LOCKDOWN, WITH BENEFITS: A Model for Degrowth and a Survivable Future
Jack Adam Weber, L.Ac., is a Chinese medicine clinician, author, organic farmer, and celebrated poet. Jack has authored hundreds of articles, thousands of poems, and several books. He is an activist for embodied spirituality and writes extensively on the subjects of holistic medicine, emotional depth work, mind-body integration, and climate crisis, challenging his readers to think and act outside the box. His new book is Climate Cure (Sept. 2020). Jack also developed the Nourish Practice, a deeply restorative, embodied meditation practice that doubles as an educational guide for healing through the wounds of childhood. His work can be found at jackadamweber.com.
Humanity is committing collective suicide by way of climate crisis.Many of us know this.
Lockdown prevents us from some (but not enough) of the polluting that drives climate crisis: driving, manufacturing, energy consumption, noise, plastic, etc.
Lockdown is a form of what’s called “degrowth.”
Degrowth is a model for living to consume and produce less of everything, including babies, but not gardens and healthy soil.
Lockdown-with-benefits is a way to survive now and into the future (yes, this is our priority nowadays if one agrees with the first sentence above).
These benefits include the life-enhancing, non-polluting, care-engendering, and eco-enhancing practices we can’t do now, such as hugging and meeting freely with others, growing food locally (sans power tools), and regenerating the ecosystem.
Degrowth, via lockdown-with-benefits, is a sane yet least popular way forward because it “lowers” our standard of living.
This “lowering” is a sacrifice we must make, meaning to protect what is sacred.
This is the most sustainable way into the future because it doesn’t try to maintain our large, first world carbon footprint way of life.
If we degrow to consume much less, we act responsibly and preserve a chance to survive into the future.
But the neurotic idea of thriving gets in our way.
Part of this is because we aren’t comfortable with loss.
With figurative death and rebirth while still alive, which is the way of grief work.
We need to survive before we can thrive because our current version of thriving is too human-centric, excessive, superficial and creates too much pollution, which drives climate crisis.
Yet, surviving and thriving can happen simultaneously.
Being prevented from business-as-usual and confined to our homes, local community, and not driving so much (or at all) is precisely what the natural world needs.
This is why people are celebrating goats, rhinos, monkeys, and ducks marching into city-scapes. Or these endangered Oliver Ridley turtles thriving on humanless beach.
These animals are ambassadors of the natural world showing us our folly by overtaking urban areas, the epitome of human insulation.
Something in us deeply celebrates seeing nature nonchalantly invade our industrial folly.
We are not going to build or manufacture our way out of this problem. We have to desist, pause, STOP.
Combine prevention with a deliberate effort to consume even less, grow food, share amongst neighbors, make things by hand, and restore the natural world in the free time we have and we create a foundation from which to further thriving.
This way, we could all work for free for the Earth, and for our survival, outside the economy model of survival.
This might sound like a fairy tale, and it largely is in terms of the likelihood of it coming to pass. But in reality, it’s what we need to survive.
And once we get used to it, many will discover it is also to thrive.
Our trying to “survive” (make ends meet financially) is actually killing us.
Humans have erected a superficial economic system that everyday threatens our physical survival, while the mere existence of this unnecessary overlay is itself killing us.
When we make physical survival dependent upon a ecocidal system, we’re screwed.
Therefore, the economy as we know it, must die.
Rapacious capitalism — which is inherently suicidal by way of plundering a finite amount of natural materials on a finite planet and tapping our addictive desire for greed — must end.
Since the world’s largest corporations and governments are not moving in this direction, we the people must. Even though it’s not enough and not enough of us will.
Lockdown helps us along in this direction, and we need to go further.
Yet everyone is dying to get out and go in the opposite direction, to get back to work, back to destroying the world.
Enter “lockdown-with-benefits.”
Sure, it would be great to gather and mingle and go to the beach and parks again. But think about it. We drive to these places; we use too much energy getting to places. It’s a slice of business as usual.
