Atmospheric Rivers, Fusion Energy, and Carbon Credits, Oh My!

On Historical Amnesia, Jevons Paradox, and Carbon Fraudulence

Jan 28, 2023

Heavy Rain

Is Biblical Flooding in California Because of Climate Change, or Do We Have Historical Amnesia?

If you have been paying attention to the news in the United States, you’ll know that over the holidays and into the new year, California received record precipitation which is proving to be catastrophic to the infrastructure that exists there. The footage of the flooding is terrifying, and 17 people have already been killed by the weather event.

Neighborhoods have been submerged in the deluge, power outages have effected millions of people, sinkholes have swallowed cars on destroyed roads, trees have fallen on homes, causing fatalities, and millions have been forced to evacuate. The weather events have been undeniably catastrophic.

“Climate change is here,” a Santa Cruz woman told The Washington Post.

It’s actually worth asking, is this climate change? In a state known for drought and wildfire, some people think this is “unprecedented” weather, and therefore must be a result of climate change. Only… it’s not. This weather pattern has existed for thousands and thousands of years.

At the beginning of the crisis, very few news outlets were discussing the historical precedent of this sort of Biblical flooding, of which there is scientific data showing that floods exceeding 25 feet of water in the Central Valley occur once every 100-200 years. Now, it seems that many outlets are harkening to the past, highlighting the extreme weather events that are characteristic to this part of the world. The last deluge of that ferocity was in the early days of 1862 when California was a much different place than it is today.

Sacramento, 1862. Source: North Kitsap School District

“Late in 1861,” writes Tom Philpott in Perilous Bounty, “the state suddenly emerged from a two-decade dry spell” after which “monster storms” began lashing the previously drought-stricken state. Sound familiar?

The Great Flood was calamitous for the colonial settlers of California who had no historical or cultural memory of this weather system that returns every couple of lifetimes. “America has never before seen such desolation by flood as this has been, and seldom has the Old World seen the like,” an account from late January of 1862 reads. Only, that’s not true. The people who had been living in these now occupied lands had seen these storms before, and they had already fled to higher ground.

“We are informed that the Indians living in the vicinity of Marysville left their abodes a week or more ago for the foothills predicting an unprecedented overflow. They told the whites that the water would be higher than it has been for thirty years, and pointed high up on the trees and houses where it would come. The valley Indians have traditions that the water occasionally rises 15 or 20 feet higher than it has been at any time since the country was settled by whites, and as they live in the open air and watch closely all the weather indications, it is not improbable that they may have better means than the whites of anticipating a great storm.” - Nevada City Democrat, January 11, 1862

Thousands of people died in the Great Flood. Houses were destroyed and thousands of dead cattle littered the landscape in the Central Valley. This was when only 500,000 people lived in the whole state. This was when California didn’t produce around 25% of the nations food. This was when California wasn’t a major arm of the global food system, as it is now. California, violently decoupled from indigenous land management and traditional ecological knowledge, has been subsumed by a completely alien ideology since the Spanish arrived in 1542 and especially since the American settlers started disrupting the water system during the Gold Rush. The disruption, now, is nearly absolute. Every river system is dammed, diverted, and “controlled”. Thousands of miles of canals cover the land. Wetlands have been drained. When the water comes, it has nowhere to go: the soils have long been stripped of organic material and the rivers are blocked and redirected by concrete.

It is possible that this very weather system is back, and it is more or less on schedule, and with it, catastrophic flooding that has the potential to impact food supply chains worldwide, not to mention an incredible human toll. According to atmospheric scientists, it is “more likely than not we will see one by 2060.”

I strongly feel it’s a mistake to view a weather system that has historic precedence as “climate change” regardless of humanity’s role in greenhouse gas emissions. Catastrophic weather happens and has always happened, particularly in California, a landscape known for extremes. The indigenous people of the land had the flexibility to deal with it: to move to higher ground when the waters rose. Sedentarization, which has always been one of the main arms of colonial civilization, abhors that flexibility in spite of the fact that the people who lived there for thousands of years knew how to live there. Instead of learning from those people, settlers of California have opted to attempt to control the landscape via incredible engineering feats such as the Central Valley Project, disrupting the land’s ability to regulate the extreme weather events. Wetlands used to cover the majority of the Central Valley, which sucked precipitation into massive aquifers and creating floodplains which hosted incredible biodiversity. Since colonization and the mass-land terraforming projects that proceeded it, those without the cultural memory needed to understand this landscape have acted like hapless victims to a climate that seems to be at war with the divine order to control, reap, and sow. What cannot be understated, however, is that the true consequences of the devastation come not from the air or the climate, but from what we’ve done to the land and our relationship to it.

