Tag: climate change

Did we see the conspiracies coming?

Tweets like this seem on point…

… but I’ve started to wonder if we’re missing something in the course of expressing opinions about what we thought climate deniers would say and what they’re actually saying. That is, we expected to be right about what we thought they’d say but we’ve found ourselves wrong. Should we lampoon ourselves as well? Or, to reword the cartoon:

How we imagined we could react when ‘what we imagined deniers would say when the climate catastrophes came’ came true: “I was so right! And now everyone must pay for their greed and lies! May god have mercy on their soul!”

Followed by:

How we expect we’ll react when we find out ‘what they actually are saying’: “I was so wrong! And now everyone must pay for my myopia and echo chambers! May god have mercy on my soul!”

And finally:

How we actually are reacting: “We’re just using these disasters as an excuse to talk about climate change! Like we did with COVID! And 9/11! And the real moon landings! Screw you and your federal rescue money! You need to take your electric vegan soy beans now!”

People (myself included) in general aren’t entirely effective at changing others’ attitudes so it may not seem fair to say there’s a mistake in us not having anticipated how the deniers would react, that we erred by stopping short of understanding really why climate denialism exists and addressing its root cause. But surely the latter sounds reasonable in hindsight? ‘Us versus them’ narratives like the one in the cartoon describe apparent facts very well but they also reveal a tendency, either on the part of ‘us’ or of ‘them’ but often of both, to sustain this divide instead of narrowing it.

I’m not ignorant of the refusal of some people to change their mind under any circumstances. But even if we couldn’t have prevented their cynical attitudes on social issues — and consensus on climate change is one — maybe we can do better to anticipate them.

A tale of two myopias, climate change and the present participle

The Assam floods are going on. One day, they will stop. The water will subside in many parts of the state but the things that caused the floods will continue to work, ceaselessly, and will cause them to occur again next year, and the year after and so on for the foreseeable future.

Journalists, politicians and even civil society members have become adept at seeing the floods in space. Every year, as if on cue, there have been reports on the cusp of summer of floodwaters inundating many districts in the state, including those containing and surrounding the Kaziranga national park; displacing lakhs of people and killing hundreds; destroying home, crop, cattle and soil; encouraging the spread of diseases; eroding banks and shores; and prompting political leaders to promise all the help that they can muster for the affected people. But the usefulness of the spatial cognition of the Assam floods has run its course.

Instead, now, we need to inculcate a temporal cognition, whether this alone or a spatio-temporal one. The reason is that more than the floods themselves, we are currently submerged by the effects of two myopias, like two rocks tied around our necks that are dragging us to the bottom. The first one is sustained by the members of our political class, such as Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma and Union home minister Amit Shah, when they say that they will avail all the support and restitution to displaced people and the relatives of those killed directly or indirectly by the floods.

The floods are not the product of climate change but of mindless infrastructure ‘development’, the construction of dikes and embankments, encroachment of wetlands and plains, destruction of forests and the over-extraction resources and its consequences. A flood happens when the water levels rise, but destruction is the result of objects of human value being in the waters’ way. More and more human property is being located in places where the water used to go, and more and more human property is being rendered vulnerable to being washed away.

When political leaders offer support to the people after every flood (which is the norm), it is akin to saying, “I will shoot you with a gun and then I will pay for your care.” Offering people support is not helpful, at least not when it stops there, followed by silence. Everyone – from parliamentary committees to civil society members – should follow the utterances of Shah, Sarma & co. (both BJP and non-BJP leaders, including those of the Congress, CPI(M), DMK, TMC, etc.) through time, acknowledge the seasonality of their proclamations, and bring them to book for failing to prevent the floods from occurring every year, instead of giving them brownie points for providing support on each occasion post facto.

The second myopia exists on the part of many journalists, especially in the Indian mainstream press, and their attitude towards cyclones, which can be easily and faithfully extrapolated to floods as well. Every year for the last two decades at least, there has been a cyclone or two that ravaged two states in particular: Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal (the list included Odisha but it has done well to mitigate the consequences). And on every occasion plus some time, reports have appeared in newspapers and magazines of fisherpeople in dire straits with their boats broken, nets torn and stomachs empty; of coastal properties laid to waste; and, soon after, of fuel and power subsidies, loan waivers and – if you wait long enough – sobering stories of younger fishers migrating to other parts of the country looking for other jobs.

These stories are all important and necessary – but they are not sufficient. We also need stories about something new – stories that are mindful of the passage of time, of people growing old, the rupee becoming less valuable, the land becoming more recalcitrant, and of the world itself passing them all by. We need the present participle.

This is not a plea for media houses to commoditise tragedy and trade in interestingness but a plea to consider that these stories miss something: the first myopia, the one that our political leaders espouse. By keeping the focus on problem X, we also keep the focus on the solutions for X. Now ask yourself what X might be if all the stories appearing in the mainstream press are about post-disaster events, and thus which solutions – or, indeed, points of accountability – we tend to focus on to the exclusion of others. We also need stories – ranging in type from staff reports to reported features, from hyperlocal dispatches to literary essays – of everything that has happened in the aftermath of a cyclone making landfall near, say, Nellore or North 24 Parganas, whether things have got better or worse with time, whether politicians have kept their promises to ameliorate the conditions of the people there (especially those not living inside concrete structures and/or whose livelihoods depends directly on natural resources); and whether by restricting ourselves to supporting a people after a storm or a flood has wreaked havoc, we are actually dooming them.

