Gentle Decline 2/34: Directions & Discourse

Hello, and welcome to a very bit-and-piece issue. I’ve had a good bit of correspondence from the last few issues, and there’ve been some questions to answer. I’ve also a bunch of links to share, and a recommendation for another newsletter.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Positive Things

It turns out that solar panel sites have more insect life. In an rather more forward-thinking mode than I’d expect, the EU are banning misleading “climate neutral” claims. And also in the EU, fuel CO2 levels are down to levels last seen in the 1960s. A Minesto “tidal kite” is connected to the grid in the Faroe Islands. This is one of the more sci-fi looking devices I’ve seen in some time.

Links and Bits

XKCD notes that we knew about the greenhouse effect about 120 years after the start of the industrial revolution. That was 128 years ago.

In response to the last few issues, a number of people have sent me links to sites that help calculate flood risk. In Ireland, there’s the Floodmaps site, and also the Maps tool on catchments.ie; in the US there’s RiskFactor (thanks Kimberly!). It does appear, though, that “The US government does more to promote floods than any other entity” (and given the work done here in Ireland, I suspect you could take a long look at the OPW, as well).

The Les Arcs Glacier in France is expected to disappear entirely by 2030.

The EU is enabling prison sentences for environmental crimes. This, to my mind, is essential in dealing with corporations - a fine is just another cost as far as they’re concerned, but if a CEO or board member could end up serving time, they’ll have a rather different attitude.

The newsletter recommendation is for Alex Steffen’s The Snap Forward, which deals with very similar topics to Gentle Decline. Steffen seems to expect a more sudden change than I do, and I think a somewhat grimmer outcome, but his material is good, and worth thinking about. One of the latest issues deals with finding places to live - my “Move Inland”.

Questions & Answers

Why do you not switch to paid newsletters? I can understand not wanting to be on Substack, but Beehiiv also does paid, I checked. You could probably go a long way toward having a good living from it.

It’s entirely possible that I would make more from Gentle Decline if it was a paid newsletter (I don’t think that the uptake would be enough to actually make a living from, not for a few more years yet). It’s also possible that it would be taken more seriously (by which I mean it would be treated as an authority, not that people think of it as frivolous). But it’s not intended to be a money-making enterprise. The intention is that it makes knowledge available from someone who has thought and read and thought some more about climate change and its consequences a lot over the last decade or so. That knowledge is better out in the world than locked behind a paywall, and the “Be Generous” principle (one of the Three Rules) says pretty solidly that I’ll be better off in the medium and long terms if my friends and neighbours benefit from it now. Obviously, working on the newsletter costs me time that I could be doing something more profitable with, and Patreons and Ko-fi donors help with that. At present, I estimate that GD “pays” me about €3.50 an hour in a quiet month, dropping as low as €1.75 in a busy one. But I feel strongly about the principle of not putting it out of people’s reach. Sometimes that does mean that there are long gaps between newsletters while I hustle on something else.

I can’t afford to sign up for Patreon, although I’ve sent you some money on Ko-fi. Is there something else I could do that would be helpful?

Thank you enormously! Every bit helps. You can share the newsletter (https://gentledecline.beehiiv.com/) on social media (Facebook, X, Bluesky, Tumblr, Threads, whatever else you’re using), in whatever group communications you use (Discord, Whatsapp, etc.), or you can forward on this or any other issue (2/11 is a good one, with plenty of links to other issues) to people you think might find it useful. I am absolutely happy for you to forward this to the climate-sceptic uncle you argued with at Christmas.

Speaking of scepticism: You seem pretty sceptical that technology will sort out climate issues. Why is that?

Well, first and foremost, climate issues are directly caused by technology. Not in the broad abstract sense, certainly, but the specific technologies we’ve been using for the last two centuries or so. Second, technology under capitalism goes through a process which has been labelled “enshittification” - the basic idea of which is that no matter how useful a given technology is, once it’s under the control of one corporate entity, costs will be cut again and again until it’s not really much good anymore. According to the original definition by Cory Doctorow, it was specifically for technology that sits between suppliers and users (“two sided markets”), but you can see it in effect all over the place. The maximisation of value to shareholders results in the minimum viable product for users. And in climate technology, that’s not helpful. So unless the technology is happening in some non-capitalist context, it’s never going to be of much help because “human civilisation continuing as it is” is not measureable in dollars to shareholders this quarter.

Further, we already have a lot of the technology in wind and solar power generation, and it is being ferociously opposed by people whose money comes from fossil fuels, including campaigns of misinformation to get “grassroots” movements to oppose them too.

We know what will sort out climate issues - stop burning fossil fuels, reforest and re-wild marginal land areas, and retreat from the coastlines to allow for the consequences of what’s already in motion. That’s it. Any approach which has as its basis “we can keep burning fossil fuels if [insert mythical tech]” has two problems; the fossil fuels and the mythical tech.

There’s been some serious coverage of the AMOC in the last couple of weeks. Is there something new there, or is this just the media catching up to things you already wrote about?

There’s a new method of prediction, which is physics-based rather than statistics-based, is my understanding. And it agrees that the AMOC is close to a tipping point beyond which it will stop flowing. I’ve written about the effects of this before, in Issue 1/23 - some of the science in that issue is now out of date, but the conclusions are pretty solid.

