We’re not immune to extinction

No people in the civilisations I have studied during my career as an archaeologist expected to become a forgotten footnote of history. Their societies were thriving and people were enjoying life. And then they weren’t.

Something happened that eradicated their cultures, buried their temples, and brought down their walls. Now, their mortal remains are the vestigial remnants of once-great nations.

The institutions of their government, and the increasing threats – be they climatic, military, economic or political – gave warnings that the paths of their nations were not sustainable. Yet, they failed to react in a timely manner.

We will not escape the consequences of global warming. Millions of people will die, and areas of Earth will become uninhabitable. But we may still be able to save our planet and billions of lives in the process.

Broader topic:

So our public-health infrastructure has wasted a lot of time not doing the right kind of surveillance on this virus. What is a realistic best path forward now, especially considering we’ll have a new presidential administration coming in?
David O’Connor: At the risk of saying something maybe a touch controversial, Tom and I were both commenting earlier that we’d listened to this week’s Ezra Klein podcast where the author of Recoding America was talking about how processes often become a substitute for judgment in terms of what the role of government officials should be. And I think we definitely see this — that a lot of public health is policy-driven. Tom and I see this in our own day-to-day lives. In our state of Wisconsin, farmers produce 30 billion pounds of raw milk a year, and yet it’s taken us five months to get permission to bring several ounces of that raw milk into our secure labs because of biosafety concerns that there might be something in this milk that would pose a risk. Even though it’s the same thing that’s being produced in the tens of billions of pounds per year and is being consumed legally and drunk by people in a dozen states.

So I think that one place where there may be an opportunity for some common cause in the new administration — where there is a pointed idea that there should be less regulation, that maybe there should be less indexing on process and more on outcomes — would be to look at this with fresh eyes and say, “What are the things that we are really trying to accomplish here? What are the goals?” And then ask the question, “Are the approaches that we’re using being driven by the best science and the best public health? Or is it being driven by other considerations, like we don’t want to step on the feet of another agency that may also have a stake in this response?”

Public health is something we all need to do. And I’d like to think that maybe we can move things faster if there is a little bit more of an emphasis on outcomes. A lot of things that public health needs to do may be unpopular at the individual level. It may be difficult for individuals, but it’s needed for community health, for literal public health. And maybe in a new administration, an optimistic take is that a reduction in regulation would be one potentially positive outcome that could lead to a more effective response.

There’s the regulation part, and then there’s the tension between the individual and the communal here in the U.S.
Tom Friedrich: I think that’s true. I would add that there should be incentives, and maybe a new administration would find some will to do this. Because ultimately, we need to incentivize cooperation from farmers and their workers to be able to go into farms and do testing. And something that we’re not really talking about here, but underlies all of this, is just a reduction in trust in governments and institutions generally. If we want to avert a pandemic, if a pandemic is about to happen, then people are going to have to act decisively, and very quickly, it’s going to get out of control. So you have a narrow window of opportunity where by definition you have to be acting with incomplete information. If you’re going to be very deliberative about the whole thing, you’re just not going to be able to contain it.

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Drugs, hormones and excrement: the polluting pig mega-farms supplying pork to the world

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/25/drugs-hormones-excrement-pig-farms-mexico-water-yucatan

The bottom line

In their paper, the MITEI team calls DAC a “very seductive concept.” Using DAC to suck CO2 out of the air and generate high-quality carbon-removal credits can offset reduction requirements for industries that have hard-to-abate emissions. By doing so, DAC would minimize disruptions to key parts of the world’s economy, including air travel, certain carbon-intensive industries, and agriculture. However, the world would need to generate billions of tonnes of CO2 credits at an affordable price. That prospect doesn’t look likely. The largest DAC plant in operation today removes just 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, and the price to buy the company’s carbon-removal credits on the market today is $1,500 per tonne.

The researchers recognize that there is room for energy efficiency improvements in the future, but DAC units will always be subject to higher work requirements than CCS applied to power plant or industrial flue gases, and there is not a clear pathway to reducing work requirements much below the levels of current DAC technologies.

Nevertheless, the researchers recommend that work to develop DAC continue “because it may be needed for meeting net-zero emissions goals, especially given the current pace of emissions.” But their paper concludes with this warning: “Given the high stakes of climate change, it is foolhardy to rely on DAC to be the hero that comes to our rescue.”

We should do all we can to protect and restore soil carbon. About 80% of the organic carbon on the land surface of the planet is held in soil. It’s essential for soil health. There should be strong rules and incentives for good soil management. But there is no realistic way in which carbon trading can help. Here are the reasons why.

First, tradable increments of soil carbon are impossible to measure. Because soil depths can vary greatly even within one field, there is currently no accurate, affordable means of estimating soil volume. Nor do we have a good-enough test, across a field or a farm, for bulk density – the amount of soil packed into a given volume. So, even if you could produce a reliable measure of carbon per cubic metre of soil, if you don’t know how much soil you have, you can’t calculate the impact of any changes you make.

A reliable measure of soil carbon per cubic metre is also elusive, as carbon levels can fluctuate massively from one spot to the next. Repeated measurements from thousands of sites across a farm, necessary to show how carbon levels are changing, would be prohibitively expensive. Nor are simulation models, on which the whole market relies, an effective substitute for measurement. So much for the “verification” supposed to underpin this trade.

Second, soil is a complex, biological system that seeks equilibrium. With the exception of peat, it reaches equilibrium at a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 12:1. This means that if you want to raise soil carbon, in most cases you will also need to raise soil nitrogen. But whether nitrogen is applied in synthetic fertilisers or in animal manure, it’s a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, which could counteract any gains in soil carbon. It is also one of the most potent causes of water pollution.

Third, carbon levels in agricultural soils soon saturate. Some promoters of soil carbon credits create the impression that accumulation can continue indefinitely. It can’t. There’s a limit to how much a given soil can absorb.

Fourth, any accumulation is reversible. Soil is a highly dynamic system: you cannot permanently lock carbon into it. Microbes constantly process carbon, sometimes stitching it into the soil, sometimes releasing it: this is an essential property of soil health. With rises in temperature, the carbon sequestration you’ve paid for can simply evaporate: there’s likely to be a massive outgassing of carbon from soils as a direct result of continued heating. Droughts can also hammer soil carbon.

Be careful.

It is hard ask for the concept of care to be broadened to include care for earth systems. Even if there is broad recognition of repairing and caring for things, the term care invokes for most the narrow conception of caring for people, and care work to be the provision of assistance to those who are ill, disabled or frail6. If however, we substitute the term stewardship for care, then we move towards a slightly different way of understanding. Stewardship is caring about the world we live in all its complexity and caring for every part of it in whatever state it is in. It not just caring to repair things once they are broken, it is to ensure things endure from the outset; it is not just caring to assist those in need, it is ensuring that community networks are strong and resilient so that difference can be supported and celebrated at all times; it is not caring to fix a food security system that is broken, it is about ensuring that food production skills and local availability of good food are strengthened at local levels; if is not just about supporting those who are care workers (for people or the environment) it is about strengthening neighbourhoods and communities so that members feel valued whatever their contributions might be. Stewardship is stressing caring about, which almost certainly will include caring for.