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Even as LA Burns, Most of Us Are Not 'There' Yet on Climate
Millions more people will die before anything close to enough "there-ness" occurs throughout the populace to prompt enough people to stand for change.
Jan 15, 2025
Can I admit something to you? Gotta say... I feel embarrassed about this. Perhaps even ashamed.
Okay, here goes: Yes, when I read, see, or hear accounts of what is happening in Los Angeles right now, I do experience empathy and sadness and compassion. And—oh yeah—also a healthy dose of heartbreak and rage about the torrents of disinformation that, these days, automatically mushroom around any event of any significance, especially if climate change is involved.
But—and here's the confession part—I am guessing that my primary reaction, the one about which I feel shame, is based upon this: I'm not there.
In other words, since it's not myself (or any of my loved ones) who is being directly and viscerally and financially impacted, my reactions of empathy occur (literally and figuratively) at a distance. Sure, I'll experience these feelings for a while, especially as I am taking in information or pictures about the situation, but then most of that will quickly evaporate as I go about my day. My at-a-distance reactions almost never move me to take direct and impactful and lasting action, because... I'm not there.
And so my primary reaction is a mixture of relief and (here comes the shame part) some level of indifference.
I'm not proud of this. But there it is.
Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet.
It's an April day in 2001 and I sit across from the chief of hepatology of Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia as he shares the conclusions of various diagnostic procedures brought on by some recent health difficulties.
"David, you have a disease called Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC), which is a progressive narrowing of the bile ducts."
Hmm. Okay. That doesn't sound all that bad, right? Okay, I'm not even sure what bile ducts do or where they are located, but...
"So," the doc continues, "What it comes down to is that you will eventually need a liver transplant, and there's nothing we can do to prevent that."
Shock. Utter shock. You see, I wasn't feeling any symptoms of this disease, this PSC. None at all. I'd been dealing with an unrelated medical matter and labs revealed that something was off with my liver numbers and further investigation revealed the PSC.
It took me about a month to get over the shock of my diagnosis. And then... well... I just got on with living my life mostly as if nothing had changed. Since I had no symptoms (they would begin to kick in about three years down the road—fatigue, itching, jaundice) and could do nothing to prevent the disease progression, it was as if I didn't have a disease at all.
I wasn't "there" yet.
Back to Los Angeles. Full Disclosure: I know much more about climate change than the average person. I researched it intensively and wrote 15 published articles back in 2012-2015. Then... I mostly gave up writing about it. Why? Because it gradually became apparent that mere information—no matter how compellingly or creatively expressed—was NOT going to move most people to take significant action.
Why? Because most people would not be "there" for years and decades to come? Sure, climate change would become more and more symptomatic, but the Earth is a big place. An increasingly occurring wildfire here or there, a superstorm here or there, a superdrought here or there, still ends up leaving the vast majority of folks not being obviously and viscerally impacted.
I mean... at least at first.
January, 2006. Dr. Susan Althoff—one of three surgeons who performed the liver transplant—shoots me a steely look: "David, we WILL get you through this."
I am laying on my bed in the liver-transplant wing of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. My youngest brother is also in this wing since, about a week before, he donated half of his liver to me (It's called a Live Donor Transplant).
So now I've got a new half-a-liver (which, incredibly, will grow to a 100% liver in about a month's time, as will my brother's remaining half-a-liver). The problem is that my body has so far rejected my new liver. This is not particularly uncommon. Suddenly, there is a huge hunk of "foreign" tissue inside of me, and my body's immune system is trying to eject it. There are drugs for this, which I am now taking and will be taking for the rest of my life.
But these drugs are being overwhelmed, and so they put me on the next protocol—high dose steroids. And—wheeeeee!—the steroids DO give me drug-induced diabetes but are not enough to turn the tide. Dr. Althoff has just entered to give me that piece of bad news. I am beyond exhausted and respond with some expression of despair and hopelessness.
Dr. Althoff responds with that steely look (see above) and explains: "We have one more protocol called OKT-3 (when they bring out the letters-and-numbers meds, you know it's serious). We've only used it three times in the last year. You'll know it's working if you get a high fever and start to feel really, really sick."
