Thirty-Nine: Clathrate Gun (10-28-2022)
There is a concept in climate science of a "clathrate gun", whereby effects of climate change, namely the buildup of certain gaseous elements in the atmosphere, trigger ecological events that further release those gaseous elements into the atmosphere, compounding the effects of climate change. Detecting evidence of presently occurring clathrate gun is difficult, and even in previous mass-extinction or climate change events its existence is often difficult to prove concretely and left to the realm of hypothesis and conjecture.
Here in Rome, nearly every day sets a heat record. Longtime local Romans complain, sometimes bewildered and occasionally dejected, of the unusual heat and the lack of seasonal weather. In a city thousands of years old, there is generational knowledge of seasonality, it forms the basis of the building design, culinary tradition, and further the social structure and attitude of the city. Changing climate conditions disrupt this. The rapidity of change is noticeable on a year-to-year basis for people living year for several decades. There is a tendency to scold Americans for their climate unconscientiousness, and it is true that Americans have unfettered access to water and fossil fuels that permits gluttonous use. More importantly, America lacks the age necessary to possess ingrained cultural understanding of climate, and as such rapid change is dismissible as regular variation in seasonal conditions.
Europeans, however, are not innocent of naivety towards the climate crisis. After scolding Americans for their disinterest in meaningful climate action, they begin to espouse possible solutions to the present situation that are outside the realm of possibility. Moisture farming in Africa is unfeasible, and presenting it as a possible technological solution to climate change is embarrassing. Carbon-negative processes for energy production or water reclamation remain in the conceptual phase because of their economic infeasibility, but are also carbon expensive through development and deployment such that their potential distribution becomes paradoxically carbon positive. While European cities and towns do, unlike their counterparts in America, have coincidental or intentional low-carbon-intensity design, they cannot, by nation of inhabitation, become carbon negative. There is no infinite growth within carbon expenditure.
Architects, scientists, engineers, and artists clinging to supposed technological solutions to climate change infantilizes the movement to create climate consciousness. Recently, popular attention has been directed at climate action groups' protests at art museums, which are both literally effective (people are talking), and conceptually effective (why do people value art more than the world itself?). These actions are not necessarily carbon negative, and it is frankly impossible for anyone to exist carbon negative in totality. Generating attention is valuable, and if these groups can then effectively transfer attention to the nexus of the crisis, energy companies, major industry, and reliance of fossil fuels through poor urban and exurban design and unsustainable development strategies, there might be a chance of slowing the pace of emissions and destruction temporarily.
Ultimately, there is likely a clathrate gun firing. The crisis is irreversible, and carbon negativity will not prevent coming crises of water access, desertification, drought, and extreme weather events. The only viable solution to the present climate crisis is total dismantling of society to eliminate human reliance on emissive fuels, and likely the reduction of human expansion to the point of sustainable cohabitation with the global environment. The clathrate gun will not extinct the entire ecosphere, but will destroy civilization as it exists today. Two major sociopolitical movements that are working towards the disruption of larger society, inadvertently, are the playfully named ecofascists and the infantile "decentralized" leftist climate groups behind art-targeting media spectacles. If either group reached its desired level of power, the structural failings would be immense, and while their policies towards climate are conceptually sound, it is their inevitable mismanagement that will have the most positive effect on the environment.
The homeless have the smallest carbon footprint. A dead person burns no fossil fuels.