Attend to what they do, not what they say... The corporate climate migration has begun Andrew Freedman Companies large and small, some with longtime roots in their neighborhoods, are on the hunt for new real estate that is less prone to weather and climate extremes. Why it matters: The corporate migration underway indicates vulnerable communities may see an exodus of large employers in the coming decades as oceans encroach. Inland areas prone to flooding or wildfires mare see similar challenges. Driving the news: Within the past three years, tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a major hospital in South Carolina, and the nation's eighth-largest airline by passengers carried have all decided to move their infrastructure to higher ground. Last month, Roper St. Francis Healthcare’s 332-bed facility on Charleston peninsula, home of a larger medical campus, announced a $500 million plan to move inland after repeated bouts of flooding during both coastal storms and so-called "sunny day flooding." Sunny day flooding does not require a storm but can occur simply due to the combination of astronomical high tides plus sea level rise. According to the Charleston Post and Courier newspaper, the hospital has been located downtown for 165 years. The new building "will be technologically and structurally upgraded to better withstand natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes," according to a hospital statement. The paper called the move "An early signal that living and working on the low-lying peninsula is becoming more tenuous." According to the newspaper, the hospital system had already devoted $9 million to measures needed to keep critical medical systems functioning if a major hurricane struck. Roper Hospital did not respond to Axios' request for comment. Threat level: The current Roper Hospital is located in an area that floods during heavy rainstorms, along with water coming in from the Atlantic. According to a NOAA report published last summer, Charleston saw a record 14 days of high tide flooding during 2020 and is predicted to have as many as 35 to 90 such days by 2050, depending on the rate and extent of sea level rise. Global average sea levels are projected to rise at least 3 feet by the end of the century, barring steep near-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Sea level rise will not be uniform, however. In Charleston, due to an unlucky combination of capricious ocean currents and sinking land, seas are rising far faster than in many other coastal cities. According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sea level rise through 2100 could range from 1 foot to 3.3 feet, though higher amounts, on the order of 6.6 feet, cannot be ruled out due to uncertainties in ice sheet dynamics. Meanwhile, in Houston, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is working to complete its new global headquarters in Spring, Texas, after experiencing extensive flooding at its former Houston-area campus in 2016 and then in 2017 during Hurricane Harvey. Harvey dumped 5 feet of rain on the city in what was the most ever recorded from any single storm in U.S. history. Subsequent studies found climate change supercharged that storm's moisture content, contributing to the deadly flooding. HP Inc., the company that remains after a spinoff of HPE, moved their Houston-area offices away from the flooding-prone campus in 2018 — soon after Harvey's damage. Separately, in Florida, the discount airline Spirit is making an extreme weather resilience move of its own. Earlier this year, it announced that it would add a second operations center in Orlando to supplement its current headquarters in Miramar, Florida, just southwest of the airline's largest hub of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. That region was battered by high winds during Hurricane Irma in 2020 and is vulnerable to damage from future storms. The building housing the new facility will be hardened against high winds and flooding from hurricanes, according to the trade publication Simple Flying. Airline operations centers are essentially the brains of an airline — they track all flights and make crew, flight dispatch and other critical decisions. If a facility is knocked out of service, it can cripple the airline, even if most of its planes are well outside of a storm zone. The hurricane susceptibility of southeastern Florida helped motivate the decision, according to news reports. Spirit Airlines did not respond to Axios' request for comment. Climate studies show that human-caused global warming is causing hurricanes to rapidly intensify more frequently, and is leading to a greater proportion of stronger storms in the Atlantic Ocean. The bottom line: Many more businesses are no doubt contemplating similar protective actions, including at the international level where this would manifest itself in a shift of corporate capital and jobs from less climate secure nations to ones with fewer extreme weather risks. https://www.axios.com/corporate-cli...her-e717dac8-268f-46a7-8b8b-8e6919b4eee3.html
Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition by Megan K. Seibert and William E. Rees Faculty of Applied Science, School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada Energies 2021, 14(15), 4508; https://doi.org/10.3390/en14154508 Received: 23 June 2021 / Revised: 18 July 2021 / Accepted: 20 July 2021 / Published: 26 July 2021 Abstract We add to the emerging body of literature highlighting cracks in the foundation of the mainstream energy transition narrative. We offer a tripartite analysis that re-characterizes the climate crisis within its broader context of ecological overshoot, highlights numerous collectively fatal problems with so-called renewable energy technologies, and suggests alternative solutions that entail a contraction of the human enterprise. This analysis makes clear that the pat notion of “affordable clean energy” views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs. These undesirable “externalities” can no longer be ignored. To achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two. While it might be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for global society to succeed in this endeavor, history is replete with stellar achievements that have arisen only from a dogged pursuit of the seemingly impossible. Keywords: renewable energy; energy transition; overshoot; biocapacity; ecological limits; social justice; sustainability 1. Introduction We begin with a reminder that humans are storytellers by nature. We socially construct complex sets of facts, beliefs, and values that guide how we operate in the world. Indeed, humans act out of their socially constructed narratives as if they were real. All political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, cultural narratives—even scientific theories—are socially constructed “stories” that may or may not accurately reflect any aspect of reality they purport to represent. Once a particular construct has taken hold, its adherents are likely to treat it more seriously than opposing evidence from an alternate conceptual framework. The Green New Deal (GND) is the dominant aspirational pathway in the mainstream narrative for achieving socially just ecological sustainability. Its central message is that a smooth transition away from climate-hostile fossil fuels is a relatively simple technological matter. Not only do proponents claim that electrification of all energy consumption by means of high-tech wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) panels is technically possible, but that such a vast and unprecedented replacement of society’s entrenched energy foundation is both financially feasible and carries the added benefit of creating thousands of “green” jobs [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The only missing ingredient, we are told, is political will. Energy transition plans produced by numerous academic institutions and researchers around the world support or conform obediently to the GND paradigm, and politicians everywhere have taken up the GND banner as the core of their environmental pledges. We argue that while the GND narrative is highly seductive, it is little more than a disastrous shared illusion. Not only is the GND technically flawed, but it fails to recognize human ecological dysfunction as the overall driver of incipient global systemic collapse. By viewing climate change, rather than ecological overshoot—of which climate change is merely a symptom—as the central problem, the GND and its variants grasp in vain for techno-industrial solutions to problems caused by techno-industrial society. Such a self-referencing pursuit is doomed to fail. As Albert Einstein allegedly said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. We need an entirely new narrative for a successful energy transition. Only by abandoning the flawed paradigmatic source of our ecological dilemma can we formulate realistic pathways for averting social–ecological collapse. 2. Climate Change in the Context of Overshoot Long-standing calls from ecologists and informed environmentalists for society to adopt a systems perspective and employ a multi-disciplinary approach to anthropogenic climate change have largely fallen on deaf ears. Most people have succumbed to the mechanistic–reductionist paradigm that has dominated Cartesian science, as is evident by the isolation of climate from its broader ecological context and its treatment as a discrete, independent variable. The reality is that climate change is only one symptom of systems destabilization as the human enterprise has come to overwhelm the ecosphere. To recalibrate our focal lens, consider the following accelerating changes. The population of H. sapiens is nearly eight times larger than it was at the beginning of the fossil-fueled Industrial Age a mere 200 years ago, and it has been growing nearly 20 times faster [8]. To accommodate the explosion of humanity, over half the land surface of Earth has been substantially modified, particularly for agriculture (that most ecologically destructive of technologies). One consequence of this is the competitive displacement of non-human species from their habitats and food sources. Prior to the dawn of agriculture eight to ten millennia ago, humans accounted for less than 1%, and wild mammals 99%, of mammalian biomass on Earth. Today, H. sapiens constitute 36%, and our domestic livestock another 60%, of a much-expanded mammalian biomass, compared with only 4% for all wild species combined [9,10,11]. McRae et al. [12] estimate that the populations of non-human vertebrate species declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012 alone. Freshwater, marine, and terrestrial vertebrate populations declined by 81%, 36%, and 38%, respectively, and invertebrate populations fell by about 50%. While fossil fuels (FFs)—coal and later oil and natural gas—have been humanity’s major source of energy over the past two centuries, 50% of all FFs ever burned have been consumed in just the past 30 years (as much as 90% since the early 1940s) as super-exponential growth has taken hold [13,14]. It should be no surprise, therefore, that carbon dioxide emissions—the major material by-product of FF combustion and principal anthropogenic driver of climate change—have long exceeded photosynthetic uptake by green plants. By 1997 (when annual consumption was 40% less than in 2021), humanity was already burning FFs containing about 422 times the net amount of carbon fixed by