Twelve hours later, I am shivering under a special, ice-filled blanket. I have a high fever and feel quite sick, wrecked even. The OKT-3 is apparently working.
Finally, I am "there." Boy-oh-boy, am I there. Right there. Exactly there. Everything else in the world disappears. Every single thing other than wanting this to stop and wanting to get better and feel better. I would do anything.
Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet. Most of them, I am sure, would do anything to make it stop and to make things better.
Even the ones who—subject to the unceasing and enormously financed propaganda of fossil fuel corporations and the governments and political parties that they have purchased—have denied the reality of human-caused climate change (as well as the ones—let us not forget—who blandly "believe" it, but have placed it way down on the list of concerns) will be less likely to dismiss the scientific reports that will be published finding that the intensity of these fires was 20% or 40% or 75% more likely to have happened due to the inexorably heating planet. These reports will be coming. This is certain.
Because—just like me under that ice blanket—they are finally "there," their nervous systems violated and assaulted. Their world turned upside down.
I am forever grateful to my brother. Yes, my situation was serious. But I was only one person. And I was willing to go along with the science. And I only needed one other person (with a compatible blood-type!!) to step up. And, lastly, as my fatigue increased and my weight melted away and my eyes and skin turned yellow, I was brought at least partially "there" and became willing to undergo fairly extreme and grueling duress to set things right.
But when it comes to setting things right climate-wise, there are 8.2 billion of us. Most are ceaselessly occupied trying to make ends meet. Many are swayed by the flat-out disinformation campaigns of those wishing to keep things as they are. Most—though this ratio will gradually swing the other way—are not yet nearly "there" in terms of direct-and-undeniable climate impacts.
This is a stark brew.
Things can get stark under the ice blanket or the thousand-and-one other grueling demands of major surgery and recovery (I needed a follow-up surgery in 2010 which was—I kid you not—at least 200% more difficult than the transplant. Once things are allowed to go a great degree out-of-balance, it becomes much more likely that unforeseen complications and collapses will ensue.)
I could have died during my transplant in 2006. I very nearly did die in the 2010 surgery.
Some people have died in the LA fires. The body count continues to grow. Many, many more have lost now-uninsurable homes, cars, pets, etc. The "stark brew" cited above all but assures that millions more people will die before anything close to enough "there-ness" occurs throughout the populace to prompt enough people to stand for change—even the grueling and deeply inconvenient change that is demanded by the physics of Earth.
I wish it were different. So do many people whom I know.
But it isn't different.
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A Trio of Small Christmas Gifts to Stave Off Climate Despair
From solar-powered data centers and balconies to a landmark legal victory, I hope these help set the holiday mood just a little.
Dec 24, 2024
One of my jobs in the tiny Vermont town where I live is to lead the Christmas Eve service at the little white church alongside the river. I’m not actually a preacher, and it’s not particularly denominational—my wife and my daughter, who are Jewish, are usually on hand to belt out carols and there’s occasionally a reading from Dr. Seuss. But the neighbors stand at the pulpit one by one to recite the Scriptures that tell the story of this remarkable baby, and then I do my best in a short homily to pick out some points of light. A little harder this year than most, but perhaps more important because of that. The goal is to make sure the community holds, now more than ever.
And I suppose that in some way the community we’ve built around this newsletter is a congregation of sorts, with me again in the role of shambling, ill-trained preacher. So I’ve poked around in the news to bring you a trio of small gifts—ambiguous, by no means definitive, but nonetheless things to build on.
The first comes, somewhat remarkably, from Silicon Valley.
As you almost certainly know, the rapid growth of AI is causing despair among some energy experts. The giant data centers that “train” these various models to do what they do (help lazy students write banal termpapers, say) soak up huge amounts of electricity, and in the last year or two the fossil fuel industry has seized on that as avidly as they seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—anything to make the case for extending their business model a little longer. Arielle Samuelson, writing at Emily Atkin’s pathbreaking newsletter Heated, offers a really powerful account of what’s gone on:
The growth of AI has been called the “savior” of the gas industry. In Virginia alone, the data center capital of the world, a new state report found that AI demand could add a new 1.5 gigawatt gas plant every two years for 15 consecutive years.
