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Last night’s fascinating dialogue with activists, skeptics, cynics, doomers, optimists, and much more was, of course, inspiring.

The Apocadocs (Michael and Jim — I’m the former) have spent the last two years consciously, daily, routinely filtering and collecting news stories, focusing on the converging emergencies (and finding punchlines for every story).

Consequently, we’re both exceedingly well versed in the horrors of burgeoning environmental collapse. That’s why I was able to write this, in last night’s diary:

What I’ve been learning over the last couple of years, as one of the two ApocaDocs gathering and bequipping stories about five likely collapse scenarios (climate chaos, species collapse, biology breach, infectious disease, peak resources — oh, and recovery too) is that nothing is happening as expected.

Scientists and specialists within all these topical arenas are saying “more than we thought,” “faster than expected,” “alarming,” “unanticipated,” “recently realized,” “worse than we thought.”

The great migrations themselves are becoming extinct, from salmon to elk to butterflies to tuna. Bats in the Northeast are suffering catastrophically from white-nose syndrome, at die-off rates of 90%. Pollinators are suffering dramatically. Top-of-the-food-chain predators everywhere are collapsing. All marine mammals have high levels of PCBs, and flame retardants, and a broad array of other human-made toxins coursing through their bodies.

The waste-processed effluent from our cities contains the prozac and viagra and hormone replacement runoff, that we flush down the toilet, which makes fish hermaphroditic. That water mixes with the pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer runoff from our factory farms —  creating a dead zone the size of New Jersey at the base of the Mississippi, joining other dead zones around the world.

In between California and Hawaii there is a gumbo of plastic gyring in the Pacific that’s at least the size of Texas. Plastic does not biodegrade, but breaks down into particles that fish consume.

And most estimates indicate we have already overfished between 85 and 90% of the raw biomass out of the ocean in the last century, and every day, we continue to hoover up four times more ocean biomass than is reborn. “Peak ocean” happened a long time ago, but our ever-more-efficient factory fishing has let us ignore it for a time.

Coal power belches heavy metals and incredibly massive amounts of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Global warming is not a theory, it is a given.

CO2 does something much worse. While we bicker with global-warming deniers, the ocean is getting more acidic. Excess CO2 plus ocean produces carbonic acid. Ocean acidification is a clear and present danger. A slight rise in acidity dramatically affects calcium-carbonate-based lifeforms, like most plankton, shellfish, and coral, the cornerstones of the ocean biosphere. They are unable to form calcium carbonate shells, exoskeletons, or other structures.

We’re also reaching, in the very near-term, limits on oil, fresh water (as reported magnificently [Sunday] in the diary “Water Bankruptcy“), topsoil, lithium, phosphorus, and plenty more.

Worst of all, nearly everything (and more) on the above list is happening “faster than expected.”

I could write that with confidence: we’ve got the database to back it up.

But — and here’s the key — neither of us are specialists in any field.

We’re not trained climatologists, or marine biologists, or economists, even self-styled specialists. That’s where this community comes in.

What I’d like to do, periodically is every week or two, post a Converging Emergency, and get focused discussion on its political, ethical, and economic significance.

I don’t want too much blather, or deniers, or one-note-ponies, of course — I want frank and realistic discussions, enhancements and clarification, better expertise, links to better resources, links to conflicting data, and thoughts about what kinds of progressive policies might be appropriate, if the emergency comes to be acknowledged (or springs ravenously upon us).

Last night, I briefly described a few of the possible “converging emergency” scenarios:

It’s the problem of, say, the 90% deathrate in bats in the Northeast, causing a rise in crop pests, causing a drastic rise in pesticide use, causing a general decline in pollinators and other beneficial species, while also causing reproductive problems in freshwater fish downstream.

It’s the problem of, say, topsoil depletion and aquifer pollution in the Midwest, compounded by climate-chaos drought and a monoculture of soy and corn, causing increasing use of fertilizer, causing the depletion and rapid rise in prices of phosphorus, while also causing the farm runoff to create algal blooms in rivers and lakes and outlets.

It’s the problem of, say, rising oceans drastically devaluing private and commercial property that is 20 feet “above (the former) sea level,” including city infrastucture, homes, and businesses, while the costs of energy are rising, ports are having to reconfigure, and shipping costs treble, as we confront the costs of CO2 realistically.

and what I’d like to do next, is start hypothesizing some emergencies in more detail, and then getting robust, practical discussion (no pooties or unicorns) on progressive politics and policy, in response to these emergencies.