We need timewise data and we need timewise first-hand accounts. To adapt the wisdom of Philip Warren Anderson, we may know how a shrinking wetland may exacerbate the intensity of the next flood, but we cannot ever derive from this relationship knowledge of the specific ways in which people, and then the country, suffer, diminish and fade away.

The persistence of these two myopias also feeds the bane of incrementalism. By definition, incremental events occur orders of magnitude more often than significant events (so to speak), so it is more efficient to evolve to monitor and record the former. This applies as much to our memories as it does to the economics of newsrooms. We tend to get caught up in the day-to-day and are capable within weeks of forgetting something that happened last year; unscrupulous politicians play to this gallery by lying through their teeth about something happening when it didn’t (or vice versa), offending the memories of all those who have died because of a storm or a flood and yet others who survive but on the brink of tragedy. On the other hand, newsrooms are staffed with more journalists attuned to the small details but not implicitly able to piece all of them together into the politically and economically inconvenient big picture (there are exceptions, of course).

I am not sure when we entered the crisis period of climate change but in mid-2022, it is a trivial fact that we are in the thick of it – the thick of a beast that assails us both in space and through time. In response, we must change the way we cognise disasters. The Assam floods are ongoing – and so are the Kosi, the Sabarmati and the Cauvery floods. We just haven’t seen the waters go wild yet.

Some comments on India’s heat

On May 5, a couple people from BBC World reached out to me, presumably after reading my piece last week on the heatwave in North India and the wet-bulb temperature, for a few comments on a story they were producing on the topic. They had five questions between them; I’m reproducing my answers roughly verbatim (since I spoke to them on phone) below.

Are these high temperatures usual?

A: Yes and no. Yes because while these numbers are high, we’ve been hearing about them for a decade or so now – and reading about them in news reports and hearing anecdotal reports. This isn’t the first such heatwave to hit India. A few years ago, peak summer temperature in Delhi touched 47º C or so and there were photos in the media of the asphalt on the road having melted. That was worse – that hasn’t happened this time, yet. That’s the ‘yes’ part. The ‘no’ part has to do with the fact that India is a large country and some parts of the country that are becoming hotter are probably also reaching these temperatures for the first time. E.g. Bangalore, where I live, is currently daily highs of around 35º C. This is par for the course in Chennai and Delhi but it’s quite hot for Bangalore. This said, the high heat is starting sooner, on this occasion from mid-March or so itself, and lasting for longer. That has changed our experience of the heat and our exposure. Of course, my answers are limited to urban India, especially to major cities. I don’t know off the top of my head what the situation in other parts is like.

The government has said India has a national heat plan and some cities have adopted heat action plans. Are they effective?

Hard to say. Only two score or so cities have adopted functional heat action plans plus they’re cities, which is not where most of India lives. Sure, the heat is probably worse in the urban centres because of the heat island effect, but things are quite poor in rural areas as well, especially in the north. The heat also isn’t just heat – people experience its effects more keenly if they don’t have continuous power supply or access to running water, which is often the case in many parts of rural India. The benefits of these action plans accrue to those who are better off, typically those who are upper class and upper caste, which is hardly the point. When North India’s heatwave was underway last week, NDTV interviewed shopkeepers and small scale traders, vendors, etc. about whether they could take time off. All of them without exception said ‘no’. Come rain or shine, they need to work. I remember there being vicious cyclones in Chennai and waking up in the morning to find the roads flooded, trees fallen down and loose electric wires – and the local mobile vegetable vendor doing his rounds. Also, in urban areas, do the heat action plans account for the plights of homeless people and beggars, and people living in slums, where – even if they’re indoors – they have poor circulation and often erratic water and power supply?

What should the government do?

That’s a very broad question. Simply speaking, the government should give people who can’t afford to shut their businesses or take time off from work the money they’d lose if they did, and rations. This is going to be very difficult but this is what should be done. But this won’t happen. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government didn’t plan for the tens of thousands of migrant labourers and daily-wage earners in cities, who, once the lockdown came into effect, slowly migrated back to their home towns and villagers in search of livelihoods. This sector remains invisible to the government.

[I also wanted to say but didn’t have the time:] the experience of heat is also mediated by gender, geography and caste forces, so state interventions should also be mediated by them. For example, women in particular, in rural India and especially in Central and North India (where literacy is relatively lower) operate in settings where they have few rights and little if any financial and social independence. They can seldom buy or own land and go out to work, and often labour indoors, performing domestic tasks in poorly ventilated residential spaces, venture out to fetch water from often distant sources – a task performed almost exclusively by women and girls –, often have to defecate in the open but do so early in the day or late in the evening to avoid harrassment and shame, which then means they may not drink water to avoid peeing during the day but which would render them vulnerable to heat stress, etc. If state interventions don’t bend around these realities, they will be useless.

