Gentle Decline 2/42: Responses & Reiterations

Hello. It continues to be a hell of a year. I’ve had a few responses to the last issue, and a few communications on other channels - including the first Gentle Decline-related email I’ve ever gotten from what seems to have been a burner address, which was mildly antagonistic and anonymous. Anyway. This issue answers some questions, and includes some links.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! If you want to help keep the lights on, you can do so via Patreon or Ko-fi. All support is appreciated!]

Positive Things

Turns out onion skins protect solar panels better than plastic. And double-headed wind turbines appear to be miracle machines. Iron-air batteries are one of the new energy storage techniques that can make renewable sources work better. Sand batteries are another.

Correspondence

The vaguely antagonistic email I mentioned above contained this among other text:

And I mean… it does have a bias. I’m not pretending otherwise. I’m further left than most people; I’m an anarchist at heart. There’s an often-repeated observation that reality has a leftward bias. But in the bluntest of terms: I do not actually believe that there are environmentalists on the right. The most basic tenets of rightwing thinking are selfish, and while there may be people on the conservative end of the spectrum who are interested in preserving specific places, species, or even carbon dioxide levels, the fundamentals of wanting to give the next generation along a working planet are contrary to conservatism. If you think you’re a right-wing environmentalist, then I invite you to closely examine either your politics or your environmentalism, and work out which of them is insincere.

I still feel like I’m not very qualified to answer this. I’m interested in dealing with climate change effects, and while I acknowledge that the political disaster that is the US in 2025 has a lot in common with an environmental disaster, it’s not the same thing. But fundamentally, if you or your kids are not white born-on-US-soil actual-US-citizens, if you have any irregularities in your right or the right of your kids to reside in the US, if you’ve expressed left-wing opinions loudly in the past, or if you’re an area where government support might be necessary in the wake of an actual disaster, natural or otherwise, I think you should at least look at the possibilities, have a plan to get out or at the very least to a safer place within the US, and work out what the thresholds of change are that will make you move. If you or your kids are trans, I think you should be moving at the very least to safer parts of the US, and honestly, I think out entirely is a better option. If things continue as they are, with refusals to seat elected officials whose politics don’t suit the powers that be, then I’d speed up getting out, because that’s a long step toward not having meaningful elections anymore.

I don’t think they can affect climate that fast (although some of them seem to be trying). They can make local environmental changes pretty fast, by for example deregulating pollution controls. What they can do more broadly, though, is stymie the response to all kinds of natural disasters, many of which are climate-linked, and make it more difficult to predict them. Some of this is on principle, such as the idea that the government should fundamentally not do much, so things like research, disaster relief, and weather forecasting should not be a government-provided service. And, honestly, more of it seems to be because defunding such things will irritate political opponents, which is absolutely childish and also observably true.

So if there is, for instance, a powerful hurricane hitting the states of New Jersey or New York (picking blue states where hurricanes can fairly easily hit), and it does serious damage, you can expect the current administration to be slow to respond at all, to delay sending in FEMA and other disaster relief groups, to oppose additional aid (or just plain deny it), and to hamper reconstruction efforts for years. There is a non-zero chance that the whole response from the White House will be some mocking posts on social media. And by defunding or shrinking institutions like the NOAA, the capability to predict the path of that hurricane in the first place is diminished.

Down the road some decades, there will also be more environmental and climate-caused disasters.

So one of the really weird side effects of the AMOC (the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is more than just the Gulf Stream) is that it literally keeps water away from the east coast of North America. It pushes it eastward, toward the mid-Atlantic. This means that if those currents shut down, sea level on that coast will rise, quickly, by about a metre. Since the currents also stablise temperatures on the Atlantic coasts, we’d also see more sudden changes in temperature. Currently we see temperature variations on both sides of the ocean of about 10C on any given day; this could increase by quite a bit. It also allows for more extremes of temperature, but that seems to be true of almost any aspect of climate change. There would be more extreme weather for North America in general. And due to knock-on effects from air-masses, the average temperatures across the whole of the Northern Hemisphere can be expected to drop, while those in the South rise.

Boom Year or Bust Year

The header picture in this issue is mushrooms growing on a fallen tree. It’s been a boom year for mushrooms; some woodlands I’ve been in have clearly been mycological habitats which happen to contain some trees as well. But it’s not just mushrooms; there’ve been huge amounts of most other fruit as well, including apples and pumpkins. At the same time, though, this kind of thing can’t be relied upon; very similar conditions can result in drought or other food chaos. One headline says that “One year’s worth of bread [has been] lost in UK to wrecked harvests since 2020“.

In a way, this boom and bust is a return to historical norms; the latter half of the 20th century was anomalous in terms of agriculture and food provision in that single crops could be expected to produce every year, allowing farms to get down to producing one thing - wheat, soy, maize, or whatever. Before that - and even into the early 1900s - farms maintained multiple different crops so that if one failed, there wasn’t too much lost. Quite apart from the just-in-time supply chains I’ve bemoaned before, single-product farms look like a weak point in our food stability. Ongoing climate chaos will presumably give reason for that to change; whether agriculture will actually catch on is a different question. Purto Rico is ahead of the rest of us on this, driven by recent hurricane disasters.

Links

Ireland’s natural environment is not doing well, which isn’t surprising to those of us paying attention to it, and the agriculture industry continues to not cooperate. Continuing the leftist bias mentioned above, here are some guidelines on activism and organisation, and an online copy of Saul D. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Also a list of ideas for how to improve Dublin (and presumably many other cities). And here’s a solid comparison of safety and cleanliness of various energy sources:

Closing

All I can really do is to repeat the instruction to hang in there. Maybe back off from the news a bit, because reading all of it honestly isn’t doing anyone any good. Drop me a line and let me know what your concerns and ideas are.

[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its (more) food-related sibling) on Patreon or Ko-fi. Major research contributions in this and all issues by Cee.]