Talking about it as merely a climate event decontextualizes these storms from the social factors that make the totality of devastation possible: colonialism, industrialism, Calvinism, imperialism, capitalism, and so many other transcontextual factors which have made California ill-equipped to deal with the extreme weather that characterizes its climate. Amnesia, in this case, is a bit of a misnomer. The knowledge of the ecological functioning of the landscape has been written out of common knowledge during colonization and occupation. California, more than most places in the world, was built in the image of the deity of Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and all other manner of ideology which declares that the natural world must be subdued and ordered to the will of Man. We cannot talk about this disaster without understanding the whole, and without that understanding, we will not be able to honor the dead. Without understanding the whole, we can do nothing to adapt our way of life to be able to weather such storms in the future, when the big one comes, and it will come.

“We need to be nicer to Mother Nature,” Ellen Degeneres said in a Twitter video, where behind her a stream rages with brown, silty water. “Mother Nature is not happy with us.”

In so many ways, I agree. Still, Mother Nature is only doing what she has done for thousands of years in this landscape. What has changed is the project of terraforming of the land, and the factory farming of all of life in California. What is different now is the slurries of toxic waste from CAFOs and oil refineries that will be dredged up in these storms. What is different now is that California is home to nearly 40 million people. What is different now is that the rest of country is reliant on California for nearly a quarter of its food supply.

Understanding the toxicity of the landscape, the sludges that will be stirred up in a great flood, and the loss of life and property helps us understand that the catastrophe will be far more man-made than nature made. The disrespect that the American settlers have had for this valley will reach a crescendo, and the lack of any humility towards the Native People of this land will lead to the untold deaths, if not this time, then next time.

So yes, we need to be nicer to Mother Nature, but what does that mean, exactly? To me, it means that we can’t treat the living world like a factory and expect it to produce for us with the efficiency and speed of machines. We need to learn how to live within the limits of the landscape. To me, it means that we need to dispense with the myth that we are somehow in control here: that our vegan diets and electric vehicles mean anything at all when we’ve completely severed our connection with the ecosystems we are part of.

We have to ask ourselves, now, seriously, whether we believe that the dams and levees, some created 100 years ago, will be able to withstand the coming storms, regardless of if they are caused by climate change or not. All of nature is cyclic, and it exists on a timescale so much longer than we understand, or even seek to understand nowadays. The decisions of the industrialists of yesteryear were made from a mentality that didn’t think on timescales long enough to even have doubts about their actions. We are the grandchildren of a cultural hubris which unconsciously believes we live in a never-ending present where we are the lords and masters of the land, amen.

Right now, people are dying in the floods. Roads are being washed away, sinkholes are swallowing cars and killing people. Trees are falling on houses and people are being sucked beneath the currents. It’s horrific, even from my safe vantage point, and I think, in the case of most tragedies that are, in large part, preventable, we have to be lucid when we try to understand why such things happen and what to do about them in the future.

If there are lessons to be learned from these floods, it is not that “climate change is here” and that “we need to act faster”— because what do those things really mean? Do they mean that we hasten electrification but leave the landscape essentially as it is? Or, as Rupa Marya says, does it mean we’ll return the land to indigenous management, free the waters, and learn again how to co-create a healthy human-coupled ecosystem? Belying these two disparate ideas exists two distinct ontologies at their cores: one which takes for granted colonial/industrial civilization, and one which knows that there is nothing inevitable about it at all, and that it can be changed— that it must be changed in order to weather the coming storms.

“Combatting climate change,” after all, has become a euphemism for, “How can we continue living exactly as we are living, minus greenhouse gases?” This means, for most of us, that climate change is someone else’s problem, with the exception of a handful of consumer purchases we can make. The “solutions” we’re offered are a great way of lining someone else’s pockets while the ecosystems we actually live in suffer and continue to be dysregulated and sickly. It’s also a great way for us to think we’re doing something when we’re actually not doing anything. We need to ask much deeper questions, and come up with much better answers than the ones we’re being offered.