The moment you mention data or figures that you say you obtained from this government, the first thought that comes to mind is that it’s probably inaccurate, and likely an underestimate. Even now, the Indian government has an ongoing dispute with the WHO over the number of people who died during the pandemic in India: India is saying half a million but the WHO as well as many independent experts have said it’s probably 3-5 million. For example, if the government is collecting data of heat-related illnesses at the institutional level (from hospitals, clinics, etc.) you immediately have a bias in terms of which people are able to or intend to access healthcare when they develop a heat-related illness. Daily-wagers don’t go to hospitals unless their conditions are acute – because they’d lose a day’s earnings, because their out of pocket expenses have increased or both.

Do you think parts of India will become unliveable in your lifetime?

This is a good question. I’d say that ‘unliveable’ is a subjective thing. I have a friend in Seattle who recently bought a house in what she said was a nice part of the city, with lots of greenery, opportunities to go hiking and trekking on the weekend, with clear skies, clean air and large water bodies nearby. Liveability to her is different from, say, liveability to someone living in New Delhi, where the air is already quite foul, summers are very hot and winters are likely to become colder in future. Liveability means different things to people living in Delhi, London and Seattle. Many parts of India have been unliveable for a long time now, we just put up with it – and many people do because they don’t have any other option – and our bar just keeps slipping lower.

Climate change, like quantum physics, will strain language

One of the defining features of quantum mechanics is that it shows up human language, and thought supported by that language, to be insufficient and limited. Many of the most popular languages of the world, including Tamil, Hindi and English, are linear. Their script reads in a line from one end of the page to the other, and their spoken words compile meaning based on a linear sequence and order of words. It is possible to construe these meanings in turn only after word after another, through the passage of time. If time stops, so does language.

Such linearity is incompatible with the possibilities in quantum mechanics for simultaneity, in both space and time. Quantum superposition is not exactly a system in two states at once but in a linear combination of states, but without the specialised knowledge, language can only offer a slew of metaphors, each of which hews asymptotically closer to the actual thing but never captures it in its entirety. Quantum entanglement, similarly, causes one particle to affect another instantaneously, over hundreds of kilometres, defying both the universal information speed limit and the ability of human minds that remain constrained by that limit, as well as a human language that has no place for, and therefore can’t identify, simultaneity. All we have something after another, effect after cause, the first step and then the second, and never both at once.

Indeed, the notion of causality – that cause will always precede effect – is one of the load-bearing pillars of reality as we strive to understand it.

But while quantum mechanics is so kooky, it is also excusably so, considering it represents a paradigm shift of sorts from the truths of classical physics (it plays by different rules, that is). It is almost simply natural that our languages do not encompass the possibilities afforded by a phenomenon we didn’t encounter until the 20th century, and still don’t except through specialised apparatuses and controlled experimental conditions.

However, there is another system of things that plays largely by the rules of classical physics – our interactions with and formalisation of which paralleled the evolution of our languages – and yet increasingly defies the ability of our languages to describe it faithfully: climate change.

True, weather and climate patterns include aspects of chaos theory, which explains how minute differences in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes. But chaos theory still only takes recourse to non-linear effects, which, while harder to conceive of than their linear counterparts, are easier than to grapple with non-locality and non-causality. Of course, climate change doesn’t violate any of these or other similarly foundational principles, yet it complicates interactions in the global weather system and intensifies the interactions between the elements and human culture, technology and biology – both to such a degree that they have consequences both different and new.

For example, to quote from an article The Wire Science published this morning:

Climate change will further exacerbate marine heatwave risks in the [Indian subcontinent] region, according to [Ming] Feng. This could suppress coastal upwelling – the process by which strong winds move surface water in the ocean, permitting water from below to surface – and reduce the amount of oxygen in the water. This in turn could have a “great impact” on fisheries.

A big part of climate change’s (extant as well as impending) devastation is in the form of surprise – that is, of the emergent phenomena that it makes possible. Expounded most famously by the brilliant physicist Philip W. Anderson, especially in his 1972 essay ‘More Is Different’, emergence is the idea that we cannot fully describe a large system only by studying its smallest components. Put another way, larger systems have emergent properties and behaviour that are more than the sum of the ways in which systems’ most fundamental parts interact. Studying climate change is important because the additional complexity it imbues to existing weather systems are ripe with emergent effects, each with new consequences and perhaps more effects of their own.

At the same time, the bulk of these effects, taken together, anticipate such a large volume of possibilities that even though they certainly won’t defy reality’s, and human languages’, assumption that causality is true, they will push it to extreme limits. Two events are still at liberty to happen at the same time, each with a distinct and preceding cause, but even as the ways we communicate wait for cause before composing effect, climate change will confront us with a tsunami of changes – each one reinforcing, screening or ignoring the other, rapidly branching out into a larger, denser forest of changes, until the cause is only relevant as an historical artefact in our grammar of the natural universe.

On the NASEM report on solar geoengineering

A top scientific body in the US has asked the government to fund solar geoengineering research in a bid to help researchers and policymakers know the fullest extent of their options to help the US deal with climate change.

Solar geoengineering is a technique in which sunlight-reflecting aerosols are pumped into the air, to subtract the contribution of solar energy to Earth’s rapidly warming surface.