One of the things mentioned in the latest research, though, is that the AMOC shutting down would result in a sea-level rise in the North Atlantic of about 1m. That’s over and above anything being driven by warming, Greenland’s glaciers melting, etc, and would probably happen pretty fast.

I do feel like a relatively sudden shift to a colder climate (albeit still with plenty of rain, wind and storms) is extremely likely for North-West Europe now, it’s just a matter of when it happens. In truth, the only thing stopping me from saying this will happen is that I abhor definite statements that I can’t completely stand by, and this is unprecedented in human history, so we don’t know that it’ll happen the way the current predictions go. So I’m only 97% certain.

I’ve been looking through back issues, and I haven’t the skills for any of this stuff. I’ve spent my life training to be a [profession] and I make good money at it. Is it not much more efficient to just build wealth and then buy the services I need regardless of what the climate is doing?

(I’ve rephrased this a bit, and taken out the actual profession of the question-asker, at their request. It’s one that potentially does make a lot of money.)

This is a complicated sort of question, because there are ways in which building wealth will potentially help a lot in insulating you from the effects of climate change. Indeed, most people reading this are in first-world countries where our wealth (even if it doesn’t feel to use like we’re rich) already insulates us from the effects. Price of wheat goes up? Enh, pasta costs 20c a packet more, no big deal. Somewhere in South Asia was catastrophically flooded? Give €10 (or €50, or whatever) to a relevant charity and feel you’ve done something. Don’t want to use fossil fuels for heating? Install a heat pump, paying the up-front cost, trusting in the savings on your bills down the line. And so on. And I’m not saying that these are not valid! That 20c more on the pasta packet is a bump of 10% or more which goes back, to some degree, to the producer who only got a limited crop, the charity is doing essential things in South Asia, and the heat pump is really good. But none of these things could be done if we weren’t, in comparison to the rest of the world (and in comparison to some people even in our first world countries), rich.

So as the effects of climate chaos become more evident, those of us living in first-world countries (and having middle-ish class incomes, inasmuch as those are a thing anymore) won’t really feel them much. Sure, the cost of living has gone up, but that’s mostly ok, right? It’s people who are living much closer to the edge of survival, in third-world countries, places that are going to be flooded even more, places that will get too hot to live in, and so on that will suffer the brunt of it, and our wealth keeps us out of those situations.

The problem is that this will remain true only until that edge arrives here. It is possible that that edge will not arrive here in our lifetimes. It is virtually certain, if you have kids (even those in thier 20s or so), that it’ll happen in their lifetimes. Their children will, without a shadow of a doubt, be impacted massively. And my bet is that there will be large-scale impacts here in the first world, in Ireland specifically, in the next 15-20 years. At that point, wealth will no longer get you out of the situation you’re in, whatever it is.

If, for instance, you’re still living by a coast or in a flood plain, you’ll have to move. Where to? A lot of the available housing (and Ireland is already short on housing) will be gone. You can offer more and more money to someone else to sell up (or move out of rented accommodation), but they have to go somewhere themselves, and they’re not going to have anywhere more to go to than you do. So there’s a point at which you just cannot buy your way out of the situation. The same applies if you’re in a situation where (even short term) food shortages are biting, and you have money but didn’t buy food in time. The shops are down to canned asparagus and own-brand Weetabix, and nobody is going to sell you the food they have. You have to rely on other people being generous and sharing what they have instead.

(I’m now going to consider that question mostly answered, and amble off into a tangent.)

There’s a Heinlein quote that gets bandied around a lot, mostly by people who haven’t thought about it much. When I thought of myself as a specialist (such as web developers were in the 90s, say), I used to get quite annoyed by it.

The specifics of what things a human being should be able to do can vary - “conn a ship” was relevant to the SF setting Heinlein was writing in, for instance - but there’s massive value in being able to do several things. The hyper-specificity of our current situation which leads us to careers in systems analysis (but only as long as the “systems” are Unix-based computers and the “analysis” is of financial software, or whatever), and Google Ads optimisation, and forensic audit accounting, and lecturing in pre-Norman Irish food history, and so on depend very greatly on that specialisation surviving, and the matrix of capitalism that surrounds it remaining in good order. Being very very good at one thing, and really not much good at anything else is rewarded by corporate structures (in the short term) and athletic competitions (also, really, in the short term), and very few other situations. In any disaster, or even mildly inconvenient situation, the specialist is a liability.

So even if you can’t move inland, flood-proof where you’re living, make sure you’re set up to deal with both stormier and colder weather, and so on, you can at least make sure that you have some other skills. It almost doesn’t matter what they are; the experience of developing new skills makes you more able to learn others when you need to.

Closing

This doesn’t feel like a long newsletter, but the word count up there is ticking past 2400 as I type, so I’d better stop. Questions and responses are all welcome, and my current line of research (which may or may not manifest as an issue soon) is in what kind of things are necessary to deal with colder weather, of the sort we’ll have in these parts post-AMOC.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Merchandise is also available. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee. Links and news contributions from Finne.]