new ones. Google the Salton Sea. We turn our backs and move on and the world as it was before the disaster is mostly forgotten. 

I'm not arguing for complacency, or hopelessness. We need to keep working on non-carbon based ways of powering our modern world. But I don't think we'll get there with international treaties or carbon taxes. I think, more likely, we'll just get really good at energy efficiency. Our houses, lightbulbs, appliances, etc., are far more energy efficient than they once were fifty years ago. We didn't embrace these improvements to save the world, but because we want smaller power bills. 

Our factories are also far more energy efficient than they once were. Trump in no way intends for his tariffs to reduce climate change, but there would be an unintended environmental benefit to returning more factory production to the US. First, our power generation is much cleaner than Chinese power generation, as can be seen by any objective comparison of our carbon emissions. Second, no matter how efficiently you produce a cell phone in China, you are then going to have to put that phone onto a tanker and move it across an ocean. Transportation is a huge chunk of the world's total carbon budget. The more stuff that's made on the continent its consumed on, the smaller the carbon cost of transportation. Finally, high tariffs should drive up costs of consumer goods, leading to less consumption. Less consumer consumption, less carbon. If someone wants to show me some math proving that it is more energy efficient to build goods in China then ship them here, go for it. The economy and energy costs are complex issues, and I will gladly admit to not being able to think through every unforeseen variable.

My most optimistic hope for decarbonizing the economy within the next twenty years moves into the realm of speculation. I have faith that, sooner or later, we're finally going to invent a better battery. We'd all be driving electric cars right now if they could be charged in five minutes and had a range of 500 miles. I don't think it's big oil that's killing the electric car, it's the technological wall we've hit on energy storage. It may be that research into improved batteries is like fusion power, sucking in billions of dollars and decades of research and returning nothing but the promise that next time, maybe, we'll lick it. But, just as Tesla has had no trouble finding investors despite a laughable failure to actually deliver the product it promised in the time frame it promised, when someone does eventually invent a better battery they'll have every investor in the world throwing money at them. We'll stop burning oil because it's pricy, messy, and politically disruptive, and the super battery is just the better option. Until the super battery, alas, I think we're stuck with oil. 

Beyond climate change, however, there are other things I worry we might not adapt to quite as readily. I'm really worried about over fishing and the pollution that goes into our oceans. And, yes, climate change is definitely stressing this ecosystem, both through warming and acidification. Still, I'm even more worried about the jelly fish apocalypse. It's a thing. Google it. And microplastics, and fertilizer, and toxic metals that get introduced into the environment a little bit at a time. 

The oceans are stressed and, unfortunately, like the vanishing delta, seemingly invisible. Again, when has this ever been a subject in a presidential debate? I don't feel like the problems get the time and attention they deserve. 

On the other hand... I kayak a lot on the NC and SC coastline and I'm often amazed at how rare it is for me to see bottles or cans or other junk. It's not that I never see them. I'm almost guaranteed to see some trash on any given mile of paddling. But, the water's just not as junky as it was in the 1970s. The road sides aren't as trashy. Believe it or not, as late as the seventies, it wasn't uncommon for people to just chunk bags of trash into ravines, or throw old tires into creeks. We've done a lot to clean up our world, little by little, and now most people do gather up their trash when they're done hanging out on the beach, or hiking to a mountain top. On a municipal level, we just don't dump as much crap into the water as we once did. We're better at managing our water and our air. This is another thing that a lot of younger people in the US won't remember, but the world used to stink. Cars and trucks used to freely roll down the highway trailing smoke. Whole towns would smell like burning coal, or excrement, or the nearly indescribable stink of a paper mill. Downtown Roanoke where I grew up used to have a miasma of smog trapped within the valley. Now, when I go there, the air smells fine. We've done a lot to clean up, little by little. 

Hopefully, this incremental improvement and awareness might yet save our oceans. My wife and I cut up plastic rings from drink cans despite the long odds that they'd ever make it to sea and around the neck of a sea turtle. But, we don't cut up a lot of them because we really just don't buy sodas that way any more. We don't use as many straws as we once did. We've talked about ways to cut down on how much plastic waste we produce. And, what we do produce, we recycle. 

And maybe it doesn't matter in the least. Or maybe it's all that matters. Educate yourself to the environmental impact of your life, both upstream and downstream. Take as many steps as you can to not be wasteful or harmful. Keep learning, and keep acting. We might get through this yet.