by Hope Jahren, 2020
Book about climate change by the author of Lab Girl. Excellent! No BS, just the facts, but she’s funny and honest, and ‘hope’-ful. Love this scientist-author. She’s a gift. Her thesis is that the developed countries use more than they need of everything, resulting in carbon dioxide output that is causing most of the problem. If we’d stop using so much of everything, and wasting so much of it, we’d find our world in a lot better shape, and we’d be happier, too.
Here are some of the quotes that I loved:
“Henry George was also right in that most of the want and suffering that we see in our world today originates not from Earth’s inability to provide but from our inability to share, as we’ll see so many times in later pages.”
“The soil of a farm field is forced to be the perfect environment for monoculture growth….Because farm fields are loaded with nutrients and water relative to the natural land that surrounds them, they are coveted as luxury real estate by every random weed in the county. In addition, the fields that were plowed for planting were already home to innumerable insects, fungi, and bacteria that are only too eager to eat key parts of our crop plants before we can…Today, more than five million tons of pesticides are applied to cropland each year the world over–that’s a little more than one pound for every person on Earth…”
“The fact that GMO plants have laboratory-altered DNA does not make them dangerous for human consumption; the National Academy of Sciences has formally reviewed the safety of GMO crops twice now and found that they pose no unique hazards to human health. The problem with GMOs is that the seeds are sold exclusively by the handful of companies that played key roles in their development….Monsanto and DuPont….”
“In 1996, the same company that sells Roundup–Monsanto–began to market the seeds for “Roundup Ready” soybean, corn, and cotton plants. Into these new transgenic crop varieties had been inserted a gene that can green-light plant growth, thus overriding glyphosate’s red light. Planting Roundup Ready GMO varieties made cultivation simpler: Roundup herbicide could be applied liberally to the entire field, not just carefully in between rows, and the weeds died with the crops thrived.Total use of glyphosate has skyrocketed since the adoption of Roundup Ready varieties, increasing glyphosate use by more than a factor of fifteen over the last twenty years. Our farm fields are now more drenched in pesticides than at any point in history.”
“In 1998, there was just one recognized species of glyphosate-resistant week; today there are more than fifteen.”
“There’s another issue of even greater concern: in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate (Roundup) is a “probable human carcinogen”…these risks are dose related, they almost exclusively affect the people who handle the largest amounts of Roundup…”
“Speaking of money, if you’d like to pay more for a food item that is exactly as nutritious as its conventional counterpart, the “USDA organic” label allows you to do just that….Independent researchers did find that the level of residue from the most toxic pesticides in use today is much lower on organic than on conventional produce, however.”
“These days it is exceptionally rare for an American to meet her meat, even though on average she eats ten food items derived from meat every single day.”
“I hail from the virtual epicenter of the pork industry…Between Fourth and Eighth Streets Northeast, thirteen hundred people kill nineteen thousand hogs every single day.”
“Puzzled and a little defensive by their reaction, I use my insider knowledge to try to convince them that my hometown hog kill is actually a good and decent place–or at least a benign place full of normal people. I explain how Temple Grandin herself had helped to design the facility such that pigs might be crossed over the river Jordan at a rate of one every five seconds with minimal trauma to everyone involved.”
“If the thirty-six countries of the OECD (including North America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan) together decreased their meat consumption by half, the world’s food-grain supply would get bumped up by almost 40 percent. Or to put it another way: If the entire OECD adopted the habit of just one meatless day er week, an extra 120 million tons of grain would be available to feed the hungry this very year.”
“We currently share the earth with more than eight hundred million undernourished human beings. … There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to live–or die–this way. Starvation is caused by our failure to share what we produce, not by the earth’s ability to provide.”
Talking about the massive amount of organic waste the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries generate: “We will see this again when we talk about energy: much of the angst expressed about overpopulation is a red herring for the fact that a very minor part of the earth’s population has done and is doing the majority of its damage.”
“We spend our lives on these labors–we wake in the morning and leave our homes and we work, work, work, to keep the great global chain of procurement in place. Then we throw 40 percent of everything we just accomplished into the garbage.”