The technique is controversial because the resulting solar dimming is likely to affect ecosystems in a detrimental way and because, without the right policy safeguards, its use could allow polluting industries to continue polluting.

The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) released its report on March 25. It describes three solar geoengineering strategies: stratospheric aerosol injection (described above), marine cloud brightening and cirrus cloud thinning.

“Although scientific agencies in the US and abroad have funded solar-geoengineering research in the past, governments have shied away from launching formal programmes in the controversial field,” Nature News reported. In addition, “Previous recommendations on the subject by elite scientific panels in the US and abroad have gone largely unheeded” – including NASEM’s own 2015 recommendations.

To offset potential roadblocks, the new report requests the US government to setup a transparent research administration framework, including a code of conduct, an open registry of researchers’ proposals for studies and a fixed process by which the government will grant permits for “outdoor experiments”. And to achieve these goals, it recommends a dedicated allocation of $100-200 million (Rs 728-1,456 crore).

According to experts who spoke to Nature News, Joe Biden being in the Oval Office instead of Donald Trump is crucial: “many scientists say that Biden’s administration has the credibility to advance geoengineering research without rousing fears that doing so will merely displace regulations and other efforts to curb greenhouse gases, and give industry a free pass.”

This is a significant concern for many reasons – including, notably, countries’ differentiated commitments to ensuring outcomes specified in the Paris Agreement and the fact that climate is a global, not local, phenomenon.

Data from 1900 to 2017 indicates that US residents had the world’s ninth highest carbon dioxide emissions per capita; Indians were 116th. This disparity, which holds between the group of large developed countries and of large developing countries in general, has given rise to demands by the latter that the former should do more to tackle climate change.

The global nature of climate is a problem particularly for countries with industries that depend on natural resources like solar energy and seasonal rainfall. One potential outcome of geoengineering is that climatic changes induced in one part of the planet could affect outcomes in a faraway part.

For example, the US government sowed the first major seeds of its climate research programme in the late 1950s after the erstwhile Soviet Union set off three nuclear explosions underground to divert the flow of a river. American officials were alarmed because they were concerned that changes to the quality and temperature of water entering the Arctic Ocean could affect climate patterns.

For another, a study published in 2007 found that when Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it spewed 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide that cooled the whole planet by 0.5º C. As a result, the amount of rainfall dropped around the world as well.

In a 2018 article, Rob Bellamy, a Presidential Fellow in Environment at the University of Manchester, had also explained why stratospheric aerosol injection is “a particularly divisive idea”:

For example, as well as threatening to disrupt regional weather patterns, it, and the related idea of brightening clouds at sea, would require regular “top-ups” to maintain cooling effects. Because of this, both methods would suffer from the risk of a “termination effect”: where any cessation of cooling would result in a sudden rise in global temperature in line with the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If we hadn’t been reducing our greenhouse gas emissions in the background, this could be a very sharp rise indeed.

A study published in 2018 had sought to quantify the extent of this effect – a likely outcome of, say, projects losing political favour or funding. The researchers created a model in which humans pumped five million tonnes of sulphur dioxide a year into the stratosphere for 50 years, and suddenly stopped. One of the paper’s authors told The Wire Science at the time: “This would lead to a rapid increase in temperature, two- to four-times more rapid than climate change without geoengineering. This increase would be dangerous for biodiversity and ecosystems.”

Prakash Kashwan, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut and a senior research fellow of the Earth System Governance Project, has also written for The Wire Science about the oft-ignored political and social dimensions of geoengineering.

He told the New York Times on March 25, “Once these kinds of projects get into the political process, the scientists who are adding all of these qualifiers and all of these cautionary notes” – such as “the steps urged in the report to protect the interests of poorer countries” – “aren’t in control”. In December 2018, Kashwan also advised caution in the face of scientific pronouncements:

The community of climate engineering scientists tends to frame geoengineering in certain ways over other equally valid alternatives. This includes considering the global average surface temperature as the central climate impact indicator and ignoring vested interests linked to capital-intensive geoengineering infrastructure. This could bias future R&D trajectories in this area. And these priorities, together with the assessments produced by eminent scientific bodies, have contributed to the rise of a de facto form of governance. In other words, some ‘high-level’ scientific pronouncements have assumed stewardship of climate geoengineering in the absence of other agents. Such technocratic modes of governance don’t enjoy broad-based social or political legitimacy.

For now, the NASEM report “does not in any way advocate deploying the technology, but says research is needed to understand the options if the climate crisis becomes even more serious,” according to Nature News. The report itself concludes thus:

The recommendations in this report focus on an initial, exploratory phase of a research program. The program might be continued or expand over a longer term, but may also shrink over time, with some or all elements eventually terminated, if early research suggests strong reasons why solar geoengineering should not be pursued. The proposed approaches to transdisciplinary research, research governance, and robust stakeholder engagement are different from typical climate research programs and will be a significant undertaking; but such efforts will enable the research to proceed in an effective, societally responsive manner.