Climate change has become decontextualized, ambient, and nebulous. It has become something that elites talk about behind closed doors, politicians trade platitudes about, and we-the-people assume is squarely in capable hands: i.e. not ours. We’ve so dissociated ourselves with the land that we’ve become functionally neutered and irresponsible. The solutions we are given to solve the climate crisis are universal, general, and in large part, theoretical. In reality, in order for it to make any difference at all, “climate change” has to, instead, refer to the localized results of human mismanagement: pollution, ecocide, the disruption of natural systems in an attempt to control them (i.e. dams, canals, oil), the poisoning of the systems that we live in, and the social/cultural/political factors that enabled such a bifurcation between humans and the living world in the first place. Therefore, the solutions will come from proper human relationship and connection to land, and the values that allow that to manifest. The solutions to these problems must come from the ground-up, the local, the contextual, and not from the top-down, which most “climate policy” intends to do.

Does it really matter how much CO2 you saved from your transcontinental flight that was “offset” when your entire world is under 20 feet of water and you had the ability to create healthy floodplains by restoring wetlands? Will you feel good about your vegan diet when the entire food system is flushed away because we couldn’t figure out how to work together to create regenerative agroecological systems, which would build the soil, protecting the land from runoff and flooding? In our quest for quick, convenient solutions, we’ve been able to avoid the deeper, harder work that must be done.

Part of our responsibility here is to know the world, to not take too much, and to be able to adapt when the time comes, but in order to do that we need to shift our values completely. This work is not the instant gratification of a “sustainable” pair of shoes or buying a Tesla. This is deep, transcendental work. It requires that we unlearn what we thought we know of the world, and learn to see it anew.

Rupa Marya says it well:

“We must abandon the ontology of separation that was used to colonize and change this place. We must undo our own mental blocks to see a world in its wholeness. These rains are washing off the veneer of colonial capitalist cosmologies and offering us an opportunity to peer into the future with greater awareness for what it is to live well in this particular place with its oak savannas, redwood groves, mountain lions and salmon, nettles and elderberries, newts and nudibranchs, mushrooms and sedges, willows and alders, great blue herons and red tail hawks—all the beautiful relatives who know more than we do about living well in this place of true abundance.”

If this is the big one, then we’re lucky. We got off easy. If it isn’t, we may still have time to change. Regenerative/agroecology farms have faired much better in the face of these storms, as the soils are porous, healthy, and able to drink the rains, unlike the dead soils, drained aquifers, and diverted river systems of the industrial food machine in California. Our lack of care for the landscape and what it provides to us is what is making these floods catastrophic: but the way we do farming is in our power to change. Still, we have to act quickly. The rains will return.

Mother Nature isn’t angry with us. She’s just reminding us who’s boss. We’re not an enemy to Nature, but she is our stern, no-nonsense elder, and it’s time we listen.

Fusion Energy

Our New “Clean” Future, or Another Case of Jevon’s Paradox?

Scientists have been trying to produce energy from fusion for over 60 years now, and in December of 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved net energy from a fusion reaction for the very first time. This means that for the first time, more energy was produced from a fusion reaction than was used. (How much energy has been used in the 60 years of research to obtain this result is unknown, as far as my Googling skills were capable of ascertaining.)

This advance is creating a buzz. CNBC author Catherine Clifford remarked that, “Fusion is particularly attractive given the increasing urgency of climate change because if it can be commercialized at scale, it produces no carbon emissions, nor does it produce the long-lasting nuclear waste associated with nuclear fission, which is the type of nuclear energy used to make energy today.”

Again, we find the assumption that carbon is the only relevant measure. Perhaps the question should not be how much of this carbon-free energy can we produce, but rather we should ask, for what reason? Are we going to use cheap and abundant nuclear energy to maintain our current system of wage slavery and overconsumption of cheap factory goods? Are we going to use the energy to continue, as a species, living on the knife’s edge of war, occupation, and colonialism? These questions matter, and they mattered at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution as well.

At the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution, when James Watts’ first increased the efficiency of the steam engine, people were sure that this increase in efficiency would lead to less coal consumption. The opposite happened. Because these machines were so efficient, all manner of industry took up the technology, and coal consumption sky rocketed. This was observed by the economist Stanley Jevons, who wrote of the complexity of this process in his 1865 book, The Coal Question:

“Now, if the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished in comparison with the yield, the profits of the trade will increase, new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it increase; and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each. And if such is not always the result within a single branch, it must be remembered that the progress of any branch of manufacture excite a new activity in most other branches.”

Some people are quick to decry Jevons’ Paradox as an excuse to “do nothing” and let the fossil fuel industry continue to run the world, therefore the usage of the term has become attached to “climate deniers” in some more militant circles, and so they seek to disprove the notion as a fallacy. They do so by trying to reduce the concept down to an extremely simple analysis. It’s not as simple as energy + efficiency = increased consumption of energy, and if that equation doesn’t perfectly pan out in a reductionist analysis, such as in the case of refrigerators becoming larger over time while using less energy, then Jevons Paradox is debunked.