Living in smaller local communities, as we are during lockdown, and riding bikes and walking is a way to reclaim this way of life with minimal impact.
It’s uncanny that coronavirus has provided a model for surviving climate crisis.
Throw in some major, do-able tweaks (beginning with how we think about such changes, i.e., “sacrifice”) and we’re on our way.
We should fight for this right to work from home.
But most people don’t want to do any of this. Many can’t do it for health and other reasons. The majority is not going to go for fhis.
But why wouldn’t we if we knew what was at stake? This is Greta Thunberg’s perpetual consternation.
Millions of humans and animals have already died as a result of industrial pollution, and almost a million species are now at risk for extinction, according to that shocking UN report from 2019.
Ultimately, we aren’t willing to sacrifice our way of life, our comfort. And too many deny that climate change, much less climate crisis, is even a thing.
Even governments of large countries like the United States and Brazil deny it.
Governments and corporations are not going to change enough, at least not in time.
Many want to believe we can change enough in time via a renewable revolution. I have wanted to believe this. Even if we make sweeping changes to our power infrastructure, to maintain our current standard of living, the violence by way of extraction and pollution, environmental degradation and human inequity, is enormous and grotesque.
Again, we aren’t going to build and manufacture our way out of the predicament, especially with an ever-increasing global population.
Plus, there is no veritable peer review science that shows we can avert the worst of climate crisis with renewables (Mark Jacobson’s study at Stanford was debunked by 21 eminent expert scientists) in a landmark peer review study.
We don’t have the leeway of switching to renewables to maintain our current standard of living, as Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans” tried to make overarchingly clear, despite its flawed data. Nor do we have the moral leeway to pillage the Earth and create the pollution this would require, including the massive use of fossil fuels to manufacture, maintain, and replace such a renewable infrastructure.
Speaking of energy . . . energy production and consumption are the largest sector of CO2 pollution (see second pie chart here). It’s why, despite being in lockdown, the CO2 concentration is higher now than at this time last year.
In large part it’s because we haven’t reduced (degrowth) AND changed the way (via renewables) we heat and cool and energize our homes and businesses.
We don’t have any kind of leeway because killing off coral reefs, the ice caps, the forests, the rivers, the wetlands, 60% of average animal populations, and driving almost half of all insect populations to extinction are unacceptable any way you slice it.
Therefore, the most morally sane way forward is to create a model for reducing our consumption, including travel, and especially our power needs.
We have shown we can do some of this during lockdown.
In addition to consuming less, we must also suck a massive amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere (a process known as CCS, or Carbon Capture and Sequestration), an incredible amount, on the scale that is almost unimaginable . . . equal to “two to four times the amount of fluids that the global oil and gas industry deals with today.”
Transition to a new economic model can be immediately implemented if every citizen is subsidized by the government with the trillions of dollars the government otherwise uses to subsidize fossil fuels, Wall Street, and the military (but this won’t happen).
This way, we can all continue the pandemic pause and get to work to restore the world.
Restoration would include soil regeneration, large-scale tree and grassland planting, and massive new permaculture projects to feed and sustainably grow us.
And massive other CCS methods.
I think we will spray the skies (and here) before doing any of this to an appreciable degree.
There is more brutal physics involved in our road to nowhere.
One is that a molecule of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, reaches its warming potential in ten (10.1 to be exact) years; this is the most recent peer review info. This means that even if we stop all pollution today, for the next ten years we will experience the warming effect of our emissions we released over the last decade.
We are, most likely, already locked into a 1.5C rise above industrial temperature levels. That report was from 2014, when we were at about .8C above pre-industrial levels; we now are at about 1.1C above.
1.5C is the threshold above which climate consequences become radically more likely and severe. The effects will hit the most disadvantaged and marginalized. This is already happening around the world.
And the further above 1.5C we go, the more exponentially catastrophic it becomes.
And what about all the smoke and loss of biomass from the wildfires in Africa, Siberia (covering 6.4 million acres by the end of July, 2019), the Amazon, and Australia over the last year, to name just the largest of wildfires?