Matthew Watson, a reader in natural hazards at the University of Bristol, had discussed a similar issue in conversation with Bellamy in 2018, including an appeal to our moral responsibilities the same way ‘geoengineers’ must be expected to look out for transnational and subnational effects:

Do you remember the film 127 Hours? It tells the (true) story of a young climber who, pinned under a boulder in the middle of nowhere, eventually ends up amputating his arm, without anaesthetic, with a pen knife. In the end, he had little choice. Circumstances dictate decisions. So if you believe climate change is going to be severe, you have no option but to research the options (I am not advocating deployment) as broadly as possible. Because there may well come a point in the future where it would be immoral not to intervene.

The Wire Science
March 30, 2021

Christopher Nolan’s explosion

In May, Total Film reported that the production team of Tenet, led by director Christopher Nolan, found that using a second-hand Boeing 747 was better than recreating a scene involving an exploding plane with miniatures and CGI. I’m not clear how exactly it was better; Total Film only wrote:

“I planned to do it using miniatures and set-piece builds and a combination of visual effects and all the rest,” Nolan tells TF. However, while scouting for locations in Victorville, California, the team discovered a massive array of old planes. “We started to run the numbers… It became apparent that it would actually be more efficient to buy a real plane of the real size, and perform this sequence for real in camera, rather than build miniatures or go the CG route.”

I’m assuming that by ‘numbers’ Nolan means the finances. That is, buying and crashing a life-size airplane was more financially efficient than recreating the scene with other means. This is quite the disappointing prospect, as must be obvious, because this calculation limits itself to a narrow set of concerns, or just one as in this case – more bang for the buck – and consigns everything else to being negative externalities. Foremost on my mind is carbon emissions from transporting the vehicle, the explosion and the debris. If these costs were factored in, for example in terms of however much the carbon credits would be worth in the region where Nolan et al filmed the explosion, would the numbers have still been just as efficient? (I’m assuming, reasonably I think, that Nolan et al aren’t using carbon-capture technologies.)

However, CGI itself may not be so calorifically virtuous. I’m too lazy in this moment to cast about on the internet for estimates of how much of the American film industry’s emissions CGI accounts for. But I did find this tidbit from 2018 on Columbia University’s Earth Institute blog:

For example, movies with a budget of $50 million dollars—including such flicks as Zoolander 2, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Ted—typically produce the equivalent of around 4,000 metric tons of CO2. That’s roughly the weight of a giant sequoia tree.

A ‘green production guide’ linked there leads to a page offering an emissions calculator that doesn’t seem to account for CGI specifically; only broadly “electricity, natural gas & fuel oil, vehicle & equipment fuel use, commercial flights, charter flights, hotels & housing”. In any case, I had a close call with bitcoin-mining many years ago that alerted me to how energy-intensive seemingly straightforward computational processes could get, followed by a reminder when I worked at The Hindu – where the two computers used to render videos were located in a small room fit with its own AC, fixed at 18º C, and when they were rendering videos without any special effects, the CPUs’ fans would scream.

Today, digital artists create most CGI and special effects using graphics processing units (GPUs) – a notable exception was the black hole in Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, created using CPUs – and Nvidia and AMD are two of the more ‘leading’ brands from what I know (I don’t know much). One set of tests whose results a site called ‘Tom’s Hardware’ reported in May this year found an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE GPU is among the bottom 10% of performers in terms of wattage for a given task – in this case 268.7 W to render fur – among the 42 options the author tested. An AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU consumed nearly 80% as much for the same task, falling in the seventh decile. A bunch of users on this forum say a film like Transformers will need Nvidia Quadro and AMD Firepro GPUs; the former consumed 143 W in one fur-rendering test. (Comparability may be affected by differences in the hardware setup.) Then there’s the cooling cost.

Again, I don’t know if Nolan considered any of these issues – but I doubt that he did – when he ‘ran the numbers’ to determine what would be better: blowing up a real plane or a make-believe one. Intuition does suggest the former would be a lot more exergonic (although here, again, we’re forced to reckon with the environmental and social cost of obtaining specific metals, typically from middle-income nations, required to manufacture advanced electronics).

Cinema is a very important part of 21st century popular culture and popular culture is a very important part of how we as social, political people (as opposed to biological humans) locate ourselves in the world we’ve constructed – including being good citizens, conscientious protestors, sensitive neighbours. So constraining cinema’s remit or even imposing limits on filmmakers for the climate’s sake are ridiculous courses of action. This said, when there are options (and so many films have taught us there are always options), we have a responsibility to pick the more beneficial one while assuming the fewest externalities.

The last bit is important: the planet is a single unit and all of its objects occupants are wildly interconnected. So ‘negative externalities’ as such are more often than not trade practices crafted to simplify administrative and/or bureaucratic demands. In the broader ‘One Health’ sense, they vanish.

Time and the pandemic

There is this idea in physics that the fundamental laws of nature apply the same way for processes moving both forwards and backwards in time. So you can’t actually measure the passage of time by studying these processes. Where does our sense of time, rather the passage of time, come from then? How do we get to tell that the past and future are two different things, and that time flows from the former to the latter?