And now, as energy demand for AI rises, oil corporations are planning to build gas plants that specifically serve data centers. Last week, Exxon announced that it is building a large gas plant that will directly supply power to data centers within the next five years. The company claims the gas plant will use technology that captures polluting emissions—despite the fact that the technology has never been used at a commercial scale before.
Chevron also announced that the company is preparing to sell gas to an undisclosed number of data centers. “We're doing some work right now with a number of different people that's not quite ready for prime time, looking at possible solutions to build large-scale power generation,” said CEO Mike Wirth at an Atlantic Council event. The opportunity to sell power to data centers is so promising that even private equity firms are investing billions in building energy infrastructure.
So, ugh. Except that it’s important to remember that Big Oil is an industry that lies a lot, and some of those commitments may not be quite as firm as they’re saying. In fact, a new report—this is the first Christmas present—from a team of Silicon Valley types came out last week, making the case that if these data centers are actually going to get built anytime soon, the best bet by far is for Google et al to put up solar farms next door. Building new gas plants, as they point out, takes a number of years—really, anything that requires a new connection to the grid goes slowly. But if you have a “co-located microgrid”—i.e., a dedicated solar farm right next to your mysterious warehouse of servers—that can be put up in a relative trice.
Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around two years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders.
The only one of the authors I knew before this was Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist employed by the payment company Stripe, but the others come from reputable places (Paces, which expedites renewable development, and Scale Microgrids) and they thank a passel of collaborators at places like Tesla and Anthropic. And their research seems impeccable—they work through the costs and the reliability of renewables paired with batteries, and they return again and again to the speed with which these new facilities could be built.
One thing they don’t stress, but which I think could be politically important, is that all of these big AI players have promised in recent years that they would zero out their emissions. And though no one in the White House will hold them to that, most of these companies are in places like Washington and California filled with environmentally committed workers and investors; we should be able to organize some pressure on them to do the right thing. It’s not the perfect thing. In a rational world we’d postpone the glories of AI long enough to power up all the heat pumps and cars from renewable electricity first. But if they get expertise building solar farms for their data centers, the experience may turn these behemoths into better crusaders for clean energy. One can hope, anyway. Here’s the final bottom line from the report:
Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the U.S. Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives… The advantages to whoever moves on this quickly could be substantial.
And then there’s the second present I promised, which was delivered Wednesday afternoon by the Montana Supreme Court. It upheld, on a 6-1 vote, a lower court ruling that the state’s children have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment,” and that that includes carefully analyzing state energy policies to keep them from damaging the climate.
This ruling is under the state constitution, which was amended shortly after Earth Day in 1970 to include environmental protections. (America’s Western states have not always been bright red). The landmark ruling comes almost a year and a half after a remarkable trial, which featured a mix of young Montanans explaining how climate change was damaging their lives (breathing wildfire smoke, for one) and nationally renowned climate experts who volunteered their time to make a compelling case. The state all but punted its response, not even putting its lead climate-denier on the stand after paying her large sums of money to prepare testimony, and the district court issued a powerful finding that’s now been upheld.
This doesn’t necessarily have national implications—shamefully, the Biden DOJ has buried the federal equivalent, Juliana v. U.S., under a blizzard of writs, picking up where the Trump administration left off. And it probably won’t immediately change Montana’s current commitment to using more gas. But it is a clear moral victory that will cast a long shadow. As Cornell legal scholar Leehi Yona said this morning, “This is a historic case and one that could serve as a model for state-level lawsuits, particularly as an alternative to federal courts (such as the U.S. Supreme Court, which currently seems unreceptive to climate cases).”
Mostly, I’m happy for the kids involved. I got to interview a couple of them on stage this fall at a gathering sponsored by Protect Our Winters. They were eloquent and moving, and I hope very much that this ruling strengthens their commitment to fight. The Trump era will end someday, and we’ll need a new wave of smart and moral people to carry on the crucial fights—these are them!