Some might say “ah, but you’re stacking the deck by providing the horrifically awful scenario,” and they’d be right.

Others might say “you can’t just make up bad shit happening,” and I’d say “I have to back up the scenarios with evidence, or it’s just fiction.”

So, some of the participatory terms I’m imagining are (subject to correction by the community):

• No scenario can be made up out of whole cloth, without multiple forms of evidence. No echo chamber, no magical thinking, though expert prediction based on evidence is acceptable.
• No abject denial. That is, no huffing that it’s “doomer” to even think it. The point is to understand the hypothetical scenario more fully, so in the event that aspects of it come to pass, we are better prepared to promote informed progressive policy and politics in response.
• No invective (or at least, no props/recs for invective). We should try to keep the discussion rational, reasonable, and plausible, and impersonal. This is politics and policy, not hyperventilation.

 

Is this reasonable? If so, let’s try one on for size, in miniature, from last night:

Over the next 3-5 years: Arctic meltdown, Transportation Shifts, Rising Sea Level, Northwest Passage, Weather Extremes, Agricultural Slowdown

Throughout 2010 it becomes increasingly clear that Greenland and the Arctic are melting at speeds far faster than expected, partly due to re-increasing solar outputand decreasing cloud cover. This also further thaws the permafrost, resulting in CO2 and methane releases that create what’s called a “positive feedback” that is anything but positive for society. It won’t kick in for another few years later, but it’s measurable, and scary.

The Northwest Passage is clear for four months in 2010, for six months in 2011. By 2011 it’s become reasonable to predict an increasing melt-off of Greenland over the next three to five years, creating a predictable, necessary sea level rise (and storm surge levels) over that span of time.

Rising oceans drastically devalue private and commercial coastal property, which is less than 20 feet “above (the former) sea level” — including city infrastructure, homes, and businesses, across the East and West coasts, and worldwide. Ports are having to reconfigure, ocean transport is interrupted, and sanitation systems in major metropolitan areas have to retool. In some areas, dykes, seawalls, or pumping stations must be built anew, at significant societal cost.

As a consequence of fresh water sluicing into the saltwater of the Northern Sea, global climatic patterns are disrupted, causing unexpected droughts, deluges, and dramatic heat and cold spells in Europe, the Northeast of the US, as well as in other places (the Midwest? China? What about the monsoons?). Agricultural production, worldwide, decreases 20%, and amelioration costs (insurance, hail damage, federal crop support) increases about the same.

Now, here are some questions:

• do we embark on a huge, national CO2 reduction initiative?
• do we call the deniers traitors?
• do we embark on a huge, national investment in solar and wind?
• do we forge agreements with the Canadians for “favored nation status” for Northwest Passage passage?
• do we find new economic opportunities that should be promoted?
• do we provide tax incentives for “early migration” from coastal areas?
• do we forgive foreclosed bad-loan TARP properties on the coast, if the forgiven goes into “green work” of some kind?
• do we bail out insurance companies who didn’t foresee the converging emergencies?
• do we bail out banks heavily leveraged in coal power?
• do we recast the military to be “homeland protection” and have them build the dykes?
• do we provide temporary housing to poverty-line-and-below environmental migrants, thrust from the cities by below-the-tidesurge mandates?
• do we provide assistance to island nations (who are suing us and the other developed nations) whose homelands have been devastated by global warming for which the the developed countries have been substantially responsible?

 

I could go on — and hope others do — the point of this “diary zero” is to explore how best to have the best discussion of these kinds of scenarios.

Are the “rules” I’ve proposed reasonable? The level of questions reasonable?

How can we best produce a reasoned discussion on potential scenarios like this? And for this scenario, how best should Progressives respond?

It’s not “our” fault, these emergencies (well, not proportionally our falut): but we will want to promote Progressive responses to them. How can we prepare for strong arguments, for sane responses, ahead of the curve?

This will be a work in progress ( to accrue inventive thinking).

But I think we can begin the process of thinking about and planning — even if for “hypothetical” eventualities — how to respond to the converging emergencies, as progressives, as Democrats, as engaged thinkers about the complexities of the upcoming world.