We sense time because things change. Clock time is commonly understood to be a way to keep track of when and how often things change but in physics, time is not the master: change doesn’t arise because of time but time arises because of change. So time manifests in the laws of nature through things that change in time. One of the simplest such things is entropy. Specifically, the second law of thermodynamics states that as time moves forward, the entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. Entropy thus describes an arrow of time.

This is precisely what the pandemic is refusing to do, at least as seen through windows set at the very back of a newsroom. Many reporters writing about the coronavirus may have the luxury of discovering change, and therefore the forward march of time itself, but for someone who is somewhat zoomed out – watching the proceedings from a distance, as it were – the pandemic has only suffused the news cycle with more and more copies of itself, like the causative virus itself.

It seems to me as if time has stilled. I have become numb to news about the virus, which I suspect is a coping mechanism, like a layer of armour inserted between a world relentlessly pelting me with bad news and my psyche itself. But the flip side of this protection is an inability to sense the passage of time as well as I was able before.

My senses are alert to mistakes of fact, as well as mostly of argument, that reporters make when reporting on the coronavirus, and of course to opportunities to improve sentence construction, structure, flow, etc. But otherwise, and thanks in fact to my limited engagement with this topic, it feels as if I wake up every morning, my fingers groaning at the prospect of typing the words “lockdown”, “coronavirus”, “COVID-19”, “herd immunity” and whatever else1. And since this is what I feel every morning, there is no sense of change. And without change, there is no time.

1. I mean no offence to those suffering the pandemic’s, and the lockdown’s, brutal health, economic, social, cultural and political consequences.

I would desperately like to lose my armour. The bad news will never stop coming but I would still like to get back to bad news that I got into journalism to cover, the bad news that I know what to do about… to how things were before, I suppose.

Oh, I’m aware of how illogical this line of introspection is, yet it persists! I believe one reason is that the pandemic is a passing cloud. It leapt out of the horizon and loomed suddenly over all of us, over the whole world; its pall is bleak but none of us doubts that it will also pass. The pandemic will end – everybody knows this, and this is perhaps also why the growing desperation for it to dissipate doesn’t feel misplaced, or unjustified. It is a cloud, and like all clouds, it must go away, and therefrom arises the frustration as well: if it can go away, why won’t it?

Is it true that everything that will last for a long time also build up over a long time? Climate change, for example, doesn’t – almost can’t – have a single onset event. It builds and builds all around us, its effects creeping up on us. With each passing day of inaction, there is even less that we can do than before to stop it; in fact, so many opportunities have been squandered or stolen by bad actors that all we have left to do is reduce consumption and lower carbon emissions. So with each passing day, the planet visits us with more reminders of how we have changed it, and in fact may never have it back to the way it once was.

Almost as if climate change happened so slowly, on the human scale at least, that it managed to weave itself into our sense of time, not casting a shadow on the clock as much as becoming a part of the clock itself. As humankind’s grandest challenge as yet, one that we may never fully surmount, climate change doesn’t arise because of time but time arises because of climate change. Perhaps speed and surprise is the sacrifice that time demands of that which aspires to longevity.

The pandemic, on the other hand, likely had a single onset… right? At least it seems so until you realise the pandemic is in fact the tip of the proverbial iceberg – the thing jutting above the waterline, better yet the tip of the volcano. There is a complicated mess brewing underground, and out of sight, to which we have all contributed. One day the volcano shoots up, plastering its surroundings with lava and shooting smoke and soot kilometres into the air. For a time, the skies are a nuclear-winter grey and the Sun is blotted out. To consider at this time that we could stave off all future eruptions by pouring tonnes of concrete into the smouldering caldera would be folly. The pandemic, like magma, like the truth itself, will out. So while the nimbuses of each pandemic may pass, all the storm’s ingredients will persist.

I really hope the world, and I do mean the world, will heed this lesson as the novel coronavirus’s most important, if only because our sense of time and our expectations of what the passage of time could bring need to encompass the things that cause pandemics as much as they have come to encompass the things that cause Earth’s climate to change. We’ve become used to thinking about this outbreak, and likely the ones before it, as transitory events that begin and end – but really, wrapped up in our unrelenting yearning for the pandemic to pass is a conviction that the virus is a short-lived, sublunary creature. But the virus is eternal, and so our response to it must also transform from the mortal to the immortal.

Then again, how I wish my mind submitted, that too just this once, to logic’s will sans resistance. No; it yearns still for the pandemic to end and for ‘normal’ to recommence, for time to flow as it once did, with the promise of bringing something new to the threshold of my consciousness every morning. I sense there is a line here between the long- and the short-term, between the individual and the collective, and ultimately between the decision to change myself and the decision to wait for others before I do.

I think, as usual, time will tell. Heh.

The potential energy of being entertained

Netflix just published a report drafted by its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, estimating – among other things – its environmental footprint for operations during the year 2019. According to the report, as The Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi writes:

Binge-watching Netflix doesn’t just fry your brain; it may also be frying the planet. The streaming service’s global energy consumption increased by 84% in 2019 to a total of 451,000 megawatt hours – enough to power 40,000 average US homes for a year.