And the third? Attentive readers will remember how happy I was earlier this year at news that half a million Germans had taken advantage of a new law to hang solar panels from the balconies of their apartments. Well, according to a new report in The Guardian, by year’s end that number has swelled to a million and a half Germans, and now it’s taking off in Spain and elsewhere.
Manufacturers say that installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give a saving of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill. With an outlay of €400-800 and with no installation cost, the panels could pay for themselves within six years.
In Spain, where two thirds of the population live in apartments and installing panels on the roof requires the consent of a majority of the building’s residents, this DIY technology has obvious advantages.
With solar balconies, no such consent is required unless the facade is listed as of historic interest or there is a specific prohibition from the residents’ association or the local authority. Furthermore, as long as the installation does not exceed 800 watts it doesn’t require certification, which can cost from €100 to €400, depending on the area.
“The beauty of the solar balconies is they are flexible, cheap, and plug straight into the domestic network via a converter, so you don’t have to pay for the installation,” says Santiago Vernetta, CEO of Tornasol Energy, one of Spain’s main suppliers.
Putting up one of these would be illegal almost everywhere in America—but that’s something to work on next year. Why should Europeans have all the fun? Belgium has just ended its ban. As one official explained: “If 1.5 million Germans have bought solar balcony kits there must be something in it,” he says.
I wish I had yet more such gifts to offer (I’m keeping a close eye on Albany, where Gov. Kathy Hochul may still sign the crucial Climate Superfund bill before year’s end, and if that happens I’ll let you know). But I hope these help set the holiday mood just a little. I can tell you that it’s snowing this afternoon up here on the spine of the Greens. And since I’m typing up the program for the Christmas Eve service this afternoon, I can tell you how it ends: with everyone in town walking through the church doors and into the (hopefully crisp) night air singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
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Look Up: The Scariest Part When We See the Big, Big, Big Picture
As a new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
Oct 23, 2024
This is “Climate week” in New York City, and my inbox has been awash recently in the latest press releases about start-ups and noble initiatives and venal greenwashing. Much of it’s important, and I’ll get to some of it later, but there’s a big new study that came out last week in Science that sets our crucial moment in true perspective. Let’s step back for a moment.
This new study—a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt “biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time”—offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years. That’s the period scientists call the Phanerozoic—the latest of the earth’s four geological eons (we’re still in it), and the one marked by the true profusion of plant and animal life. It’s a lovely piece of science, and it’s lovely too because it reminds us of all we’re heir to in this tiny brief moment that marks the human time on earth. So staggeringly much—strange and extreme and fecund—has come before us.
But it’s also scary as can be, for two big reasons.
The first is that it shows the earth has gotten very very warm in the past. As the Washington Post explained in an excellent analysis yesterday, “the study suggests that at its hottest the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius).” Our current average temperature—already elevated by global warming to the highest value ever recorded—is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15 degrees Celsius. For most of the 500 million years the study covers, the earth has been in a hothouse state, with an average temperature of 71.6 Fahrenheit, or 22 Celsius, much higher than now. Only about an eighth of the time has the earth been in its current “coldhouse” state—but of course that includes all the time that humans have been around. It is the world we know and we’re adapted to.
In every era, it’s increases in carbon dioxide that drive the increases and decreases in temperature. “Carbon dioxide is really that master dial,” Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, said. And so the study makes clear that the mercury could go very high indeed as humans pour carbon into the sky. We won’t burn enough coal and oil and gas to reach the very highest temperatures seen in the geological record—that required periods of incredible volcanism—but we may well double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and this study implies that the fast and slow feedbacks from that could eventually drive temperatures as much as eight degrees Celsius higher, which is more than most current estimates. Over shorter time frames the numbers are just as dramatic
Without rapid action to curbgreenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.
Now, you could look at those numbers and say: well, the earth has been hotter before, so life won’t be wiped out. And that’s true—there’s probably no way to wipe out life, though on a planet with huge numbers of nuclear weapons who knows. But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.
But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.
In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.
Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.
Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.
Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.
That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over this week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work.
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