“Americans are the world’s heaviest energy users, consuming a full 15 percent of the world’s energy production and almost 20 percent of the world’s electricity, despite making up only 4 percent of the world’s population.”
“Curbing consumption will be the ultimate trial of the twenty-first century. Using less and sharing more is the biggest challenge our generation will ever face.”
“If, instead of flying, all two hundred of us escaped from the plane into two hundred separate cars and drove, individually, from New Jersey to Minnesota, we would have collectively burned 40 percent less fuel than we ended up using for that one plane by flying all together.”
“Flying on an airplane has to be the most resource-intensive way you can spend your day, outside of being launched from Earth’s surface in a spacecraft. The average American car gets about thirty miles to the gallon; the average airplane gets something like four hundred feet to the gallon.”
“If I have a single bias that I should reveal as the author of this book, it is that I hate cars.”
“I personally hate cars because all my life, I have watched helplessly as they torture the people I love–I grew up surrounded by crapcars; then when adulthood struck, they came for me.”
There is a 50-year supply of oil and gas reserves in today’s usage. “It is true that the total amount of known oil and gas reserves has doubled since 1980, but global fossil fuel consumption doubled right along with it. We may not know exactly when, but at some point something will have to give: there is no second Panthalassa Sea that four generations of geologist missed when they mapped the plains, mountains, and ocean floor. If we want human society to outlast the finite resource that it is dependent upon, then any movement away from fossil fuels is a step in the right direction, and one that can’t happen too soon.”
She talks about biofuels made from corn in the US and sugar in Brazil. They are terribly inefficient and not a reasonable alternative to oil. If we relied solely on our biofuels, we’d last 6 days without oil.
“But it’s not just our cars, it’s our whole lives that are stuffed with, and packaged in, the synthetic material that we call “plastic”–which is yet another product derived from oil.”
“There are some who prophesy that today’s enthusiasm for green technologies will naturally translate into improved efficiency and the ability to scale. But we’d need a breakthrough that could improve the output of energy by an order of magnitude. Such ingenuity might also be usefully applied to improving the safety and security of the mere five hundred nuclear power plants that would be needed to supply all of America’s electricity.”
“Tethered to fossil fuels through an umbilical cord made of lead, nickel, cadmium, or lithium, an electric vehicle emits its smog on the other side of town, allowing us to imagine it as clean and green.”
“Big steps have been taken to scrub much of the lead and sulfur out of the emissions that are produced during the burning of fossil fuels, and air quality has increased dramatically as a result. However, the biggest pollutant coming from our power plants and vehicles is something that you can’t see or smell, and you might now even notice it becoming a problem.” (Carbon dioxide)
“Increases in carbon dioxide are easy to measure–there’s a weather station in Hawaii that does it every day–and recognizing the increasing trend in the data is as obvious as recognizing your own name written on a chalkboard.”
“The most recent warming trend of just over one degree Fahrenheit during the last thirty years is not something that scientists fight about–and trust me: scientists will fight about almost anything.”
Then she talks about the world-wide agreements which have been written and agreed to since 1995, like the Kyoto Protocol: “It was a very nice idea that everyone basically agreed to and then completely blew off.”
“Seventeen years and four additional reports later, the 2015 UNFCCC produced the Paris Agreement, a climiate accord that pleaded for help in limiting net global warming to two degrees Celsious by whatever means available….In the end, it was the same old story as before: 175 countries signed, carbon dioxide emissions continued to increase, and 2016 was the hottest year on record.”
“Nevertheless, the world placed great symbolic value on the appearance of loyalty to these doomed protocols. Donald Trump announcing that the United States will not comply with the terms of the Paris Agreement is like me announcing that I will not rule England after Queen Elizabeth dies, but the international media still reported it as news.”
“One puzzling response has been to suggest that the answer to our fear is to become more afraid and that our real problem is that we’re not terrified enough.”