This is staggering but not surprising. Through history, the place at which energy is consumed to produce a product has been becoming less and less strongly associated with where the product is likely to be purchased. The invention of sails, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and then satellites each rapidly transformed the speed at which goods could traverse Earth’s surface as well as the speed at which consumers could make more and more informed – therefore more and more rational – choices, assisted by economic reforms like globalisation and foreign direct investment.

The most recent disruption on this front was wrought, of course, by the internet and a little later the cloud. Now, with industries like movie-making, gaming, digital publishing and even large-scale computing, nothing short of a full-planet energy-accounting exercise makes sense. At the same time economic power, inequality and effective governance remain unevenly distributed, leading to knotty problems about determining how much each consumer of a company’s product is effectively responsible for the total energy required to make all products in that batch (since scale also matters).

Such accounting exercises have become increasingly popular, as they should be; private enterprises like Netflix as well as government organisations have started counting their calories – their carbon intake, output, emissions, trade, export, etc. – as a presumable first step towards limiting greenhouse gas emissions and helping keep Earth’s surface from warming any more than is already likely (2º C by 2100).

There is a catch, of course: it’s difficult to affect or even estimate the relative contribution of one’s operations to the effort to restrict global warming without also accounting for one’s wider economic setting. For example, Netflix likely displaced the DVD rental industry as well as stole users, and their respective carbon ‘demand’, from cable. So Mahdawi’s ringing the alarm bells based on Netflix’s report alone is only meaningful in a stand-alone scenario in which the status quo is ‘memoryless’.

However, even in this contextually limited aspiration to lower emissions and its attendant benefits for human wellbeing, joy, hope and optimism don’t seem to feature as much or, in many cases, at all.

Knowing Earth is already headed for widespread devastation can certainly smother action and deflate resolve. But while journalists and researchers alike have been debating the pros and cons of using positive or negative messaging as the better way to spur climate action, their most popular examples are rooted in quantifiable tasks or objects: either “Earth is getting more screwed by the hour but you can help by segregating your trash, using public transport and quitting meat” or “Sea-levels are rising, the Arctic is melting and heat-waves are becoming more frequent and more intense”.

It seems as if happiness cannot fit into either paradigm without specifying the number of degrees by which it will move the climate action needle. So it also becomes easily excluded from conversations about climate-change adaptation and mitigation. As Mahdawi writes in her column,

Being a conscientious consumer does not mean you have to turn off your wifi or chill with the Netflix. But we should think more critically about our data consumption. Apple already delivers screen-time reports; perhaps tech services should start providing us with carbon counts. Or maybe Netflix should implement carbon warnings. Caution: this program contains nudity, graphic language and a hell of a lot of energy.

If Netflix did issue such a warning, it would no longer be a popular pastime.

One of the purposes of popular culture, beyond its ability to channel creative expression and empower artists, is entertainment. We consume the products of popular culture, nucleated as music, dance, theatre, films, TV shows, books, paintings, sculptures and other forms, among other reasons to understand and locate ourselves outside the systems of capitalist production, to identify ourselves as members of communities, groups, cities or whatever by engaging with knowledge, objects – whether a book or the commons – or experiences that we have created, to assert that we are much more than where we work or what we earn.

Without these spaces and unfettered access to them, we become less able to escape the side-effects of neoliberalism: consumerism, hyper-competitiveness, social isolation and depression. I’m not saying you are likelier to feel depressed without Netflix but that Netflix is one of many sources of cultural information, and is therefore an instrument with which people around the world gather in groups based on cultural preferences – forming, in turn, a part of the foundation on which people are inspired to have new ideas, are motivated to act, and upon which they even expand their hopes and ambitions.

Of course, Netflix is itself a product of 21st century capitalism plus the internet. Like iTunes, YouTube, Prime, Disney, etc. Netflix is a corporation that has eased access to many petabytes of entertainment data across the globe but by rendering artists and entertainers even less powerful than they were and reducing their profits (rather, limiting their profits’ growth). The oft-advanced excuse, that the company simply levies a fee in return for easing barriers to discover new audiences, doesn’t always square off properly with the always-increasing labour required to create something new. So simply asking Netflix to not display a warning about the amount of energy required to produce a show may seem like a half-measure designed to fight off all of capitalism’s monsters except one.

We have a responsibility to iteratively replace the most problematic ways in which we profit from labour and generate wealth with practices that improve economic equality, social dignity, and access to education, healthcare and good living conditions. However, how do we balance this responsibility with a million people being able to watch a cautionary documentary about the rise of fascism in 1930s’ Germany, a film about the ills of plastic use or an explainer about the ways in which trees do and don’t fight global warming?

Binge-watching is bad – in terms of consuming enough energy to “power 40,000 average US homes for a year” as well as in other ways – but book-keepers seem content to insulate the act of watching itself from what is being watched, perhaps in an effort to determine the absolute worst case scenario or because it is very hard to understand, leave alone discern or even predict, the causal relationships between how we feel, how we think and how we act. However, this is also what we need: to accommodate, but at the same time without being compelled to quantify, the potential energy that arises from being entertained.

