Unpredictability on Top of Unpredictability
Here we go again. Plus: The 1.5-degree climate target at COP29.
There ya have it, folks: We now know who will be president for the next 4 years. It’s a strange feeling: We’ve been here before, and yet we really don’t know how this will all unfold. I’ll share some reading that has been informative or helpful below.
What does it mean for climate? Well, the climate will continue to get warmer, as it would have in either case. When disaster strikes, we will likely find President Trump looking to obfuscate the true scale and nature of the events; if his past behavior is any guide, he may be uncaring or unresponsive to people on the ground. He will likely pull the U.S. out of international cooperation on reducing emissions, which will give other actors an out, too. As for his approach to renewable energy efforts already underway, we’ll have to wait and see; predictions vary widely, from “renewable energy isn't going anywhere” to “he will find a way to roll back unspent IRA dollars.”
This moment in purgatory — post-election and pre-inauguration — is a strange state of perpetual anticipation. In an already disrupted world, the U.S. has elected a President who is defined by unpredictability. We’re just going to have to wait and see how the system balances him this time around, and respond to events as they unfold.
My comfort in this is solidarity: We will all go through this together. We’ll be there to help each other, advise each other, work together, just as always. Right now many activists are advising that we get organized, and this is what they mean: Connect with people you trust and prepare to work together. Make connections with people different from you, especially if you have resources and access to share. Go from being an individual alone to being with a group moving in the same direction. Look at who you know and what’s in front of you. And if the opportunity arises, help someone.
Additional thoughts and some reading below.
Warmly Yours,
Hannah
Programming Note
I don’t want to be thinking this much about the President-elect, either, and I don’t plan to give his circus more air — unless I find it necessary or unavoidable. Back to regularly scheduled programming.
Why Is It So Freaking Warm? // Blame the jet stream.
Finally, it feels like fall in New York City. This warm November weather, though, got me thinking back to my inaugural newsletter post two years ago, showing data that although Halloween felt warmer than usual that year it actually wasn’t. This year’s 82-degree NYC Halloween, however, was the warmest Halloween since the late 1980s — and 8 degrees hotter than 2004’s 74-degree Halloween, the previous record holder.
We have an explanation. According to meteorologist Ben Noll with the Washington Post, a marine heat wave extending across thousands of miles in the North Pacific displaced the jet stream (a band of wind blowing 30,000 feet above us in the atmosphere). The air masses warmed up and dried out as they crossed the Rockies, and also held back cold air masses coming from the Arctic, which would typically be descending across the U.S. this time of year. The result is this drought ongoing across the country, cooler conditions in the West and warmer weather in the East.
Climate change is causing more frequent and longer heat waves at sea and on land.
The more you know! Thanks, Ben Noll. He says we’re due for a polar blast soon.
1.5 degrees is dead, long live 1.5 degrees! // COP29
Scientists have argued for years that we should limit our average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (above temperatures before the Industrial Revolution, when humans starting combusting fossil fuels for energy). That’s because the differences between a 1.5-degree warmer world and a 2-degree warmer world are significant, according to modeling: The loss of some instead of all coral reefs, an additional 4 inches of sea level rise, many more ice-free Arctic summers, species extinctions — all indicators of worsening conditions globally and greater risks to life.
Recently, though, some have begun to admit that the chances of us not surpassing that 1.5-degree target are slim to none; indeed it may happen in the next couple of years. That’s put governments and non-profits in a pickle: They’ve been using 1.5 degrees as a rallying cry, including at this month’s U.N. COP29 climate change meeting, and they don’t want to give it up.
Zahra Hirji and John Ainger at Bloomberg News:
The stakes are so high, and so much has been made of 1.5C, that backing away from the target risks taking the air out of the climate movement. “I don’t expect most governments or NGOs to acknowledge the reality of 1.5 anytime soon,” said David Victor, director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California at San Diego. “There’s no context out there where they can talk about things other than 1.5 and not be accused of backsliding.” … No one knows what goal to embrace next. Should it be 1.6C, or 1.7C, or even higher? What is realistic but also still motivating? Should a new goal even be another temperature target or something else?