When and how will we account for this increased pollution and loss of CO2 sequestration?
A couple years ago, the IPCC, the most reliable but also an inherently handicapped and conservative climate change reporting organization, determined that we need to reduce 2010 emissions levels by 45% by 2030 to stay below 1.5C in order to save ourselves from the higher probability of catastrophic climate chaos.
Included in this projection is the condition that emissions need to peak in 2020, at the latest, for us to avert crossing critical tipping points on the way to the worst of climate crisis. Yet, emissions have continued to rise straight through 2019.
While It’s unclear how the Coronavirus Pandemic will affect 2020 levels and beyond, a comprehensive report by leading scientists titled “United in Science” and presented to the UN Panel on Climate Change before the 2019 talks in Madrid, shows that emissions are not expected to peak even by 2030 (scroll down to the multi-colored pie chart and see figure at 8 o’clock in light blue).
This puts us at least 10 years behind schedule.
And then another 10 years more due to the CO2 lag effect?
Ralph Keeling, son of Charles David Keeling who developed the chart to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide (called the Keeling Curve), comments that to flatten the emissions curve necessary to reverse climate crisis: “The changes are too big to expect it to happen just because of individual choices.”
This is why top down change is needed, which is what Extinction Rebellion acknowledges. This is also why it is (or most likely was, unfortunately) absolutely crucial to elect a president with a very aggressive climate plan and why I’ve said this election could seal the fate of our attempt to mitigate climate crisis.
If we combine these data with the projection that fossil fuel production is expected to continue to dominate straight through 2040 (see graph below) and into 2050, global energy consumption will increase 50% by 2050, and global population will increase by about 25% (from 7.7 to 9.7 billion), it doesn’t matter how many solar panels we slap on our rooftops and erect in the deserts.
So, we aren’t even close to being on track to fulfill the optimism of the IPCC projections.
More, the IPCC projections are conservative and several of the more optimistic pathways to future climate mitigation include CO2-reducing CCS and BECCS (Bioenergy Crops with Carbon Capture and Storage) technology that has not yet been implemented, and that may ultimately be impossible to sufficiently implement.
And what about all the forest fires over the last couple years?
We must degrow, fast and furiously.
Year-end drops in the carbon dioxide level due to the Covid Pandemic are estimated to be 5.5% and as high as 8%. According to a recent UN report, we need a drop of 7.6% over previous year’s level each year during this coming decade to keep below a 1.5C rise.
In other words, we would have to string together 10 years in a row of reducing CO2 levels by the end of 2020, and each year we would have to reduce CO2 levels by an additional 7.6%.
That means ten more years restricting CO2 levels the way we (likely will) have during 2020, and continuing to compound that number annually over last year’s levels. This means 7.6% this year, 15.2% the next, 22.8% the next, and so on.
This is even more incentive to continue a lockdown-style degrowth-with-benefits well into the future. But this will not come to pass.
Monetary subsidies currently being allocated to citizens in light of the Covid pandemic are part of a solution for moving forward and giving the Earth the longer break it needs.
We could continue the current lockdown and participate in a modified lockdown-with-benefits that includes all the juicy and life-sustaining, non-industrial interactions that sustain us mentally, emotionally, and physically — but without a good part of the consuming and polluting via driving, entertainment, using lots of electricity, and producing abundant noise and fumes.
For this Americans would have to learn how to live simple lives, which would require us to be okay enough in our skin and to feel fulfilled enough by what is free. But this will not happen enough.
A bare minimum of consumption and truly essential services that injure clean air, soil integrity, plant life, quiet, and ecosystems could be allowed.
We would live like “poor” disadvantaged people (while simultaneously giving them the dignity they deserve) to create richness in every way (true thriving), including our own and our childrens’ biological survival.
If this beautiful kind of life seems extreme and unnecessary, I imagine you agree that massive suffering and extinction are worse.
This is why I have written that the best way to deal with Pandemic struggles is to consider it a training ground for worse ahead.
Future conditions will make current lockdown inconveniences seem like a vacation, says Chris Hedges.