photosynthesis globally each year [15]. Between 1800 and 2021, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 48%, from 280 ppm to approximately 415 ppm. These data show that plunging biodiversity and climate change, along with air/land/ocean pollution, deforestation, desertification, incipient resources scarcity, etc., are the inevitable consequences—indeed, parallel symptoms—of the same root phenomenon: the spectacular and continuing growth of the human enterprise on a finite planet. H. sapiens is in overshoot, exploiting ecosystems beyond their regenerative and assimilative capacities. Overshoot is possible only because of: (a) the short-term availability of prodigious stocks of both renewable (fish, forest, soil, etc.) and non-renewable (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.) forms of so-called “natural capital”; and (b) the enormous, but finite, natural waste assimilation and recycling processes of the ecosphere. However, a reckoning is at hand. In just a few decades of geometric population and economic growth, humans have exploited (often to collapse) natural capital stocks that took millennia to accumulate and have impeded natural life-support processes through excessive, often toxic, waste discharges. The human enterprise now uses the bio-productive and assimilative capacities of 1.75 Earth equivalents [16]. In simple terms, the industrial world’s ecological predicament is the result of too many people consuming too much and over-polluting the ecosphere. Clearly, the climate crisis cannot be solved in isolation from the macro-problem of overshoot—certainly not by using technologies that are reliant on the same FFs and ecologically destructive processes that created the problem in the first place. 3. Problems with So-Called Renewables... Rest of paper...
This movie describes a nine-boundaries structure useful for thinking about ecological overshoot, and the current effect and trends of the human enterprise on each. Imo it's a much more useful way of thinking about our predicament than global warming alone. Trailer:
How many Earths do we need? By Charlotte McDonald BBC News Published 16 June 2015 Image source, Thinkstock It has been suggested that if everyone on the planet consumed as much as the average US citizen, four Earths would be needed to sustain them. But where does this claim originate, and how is it calculated? The world's seven billion people consume varying amounts of the planet's resources. Compare the lifestyle of a subsistence farmer with that of a wealthy city-dweller in a developed country. More land is required to grow the city dweller's food, more materials are used to build the city dweller's home and workplace, more energy is required for transport, heating and cooling. So it's obvious that Americans consume more, on average, than the people of less developed countries. But the claim that four Earths would be needed if everyone lived like Americans is still a striking one. It has been recurring on social media at least since 2012, when science writer Tim De Chant produced this infographic illustrating how much land would be required if seven billion people lived like the populations of nine selected countries from Bangladesh to the United Arab Emirates. De Chant was using a subset of data produced by the Global Footprint Network (GFN), which has been attempting the tricky business of measuring the impact of humans on the planet since 2003. "Ecological footprinting" is where researchers look at how much land, sea and other natural resources are used to produce what people consume - how many potatoes they eat, how much milk they drink, the cotton that goes into the shirts they wear and so on. They do this by using published statistics on consumption and the amount of land or sea used to produce the quantity of goods consumed. "It's a book-keeping approach for resources," says GFN director and co-founder Mathis Wackernagel. The key questions for GFN, he says, are: "If there is one planet - how much planet is available per person and how much planet do we use per person." The answers are expressed in an unusual unit - the global hectare, defined as a biologically productive hectare with world-average bioproductivity. The average American, says GFN, uses seven global hectares, compared to a global average of 2.7, according to the most recent GFN figures (based on data from 2011). It's this figure of seven global hectares that allows Wackernagel and his colleagues to calculate that it would take four Earths - or to be precise, 3.9 Earths - to sustain a population of seven billion at American levels of consumption. However, the US does not consume the most on this measure. It is in fact ranked fifth among countries with a population of one million or more. Kuwait comes top with 8.9 global hectares (5.1 Earths), followed by Australia (4.8 Earths), the United Arab Emirates (4.7 Earths) and Qatar (4.0 Earths). The others in the top 10 are Canada, Sweden, Bahrain, Trinidad and Tobago, and Singapore. The UK is 32nd on the list (2.4 Earths). How useful are these figures? One curious thing to note is that according to the Global Footprint Network, the world's population is currently using not one, but one-and-a-half Earths. That's because it takes account of carbon emissions. The forests and oceans of the world absorb a lot of carbon dioxide, but we are currently emitting more than the planet can handle - and Wackernagel's team has calculated how much extra land and sea we would need to absorb it. They estimate that we need an extra half a planet. If we now look again at the average American footprint - two-thirds of that is made up of carbon emissions. This means that for the four Earths we would need if everyone consumed like an American, more than