What it actually refers to is much more interesting and nonlinear. What happens when a new energy source comes online? There is a shifting baseline of expectation, a decrease in cost, and increased consumption, yes, but it’s much more than that: energy systems, innovations, and evolutions in technology change the world. The very operating system of a society can change in an instant, and often, our very civilization hinges on the technological innovations of a handful of scientists.

This complexity makes Jevons Paradox challenging to analyze, and also easy to “disprove” under typical x + y = z sorts of analyses. This paper by researchers Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi attempts to explain the emergent properties that come from innovations in efficiency, and why ceteris paribus assumptions about the conditions following such innovations cannot be measured in “simple analytical models.” They state, “an increase in efficiency causes the system to ‘become something else,’ thus requiring the adoption of different parameters and, in case of extreme changes, even different variables and new functional relations among them (emergence).” Innovation, they say, causes “genuine change of the system under analysis.” Simply, increases in energy production and efficiency have broad, complex consequences, and its worth discussing what those consequences may turn out to be.

For example, there’s always a bit of an innate assumption that “clean energy” will be used in “clean ways.” So far, what we see as renewable energies proliferate is a worsening of the conditions on Earth: more mining, more lands urbanized, more industrialization, more lands appropriated for energy production, and overall just a continuation of the same story as before. I’m sure in small pockets around the world, people are using renewable energy under a new paradigm, but as far as the typical climate change discourse from the top goes, this is much more about keeping the machine going than changing the modus operandi of our civilization in any functional way.

Where are we going, exactly, as technotopian visions proliferate, and we’re told consistently that nuclear energy, fission or fusion, will provide us with the cheap and abundant energy we need for a sustainable future? Do we all agree about what is sustainable? Is it sustainable to keep barreling down a civilizational path that continues dispossessing people from land and connection to the world and one another, which further commodifies the living world and consolidates control into the hands of the rich and powerful? Does it matter how “clean” an energy source is if we continue business as usual? These questions are not asked often enough.

And if we suddenly have essentially free energy from fusion, could this culture handle wielding such power? Are we responsible enough? Are we mature enough? If Jevons Paradox is accurate, and this expansion of energy efficiency does indeed happen, who will stop this “near-limitless energy” from being used to continue factory farming the world into oblivion? Will we feel like it’s “clean” then?

They state that, “without proper contextualization” efficiency based on input/output ratios, “does not provide useful information for policy.” We should not, therefore, take for granted the idea that more energy or efficient use of energy is automatically better or more sustainable.

When “cheap and abundant” oil was first found, human society dove headfirst into the crude to create an industrial civilization. The discovery was a bit of a Pandora’s box, in a certain sense. The power that was unleashed was ultimately an experiment on Earth, and as we created machines to more efficiently extract it, society shifted with it. Like many technologies, first the military industrial complex creates it, perfects it, and then by the time it’s efficient enough to be cheap (i.e. the internet, solar cells, but most notably, nuclear power), only then it does it become commercially available to the public. Will fusion first be used to conquer our remaining neighbors, and we the people will get the leftovers in the form of virtual reality, mind-numbing AI “art”, and abundant fake foods made in factories? With the current apparent telos of our society being the colonization of the solar system, I’m pretty certain that this increase in available energy will not be particularly useful for humans remembering how to live on this planet without destroying ourselves.

As the authors state, an increase in energy (and efficiency) deeply affects what the system is and what it does. It’s worth asking if these innovations will be solutions, or if they will lead to more of the same story, implemented in the same ecocidal and soul-crushing ways as they have been for ages. Giampietro and Mayumi conclude that Jevons Paradox shows that “sustainability problems cannot be solved by technological innovations alone. They must be solved through institutional and behavioral changes.”

In other words, the same story that created the problem will not be the one to fix it.

Carbon Credits

The Violent Fallacy of Carbon Neutrality & Net-Zero

To those who consider climate change to be more than an mathematical issue of there being too much of carbon in the atmosphere (so we simply need to put that carbon somewhere else), carbon credits have always seemed stupid. Net-zero, which is more promissory than anything happening in reality, has a slight distinction from carbon neutrality in that those who take a net-zero “climate pledge” must also pledge to decarbonize their supply chains as much as they can, in addition to purchasing offsets. Given that companies like Amazon can be lauded for their sustainability goals while increasing their net-output of carbon emissions by 18% following taking the pledge, net-zero seems relatively meaningless at present.