“People don’t make good decisions out of fear, history seems to have shown, and at least ome of the time, people who are afraid are also prone to doing nothing. Case in point: When I was a child in the 1980s, I was terrified of a nuclear war…Was our fear justified? Yes. Did it yield a solution? Not really. Forty years later, the type of bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima is now used as the matchstick that lights the thermonuclear bomb of today. Despite the marring of my childhood sleep, we now stand capable of more nuclear devastation, not less, at the hand of more nations, not fewer.”
“Thinking logically, in light of the above, it is clear that to avoid warming and upheaval beyond what we’ve already experiences will require a transformative approach to energy use, rather than the incremental changes supplicated within the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.”
“As a scientist, I am supposed to have answers, but like everyone else I know, I cannot yet imagine what real transformation looks like. Almost everything I do uses energy. Almost all of that energy comes from fossil fuels. I am one of one billion people who live like this. I am one of seven billion people who want to live like this.”
“The global temperature rise that we discussed in chapter 15 is melting the world’s ice. Scientists are certain of this, because we see it using satellites at work, we see it in our daily lives at play, ad we see it through our binoculars while on vacation.”
“If there is something in the world nobler than a good dog, I have not yet encountered it. All breeds have their charms, but I am partial to the Chesapeake Bay Retriever–big, brown, and indestructible.”
She talks about mass extinction events and believes we are in one now. There is a lab in Brazil with thousands of fish that they are hoping to catalog before they go extinct. Habitat loss (development and growth of cities) and warming are causing much of the extinctions in species.
“Indeed, if we look to the most comprehensive measures used to estimate the elusive concept of “happiness,” we find that our increasing consumption of food and fuel over the last decade has not made us happier–quite the opposite.”
These 6 things fuel happiness: “social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity, absence of corruption in government, healthy life expectancy, and per capita income. It goes without saying that most of these factors can be maintained, or even improved, while reducing fossil fuel use.”
She presents some of the ideas scientists have come up with in hopes of preventing that one further degree of global warming such as reforestation, a giant sunshade to block the sun, growing algae on the ocean, putting up a concrete wall in Greenland to prevent warm ocean water from touching the ice. None of these ideas is feasible for one reason or another, some because they would expend as much or more CO2 as they might contain, and some because they could have devastating consequences.
Then she writes the following, which is SO good:
“Earth–the only thing we all share–has become a pawn in our political discourse, and climate change is now a weapon that can be hurled by either side. For scientists especially, feeding into political pique and polarization actively damages the planet we are trying to save. Down the road, it won’t matter what we do as much as it matters what we all do. Need I mention that “we all” has always included–and always will include–both me and you? We are all part of what is happening to the world, regardless of how we feel about it, regardless of whether we personally “believe” or “deny.” Even if you consider yourself on the right side of environmental issues and a true believer in climate change, chances are that you are actively degrading the earth as much as, or more than, the people you argue with. An effort tempered by humility will go much further than one armored with righteousness.”
“We, the 20 percent of the globe that uses most of its resources, must begin to detox from this consumption, or things will never get better.”
She talks about the things that use the most electricity in a home: first is an electric water heater, then the machines designed to heat and cool large spaces (especially air conditioners), then the machines that heat or cool small spaces (dryer, stove, dishwasher, refrigerator/freezer).
“Ironically, your television, your computer, and the lights that brighten your home–things you are probably careful to turn off when not using–contribute very little to your total electricity usage. You’d have to leave a sixty-watt light blazing 24/7 for a whole year in order to approach the amount of electricity that your electric stove consumes off-and-on. For slobs like me, the bad news is that this set of weak levers also includes your vacuum cleaner. If you vacuum your house once a month instead of once a week, you’ve barely shaved off one-third of 1 percent from your total electricity use for the year.”
She implores those people wanting to check out databases to do so soon because who knows when the might just disappear. She says the EPA used to publish reports every 2 years since 2010 and they were “invaluable public resources.” But no report was published in 2018 and no explanation was given. She doesn’t think they will publish anything in 2020 either.
In her Acknowledgements, she says: “I am also indebted to each and every person–especially the good people at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu–who asked me when the next book was coming out.”
Thank you, Hope Jahren, for this UNUSUALLY good book!