two-and-a-half of those would be needed just to absorb carbon dioxide. This calculation has its critics. "It seems a little odd to convert what's happening in the atmosphere into a proxy measure and pretend you're measuring land when you're not," says Fred Pearce, environment correspondent for New Scientist magazine. But Mathis Wackernagel says it is important to include carbon emissions in the calculation to capture the "total package" of our activity. Another criticism - made, for example by Linus Blomqvist, Director of Conservation at the Breakthrough Institute in California - is that there is insufficient data from many parts of the world to create meaningful ecological footprint estimates. Researchers just don't know how sustainable some agricultural practices are, and therefore to what extent resources are being overused. Image source, AFP Image caption, Rice farming in Haiti "Our critique is that these figures don't say anything about sustainability of cropland, such as the erosion of soil," Blomqvist says. Wackernagel accepts this criticism, to an extent. "I would be perfectly blunt - our numbers are certainly wrong. I'm convinced our numbers are underestimates. "There are aspects on which no good data exists that we don't include, so our demand on nature is larger." While these figures may not be perfect, Wackernagel says that governments can find them useful as a way of thinking about policies on the environment. For example, Switzerland publishes ecological footprint estimates on its Federal Statistics Office website. The UK, meanwhile, has formed a Natural Capital Committee to study how the country consumes its natural resources and how long, at current rates, they will last. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712
I would LOVE to see this data broken out. For instance, how much of it is related to transportation (trucking, autos, etc) and how much is basic energy consumption? How much is food driven? Medical driven? Kinda need this. Can't just say (and I know, you aren't) live like those in Bangladesh, even if it means sacrificing food security.
I agree on all, and the data is out there, but hard to find consolidated. It's very challenging. I'm around 10 books into the subject now, a lot of articles and papers, and I'm still struggling with the magnitude of it, and all the moving parts, for the purpose of explanation. Simply multiplying the number of consumptive activities you list here (not a complete list of course), by the number of planetary boundaries we should consider pertinent to the human enterprise (I favor the nine-boundaries framework), gives us a large number of still complex intersections. Now, if you wanted to focus on the global warming boundary alone, and take say transportation as a sector, you can find useful for-the-layman info in Bill Gates' book. There is a lot of work already done focused on that boundary, it's "all anyone talks about", and to some extent it can be short-handed rather simply as a function of CO2 ppm. The broad view today is that we can emit about another 400 gigatons of CO2 if we want to keep warming below 2°C. (I think we're headed to 3°C at our current level.) I know warming is a serious problem, but my belief is that focusing on that alone is insufficient and won't get us out of our predicament.
"But the words on these pages are meant only for those who are ready for them." Facing Extinction by Catherine Ingram 2019 DARK KNOWLEDGE “The heavens were all on fire; the earth did tremble.” –William Shakespeare Henry IV, Part 1 "For much of my life, I thought our species would soon go extinct. I assumed we might last another hundred years if we were lucky. Now I suspect we are facing extinction in the near future. Can I speculate as to exactly when that might happen? Of course not. My sense of this is based only on probability. It might be similar to hearing about a diagnosis of late stage pancreatic cancer. Is it definite that the person is going to die soon? No, not definite. Is it highly probable? Yes, one would be wise to face the likelihood and put one’s affairs in order. "First, let’s look at climate data. Over the past couple decades I have been studying climate disruption by reading scientific papers and listening to climate lectures accessible to a layperson. There is no good news to be found there. We have burned so much carbon into the atmosphere that the CO2 levels are higher than they have been for the past twenty three million years. In the last decade our carbon emission levels are the highest in history, and we have not yet experienced their full impact. If we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, we are still on track for much higher heat for at least ten years. And we are certainly not stopping our emissions by tomorrow. Although global carbon emissions were down in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, there has been negligible effect on global temperatures, which are continuing to rise, with 2020 tied with 2016 as the hottest years on record, despite the cooling effects of the climate cycle known as La Niña in 2020. "The blanket of carbon in the atmosphere has triggered, and will trigger, further runaway warming systems that are not under our control, one of the most deadly of which is the release of methane gases that have been trapped for eons under arctic ice and what is now euphemistically known as permafrost (much of it is no longer permanent frost). "Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon, and much faster acting. In the first twenty years after its release into the atmosphere, it is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Whereas the full effect of heat from a carbon dioxide molecule takes ten years, peak warming from a methane molecule occurs in