Carbon neutrality, as explained as being very distinct from net-zero by those keen to tighten the definition (a bit too-little-late, if you ask me), is far more reliant on merely offsetting emissions. The idea that emissions can be simply offset somewhere else while business as usual is continued seems like more of a scheme by the fossil fuel industry rather than something people would genuinely take seriously (never mind that the concept of a “carbon footprint” was coined by British Petroleum in the early 2000’s), but here we are. You can even offset your own breath now, in what has to be the most ridiculous racket I’ve ever seen. Luckily, exposing this nonsense for what it is is becoming more mainstream.

There are so many reasons to be suspicious of the rampant greenwashing we’re relentlessly subjected to, but carbon offsets are particularly pernicious in how obviously they aim to do nothing whatsoever to address ecocide, pollution, biodiversity loss, and the continuing consolidation of power and capital into the hands of corporations (and their captive governments) that are perpetuating these problems.

This is also the logical extension of so-called “nature-based solutions” which in the best case may involve re-coupling humans into ecosystems as stewards and in the worst case involve the formulation of “protected areas” where land is that is “protected” is given a monetary value in carbon credits, which can then be sold to polluters so they can continue their pollution-doing with less scrutiny and be able to greenwash their marketing.

In the best case, carbon credits are sold to corporations from landscapes that are completely unlikely to be at risk from clear-cutting in the first place (in which case, the worst outcome is the bullshit greenwashing), but often, particularly in the Global South, when a landscape is “protected” it usually means that land that has always been protected by the people who have lived there for hundreds, if not tens of thousands of years, will be appropriated by some conglomerate, and the people living there will be evicted. In other cases, tree farm owners can get carbon credits for simply waiting the 30ish years it takes for their monoculture of trees to develop to maturity before cutting them down.

Essentially the idea is that by “protecting” that land from deforestation, that landscape is sequestering carbon. A recent study has found, however, that how much carbon is being sequestered in rainforest areas sold for carbon credits has been ridiculously overestimated.

The Guardian has reported that Verra, a program which has created the world’s leading standard for calculating carbon credits, has been selling “phantom credits” to multinationals such as Disney, Shell, Gucci, Salesforce, and for some reason, Pearl Jam. The analysis of their rainforest protection projects has concluded that 94% of their projects provide no benefit to reducing carbon emissions at all.

Not only that, but some of the land that Verra claims to be protecting has dispossessed the forest communities of Alto Mayo, Peru in the effort to make Disney cruise ships and amusement parks somehow less bad for the environment (yes, I’m serious). Evicting people from lands is unfortunately an incredibly common tactic when it comes to saving the planet.

And it isn’t just protecting lands from deforestation that is a problem. Afforestation can cause considerable harm, as well. For example, The Oakland Institute reported Norwegian company Green Resources, which Norway, Sweden, and Finland all used to purchase carbon offsets, forcibly evicted Ugandan subsistence farmers to plant a pine plantation in order to somehow save the Earth. Schemes are popping up all over the world to plant plantations of fast growing trees on farmland as a way of sequestering carbon. The problem, however, is that a plantation is not a forest, and plantations (monocultures) are incredibly prone to disease and fire. The supposed short-term offsetting benefits, however, are often considered to outweigh the long-term costs, which include stealing people’s lands and creating ecological disasters waiting to happen. In the name of climate emergency, these harebrained schemes continue, and when the plantations invariably go up in flames, they can again call upon climate emergency to justify doing it again and again.

When it comes to the distinction between net-zero and carbon neutrality, it’s important to consider that renewable energies have a similar problem as carbon offsets. When a company “decarbonizes” by adding renewable energies to their operation, they are only shifting local pollution to somewhere remote to them, and the pollution still exists. Just because an Amazon warehouse is run on solar panels, that doesn’t mean that where the solar panels, rare earths, and materials come from is “clean.” Solar panels create toxic pollution, require extensive rare earths mining, and are incredibly difficult to recycle after they expire. But when the ideology of climate change is functionally limited to carbon and carbon equivalents, there are many measurements that are left out which aren’t limited to continued ecocide, pollution, and the continued creation of toxic waste. Human rights, sovereignty, and access to land are often casualties in our war against climate change.

For more information on the problem’s with carbon markets, nature-based solutions, and protected areas schemes, check out our podcast with Simon Counsell, executive director of the Rainforest Foundation UK, because, as usual, we’re missing the forest for the trees.

Written by Maren Morgan

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