A Conference Of (not all) the Parties

What would Mother Earth say?

As many have long argued, there are two reasons Earth’s climate is collapsing. One has to do with carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect, and the other with land destruction and broken water cycles. Like all mainstream climate framing, this conference was only about the former, largely ignoring the latter, and with it the ongoing ruination of Earth’s ability to biotically regulate the climates we actually live in. In this largest COP of all, the diplomats, bankers and captains-of-industry were there, but Mother Earth was not.

Also missing were certain inconvenient realities, such as the fact that the intense industrialization needed for the transition to renewable technologies necessitates an increase, not decrease, in fossil fuel use, at least in the short term (twenty years or so,) which may be the only term we have. In a post for resilience.org, called Why We Just Can’t Do It: The Truth about Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions, energy expert Richard Heinberg notes that “Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term.”

It’s been called the “Heinberg Pulse” and no one needs a PhD to understand it. A massive industrial project is underway, and it’ll take a lot of fossil fuels to mine, process, ship and build all that infrastructure. We’re already seeing this in places like Indonesia. Holding the world’s largest nickel reserves, a key component of electric batteries, the country is gearing up to become a major producer of electric cars and batteries. This will entail huge increases in energy-intensive nickel mining and processing, with that energy coming from Indonesia’s near total reliance on coal. At present, 14,500 MW worth of new coal energy infrastructure is under construction.

And this industrial build-out also comes with an economic multiplying effect, further expanding the global consumer-economy, increasing energy and ecological demands on an already overburdened Earth. You may have noticed that, despite two decades of renewable energy expansion, carbon emissions continue to rise.

But there is another inconvenient reality being avoided, which is that ecological harm is also climatological harm. Wherever we destroy land, we destroy the climate’s true “green infrastructure,” leaving the earth with that much less capacity for biotic regulation. It’s a double whammy: at we pulse carbon into the atmosphere we will also pulse destruction of the land. Will the patient survive the cure long enough to be saved by it? Who knows. But don’t ask questions. It’s “the science.”

I’m glad there was a strong social justice presence there, and was heartened by the demonstrations in support of the people of Gaza. But I heard, at least on Democracy Now, almost no recognition of the ecological costs of this enterprise.

The final text calls for “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” I’m not sure about the point of “orderly” here. It certainly isn’t orderly for the square miles of old growth sage-grouse habitat currently being scraped at Thacker Pass for lithium, land which is ancestral and sacred to the Paiute Shoshone.

Come to think of it, watching the plowing and grading, stacking and laying of massive water pipes, it was in fact quite orderly. Maybe that’s the point of inserting the term “orderly,” to make it clear that nothing and no one will be allowed to get in the away.

“Just” and “equitable” seem to repeat the same meaning, but why quibble. They are fundamental to any social undertaking. But then comes the term “accelerating action.” Those concerned about the extinction crisis are familiar the phrase “the great acceleration.” It refers to the massive acceleration of ecological damage that came with oil-fueled industrial expansion. Now we are told to accelerate even faster to replace the fuels that started the acceleration to begin with. It is the perfect recipe for accelerating the extinction crisis.

I said Mother Earth was not present, but of course she was, as us, humans, one of her creations. But if she were able to assemble herself as a voice in a room, and if she were given a chance to speak, what might she say? Perhaps something a little like this.

Thank you for coming together to figure out how to save the climate I made for you. You must understand, however, that you can’t continue destroying me and hope to keep that climate, which only I can create and maintain. Beneath you and around you, and with every breath I give you, this is a fundamental reality, but it appears to have been overlooked in your plan.

My drought-hardened lands will not suddenly sprout rain because you have planted them with solar arrays. But restore my soils there, protect and recover my forests there, let be the meadows and wetlands, and watch me make rain for you, Watch me cycle and grow this thing you call climate, but which I know as life.

And if you wonder why my forests are burning, it’s because you are killing them. You haul away the originals, what took me millions of years to teach and interweave into being, and replace them with greenhouse-grown, genetically-modified automatons, who’ve lost memory and can no longer sense my signals or anticipate my moves. You are turning my ancient forests into modern tinder boxes.

Carbon? I know a bit about carbon. I am carbon. I am water I am sunlight I am air I am life. Those hydrocarbon your burn so foolishly, I made them. Took them from the air, drew up the water, touched the sun, made life, fed it to the land, fed the land to time. I can do it again. But you must help me.

Mostly I need rest and I need time. I need you to slow down. I need to you to cool down, stop burning for more and more. I think you already know it will never fill you.

And I need water. I need my estuaries and my marshes, my mosses and microbes and spongy forest floors. Where I am life I am also water. You see it’s all interwoven and it all flows, and is like no machine you could imagine or build. Don’t doubt that by such power I could reclothe the flanks of Antarctic glaciers, but for that I will need my whales back.

I am here. I don’t wander away.

Only you do that.

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