a matter of months. "Nitrous oxide is another greenhouse gas whose dangers have only recently been reported. Excess nitrogen from fertilizer becomes nitrous oxide when it escapes into soils and groundwater. It is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, molecule for molecule, and now accounts for about 20% of global warming. Due to food shortages, some countries are using more fertilizer than ever to increase crop production. New studies show a clear correlation between increased fertilizer use and increasing levels of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere. "As if these emissions were not daunting enough, a heretofore little-known gas, sulphur hexafluoride or SF6, used in many green and renewable technologies, is 23,500 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon. It leaks from electrical production sites and is estimated to stay in the atmosphere for a thousand years. "The Amazon rainforest, which had historically been considered “the lungs of the planet,” is now emitting more carbon than it can absorb. Much of this has been caused by fires for deliberate crop clearing and animal grazing, but higher temperatures and drought have contributed to the Amazon now throwing off an estimated billion tons of carbon per year, turning it from a carbon capture to a carbon generator. "The arctic and antarctic icecaps are melting at rates far faster than even the most alarming predictions, and methane is pouring out of these regions, bubbling out of arctic lakes, and hissing out of seas and soils worldwide. Some scientists fear a methane “burp” of billions of tons when a full melt of the summer arctic ice occurs; a full melt has not happened for the past four million years. Should such a sudden large release of methane occur, the earth’s warming would rapidly accelerate within months. This alone could be the extinction event. "The arctic summer ice is currently two thirds less than it was as recently as the 1970s, and the arctic is warming so fast that a full summer melt is likely within the next few years. During the month of June 2020, the Arctic Circle had the highest temperatures ever recorded in the region, with one Siberian town hitting 38C (100 F). The wildfires that raged for months in the Arctic have now set a pollution record by emitting 244 megatons of carbon dioxide during the summer season of 2020, thirty-five percent more than in 2019, which also set a record. This is more than the annual carbon output of numerous countries. The Arctic ice is not only threatened by a warming atmosphere but, according to a study published in the Journal of Climate, “deep heat in the Arctic Ocean has risen and is now melting the ice from below”. The continent of Antarctica is also rapidly melting at an acceleration of 280% in the last forty years. The massive ice melts that are happening there, such as the breaking off the Larsen B ice shelf defied scientific predictions; the ice shelf known as Larsen C, which broke off in July of 2017, was 2,200 square miles in size. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, a mass of ice the size of Florida, is becoming increasingly unstable, now losing more than 100 billion tons of ice each year. Scientists fear that its collapse would cause much of the West Antarctic ice sheet to fall into the sea, since Thwaites currently acts “like a cork in a wine bottle.” "The arctic ice has been the coolant for the northern part of the planet and it impacts worldwide climate as well. Its white surface also reflects back into space much of the heat from the sun, as does the antarctic ice. As the ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs the heat and the warming ocean more quickly melts the remaining ice. Over the past four decades, the proportion of the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic’s winter ice pack has dropped from more than 33 percent to barely 1 percent today, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2019 annual Arctic report. "The U.S., Russia, and China are now vying for hegemony of the arctic region in order to get at the massive reserves of oil that exist there and will be accessible as the ice melts. For instance, in 2019, Russia launched a floating barge on which two nuclear reactors were wired into its infrastructure to power gas and oil platforms in remote regions of the Arctic. In early 2021, satellite images show a build-up of Russian military forces in the Arctic, which, according to a spokesperson for Vladamir Putin, they have deployed in order to implement economic development in the Arctic region, an area they consider part of the Russian Federation. Apart from the real possibility of military conflagrations over control of the Arctic, moving “icebreaker” tankers through and drilling in this sensitive eco-system would cause the dual destructions of rapidly deteriorating whatever ice is left, thereby speeding up the release of methane, and then burning all that stored carbon of newly found oil reserves into the atmosphere. "These and all the other warming feedback loops are now on an exponential trajectory and becoming self-amplifying, potentially leading to a “hothouse earth” independent of the carbon emissions that have triggered them. Each day, the extra heat that is trapped near our planet is equivalent to four hundred thousand Hiroshima bombs. There are no known technologies that can be deployed at world scale to reverse the warming, and many climate scientists feel that the window for doing so is already closed, that we have passed the tipping point and the heat is on “runaway” no matter what we do. "We are now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction with about 150 plant and animal species going extinct per day. Despite the phrase “the sixth