Is it a coincidence that the best way out of first-world hell on Earth is the most unpopular and unthinkable way forward?
Is it any coincidence that the most promising way to a viable future is precisely opposite our cultural norm, and unfolding in right now due to a disease pandemic?
We are hurtling headfirst into a brick wall.
In all likelihood, the polluting human juggernaut is not going to stop, the politicians and corporations are not going to stop. Not nearly enough.
Not enough people are resisting and rebelling for top-down change. And when they do, not enough government and policy makers are listening and changing, and not fast enough.
Will a Democratic president and hopefully a blue congress in November 2020 make enough of a difference, seeing that America is an example to the world for how to behave?
Not with Biden, if we are even “lucky” enough to elect him.
Will we have Trump again, which would essentially seal our fate, along with increase the destruction of everything else that makes life worth living?
It’s too scary to consider all this, so most choose blindfolds. I understand; I do too sometimes.
But I think we need unhappy endings to stories like this if we are to have a chance of a real-life future. This was the biggest takeaway for me from “Planet of the Humans.”
All the good endings to dire reports seem to just put us back to sleep: “We got this, no need to worry, someone else will take care of it.”
So, lockdown is it. This, in modified form, as described, is our best future. Lockdown means we and our bad ways are restrained from doing harm, because we, like children, can’t control ourselves and make sacrifices. We want play time, with brand new toys, all the time.
But lockdown done better is not punishment; it’s a bloody gift, it’s what needs to be done to survive and to give the rest of the word a fighting chance.
Actually, it’s true freedom, relative to our predicament now.
It’s a chance for a beautiful new world. And once we get used to it, we might earn the right to thrive without causing ecocide.
So here we are in lockdown, and if you were alien looking down at the world from outer space, you might say, “Wow, those humans finally woke up to climate crisis!” Except we have not in the least chosen these restrictions to address climate crisis to save our future.
Nor are we in agreement to use this time, or such future lockdown time, to sequester CO2 and grace the natural world.
And we hate lockdown. We want to get back to normal.
The current restrictions are to save our lives from Covid-19. Why wouldn’t we volunteer to extend them to save us from a worse plague: polluting ourselves and everything else to death via climate crisis?
It’s a head-shaker for sure.
So, can we pretend that Climate Crisis is Covid?
It just seems that we (who aren’t threatened this moment by climate change-induced wildfires, droughts, starvation, floods, hurricanes, locusts, and starvation) are able to grok the invisible coronavirus more readily than we are the invisible effects of greenhouse gases.
One reason for this this is that we are familiar with illness — even bronchitis and pneumonia are familiar enough reference points to help us better relate to the coronavirus, and take appropriate action (many of us anyway).
Covid is a here and now bodily threat for everybody, whereas climate change is less dramatically now (in many cases) and more futuristic and removed from what we know amid our everyday lives, so our brains have a hard time grokking the urgency of it.
This out-of-sight and out-of-mind dynamic is perpetuated by the unskillful reporting, per the proverbial, “We have till 2100 before it gets really bad.” Some, like Harvard’s James Andersen, say we have 5 years, and that was 2.5 years ago. Others say 2100 will come by 2050.
Whatever the case, worse is in all of our lifetimes
Here’s a review of the crucial science-bytes mentioned previously:
1) Emissions must peak by 2020 to stay under 1.5C rise
2) Emissions are not even expected to peak by 2030
3) 1.5C is the threshold beyond which the likelihood of climate catastrophe grows more exponentially
4) We are essentially locked into 1.5C rise
5) Rises above 1.5C become exponentially worse, barring more pandemic miracles (eh-hem).
I wish we could degrow via collective lockdown-with-benefits to live well, and to survive at all.
But this will not come to pass.
The economy will rev up, and make up for lost time.
So, after lockdown I will determine the best way to continue lockdown, but with benefits — how to open-up-locally for myself, how to live respectfully, with time to grieve and to care for those around me. And I will invite my friends to join me.
No happy ending here . . . because I care about our future.