…
Several scientists have also expressed concern that passing 1.5C, even briefly, could lead to widespread public despair because of the emphasis that’s been placed on potential consequences of failing to meet the target. That could be demoralize those in the climate fight, at a time when governments are already struggling to prioritize decarbonization while grappling with energy crises, inflation and backlash against policies that aim to phase out polluting consumer products such as gas stoves and diesel cars.
On November 11, the opening day of COP29, the World Meteorological Organization reported that between January and September 2024, the average global air temperature was 1.54 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average.
On Saturday, November 23, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: “An agreement at COP29 was absolutely essential to keep the 1.5 degree limit alive. And countries have delivered.”
Some Reading
In the meantime, here are some readings I found helpful.
Daniel Hunter in Waging Nonviolence: “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won”
Looking into an even more destabilized future is not easy. If you’re like me, you’re already tired. The prospect of more drama is daunting. But authoritarianism isn’t going away no matter the election results. … Good psychology is good social change. Authoritarian power is derived from fear of repression, isolation from each other and exhaustion at the utter chaos. We’re already feeling it. Thus, for us to be of any use in a Trump world, we have to pay grave attention to our inner states, so we don’t perpetuate the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion or constant disorientation.
Gabriel Winant in Dissent Magazine: “Exit Right”
In our century, American politics has been blown open by the reverberating crises of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. They have rebounded on our society and politics in four major forms: imperial blowback and endless warfare; deindustrialization and the hollowing out of American society; the rise of an engorged, predatory, and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and immortality; and the climate crisis, now a source of regular natural disasters and swelling refugee flows. At each juncture, the Democrats have attempted restoration: to manage the crisis, carry out the bailout, stitch things back together, and try to get back to normal. It is the form of this orientation, as much as substantive questions of culture, race, and gender, that seems to me the fundamental reason the Democrats are often experienced as a force of inhibition rather than empowerment by so many voters. And it is against this politics of containment that Trump’s obscenity comes to feel like a liberation for so many.
Joseph O’Neill in The New York Review of Books: “All Bets Are Off”
The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. Of course, political science is not designed to investigate this kind of stuff. The clearest insights we have come from the realm of philosophy and literature. Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi did not rely on focus groups.
Sarah Thankam Mathews in her Substack thot pudding: “every day is all there is”
The move in this moment for many of us might simply be: take steps as you can to protect yourself and yours if you or they are part of a group under threat by the coming regime, take the space to recharge and center yourself a little, take the time to deliberate and think for yourself, decide how you want to consume information and direct your attention (like actually), be connected to at least one political group, and simply, strengthen your relationships. On this last point … I think a lot of people imagine that they will be heroic saviors to strangers during The Times Of Great Crisis and Breakdown. This is 98% pure fantasy. Protecting and caring for those known to us, and both deepening and expanding our relational circles in ways that push against our morbidly stratified society (online and IRL) seem more worthwhile and practicable to me. Put otherwise: if you don’t already, I personally think it’s good to find some way to be in relationship with people different than you, especially in terms of class and race.
Mariame Kama in her Substack Prisonculture’s Newsletter: “Letter to a Young Organizer”
I’m regularly asked about hope. I’ve said that for me hope is a discipline: a practice that I engage in daily and on some days hourly. Sometimes people say to me that hope is a disposition and that you either have it or you don’t. I vehemently disagree.
Some people seem to think about hope as ‘wishful thinking.’ For me, it’s not that at all. Rather, because I don’t know how things will turn out, I choose to take action in the direction that I want to influence. I devote my efforts to make what I want to happen actually happen. Nothing can happen if we don’t take action. As Annie Dillard writes: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” I would add that how you do anything is how you do everything.
Action is a practice of hope. Put another way, hope is generated through action. ‘Doing’ allows us to derive experience and meaning - it is through doing that we experience feeling. I’m interested in a robust & active hope; the kind that has dirty and calloused hands.