extinction” making its way into mainstream awareness via the publication of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book of that title, most people still don’t realize that we humans are also on the list. "Some of the consequences we face are mass die-offs due to widespread drought, flooding, fires, forest mortality, runaway diseases, and dying ocean life—all of which we now see in preview. A few of these consequences could even result in the annihilation of all complex life on earth in a quick hurry: the use of nuclear weapons, for instance, as societies and governments become more desperate for resources; or the meltdown of the 450 nuclear reactors, which will likely become impossible to maintain as industrial civilization breaks down. Since 2011, when a tsunami struck the northeast coast of Japan and caused a near meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, it has taken more than 42,000 gallons of fresh water per day to keep the reactors cooled. Keeping the radioactive elements contained requires dangerous jobs for the workers and building a new steel water tank every four days to store the spent radioactive water. As this process has become increasingly untenable, Japan approved plans in April, 2021 to begin dumping 1.2 million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific ocean. "If we were to make it through this gauntlet of threats, we would still be facing starvation. Grains, the basis of the world’s food supply, are reduced on average by 6% for every one degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial norms. We are now about 1.6 degrees Celsius above and climbing fast; the oceans are warming twice as fast and have absorbed a staggering 93% of the warming for us so far. If that were not the case, the average land temperatures would be a toasty 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) above what they are now. Of course, there is a huge cost for ocean warming in the form of dying coral reefs, plankton loss, ocean acidification, unprecedented storms, and increased water vapor, which is yet another greenhouse blanket holding heat in the atmosphere. "As I became aware of these facts and many hundreds like them, I also marveled at how oblivious most people are to the coming catastrophes. There has never been a greater news story than that of humans facing full extinction, and yet extinction is rarely mentioned on the evening news, cable channels, or on the front pages of blogs and newspapers. It is as though the world’s astronomers were telling us that an asteroid is heading our way and will make a direct hit destined to wipe out all of life to which the public responds by remaining fascinated with sporting events, social media, the latest political machinations, and celebrity gossip. "However, beginning around 2010, a few books and other sources of information began to address the chances of full extinction of all complex life, and these became my refuge, even though the information was the most horrific I had ever imagined. "For decades, I had sensed that things were dramatically worsening, the rate of destruction increasing. As a journalist from 1982 to 1994, I specialized in social and environmental issues. I had written about global warming (the phrase we most used in those days) numerous times in the 1980s, but because it seemed a far-off threat, we could intellectually discuss it without fear that it would affect our own lives in terribly significant ways. As time marched on, I began to awaken to how fast the climate was changing and how negative would be its impacts. It became a strange relief to read and listen to the truth of the situation from people who were studying the hard data as it affirmed my instincts and threw a light on what had been shadowy forebodings, dancing like ghosts in my awareness. It is an ongoing study that has taken me through a powerful internal process–emotional and cathartic–one that I felt might be helpful to share with those who have woken to this dark knowledge or are in the process of waking to it, just as I, over time, found comfort in the reflections of the small yet increasing number of comrades with whom I share this journey. "Because the subject is so tragic and because it can scare or anger people, this is not an essay I ever wanted to write; it is one I would have wanted to read along the way. But the words on these pages are meant only for those who are ready for them. I offer no hope or solutions for our continuation, only companionship and empathy to you, the reader, who either knows or suspects that there is no hope or solution to be found. What we now need to find is courage. "The Coronavirus Pandemic: I wrote the original version of this essay in February 2019. At this writing, we find ourselves twenty months into a worldwide focus on the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent global restrictions on human movement and business. The imminence of this threat has taken center stage in our minds, but of course the other crises are rolling along in the background, undeterred by a virus, as evidenced in the 2021 report from the IPCC with data showing that the earth is hotter than it has been for 125,000 years. We can also expect more viruses to erupt not only from gain-of-function research and mishaps and overcrowding of human populations, but also from melting ices caps. In January 2020, a team of scientists published their discovery of 28 new virus groups contained within 15,000-year-old ice. All of these viruses would likely be “novel.” The outbreak of Covid has also shown us how quickly life in the world entire can be radically changed and how confused, inept, and corrupt are most of our governments in response to a crisis with a less than one percent death toll."