Losing sight of the agricultural finish line

In The Guardian, Joanna Blythman pokes an important pin into the frustrating but unsurprisingly durable bubble of vegan cuisine and the low-hanging fruits of ethical eating:

These days it’s fashionable to eulogise plant foods as the secret for personal health and sound stewardship of our planet. But in the process of squaring up to the challenge of climate breakdown, we seem to have forgotten that plant foods too can be either badly or well produced. … As long as we demonise animal foods and eulogise plant foods, any prospect of a natural food supply is shattered. We are left to depend for sustenance on the tender mercies of the techno-food corporations that see a little green V and the word “plant” as a formula for spinning gold from straw through ultra-processing.

Hopefully – though I hope for far too much here! – her article will sufficiently puncture the global elite’s bloated righteousness over eating healthy, especially vegan and/or organic, in order to save the planet, when in fact it’s just another instance of doing the bare and suspiciously photogenic minimum to personally feel better.

My own grouse is directed at tech-driven agricultural targets that speak about the producer and the consumer as if there was nothing in between, such as R&D, processing, storage, supply, distribution and trade, all in turn resting on a wider substrate of political-economic issues. The defensive technologist and/or investor might say, “You have got to start somewhere,” but innovators frequently start by targeting a demographic for which the situation might never been too late, instead of the people for whom it already is. Even then, their rhetoric also quickly forgets how misguided and off-target their ambitions are, leave alone losing sight of the problemy problems in desperate need of resolution.

I do think vertical farms are an interesting idea but I also think their wealthy investors and wealthy publicists have made a habit of horribly overestimating the extent to which these contraptions are going to be part of the solution – which in turn has contributed to a widespread sense of complacency among the elite and blinded them to the need for more better and radical changes to the status quo.

Sure, pesticides suck; I am also familiar with accounts that describe how the world produces enough but wastes too much, the tactics of companies like Monsanto; and I recognise agriculture is arguably the oldest human activity contributing to global heating. However, most narratives that provide the counter-view, and some of which also offer supplementary alternatives, gloss over important features of modern agriculture like scale and cost-effectiveness, enabled in turn by the various -icides, as well as the ways in which it is enmeshed in the economies of the developing world.

Ideas like indoor farming have become increasingly trendy of late: just two startups in the US raised $300 million as of last year but their products seem to cater only to upper-class westerners content with a salad-centric diet, seemingly mindless of the millions in third-world countries grossly underprepared to deal with climate change, water shortage, undernourishment and deepening economic inequality at the same time. (Not to mention: the more it costs to produce something, the more it is going to cost to buy without subsidies.)

For many – if not most – of India’s children, eggs are often the sole affordable source of protein. As an elite, upper-caste Indian, I have both privilege and responsibility to change my lifestyle to reduce my as well as others’ carbon footprints1; but in addition, to what extent could I be expected to fight against non-free-range egg production in the absence of guarantees about alternative sources – including lab-grown ones – when ultimately human welfare is our shared concern?

1. I can reduce others’ carbon footprints by reducing the amount of materials I consume to maintain my lifestyle.

The midday meal programme for instance feeds more than 100 million children, with the per-plate cooking cost ranging from Rs 4 to Rs 7; each plate in turn needs to have 12-20 grams of protein. We know pesticide-fed agriculture works because (together with government subsidies) it makes these costs possible, not when it does not damage the world in whatever other ways.

More broadly, there is a limit to which concerns for the climate have the leeway to supersede crop and cattle-meat production in India when the government will not sufficiently protect members of these sectors, often belonging to the more marginalised sections of society, from poverty, insolvency, suicide and death. Axiomatically, “breakthroughs in the development of food” will not move the climate-action needle until they provide alternate livelihoods, upgrade storage and distribution infrastructure, improve access to capital and insurance, and retool the public distribution system – a slew of upstream and downstream changes whose complexity towers over the technological options we currently have on offer.

Fighting climate change is, among other things, about replacing unsustainable practices with sustainable alternatives without sacrificing human development. However, the most popular media and business narratives have given this ambition a Malthusian twist to suggest it is about saving the planet at all costs – and not out of desperation but sheer ignorance, albeit with the same consequences. The dietary movements that promote organic farming, anti-meat diets and, quite terribly, genetically modified foods among the rich are part of this rhetoric. The technologies they bank on are frequently riddled with hypocrisies, most of all concerning external costs, and their strategies are restricted to regimens with their own well-established economies of profitability, such as keto, paleo, detox, etc., over anaemic, stunted, malnourished, etc.

The story here is quite similar to that of electric vehicles. If you are driving an electric scooter in India today, you are still far from helping cut emissions because coal is still the biggest source of power in the country. So without undertaking efforts to produce cleaner power (an endeavour fraught with its own problems), all you have done is translocated your share of the emissions away from the city where you are driving the scooter and to the faraway power plant where more coal is being burnt to provide the power you need. Your purchase may have been a step in the right direction but celebrating that would be as premature as getting to Kathmandu and tweeting you are on your way to the top of Mt Everest.

Claiming to be on the path to resolving the world’s food crisis by putting food on the plate of the already well-fed is similarly laughable.

Free speech at the outer limits

On January 12, Peter W. Wood, president of an American organisation called the National Association of Scholars (NAS), wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal against attempts by one individual to prevent NAS from organising a conference on science’s reproducibility crisis.

As it turns out, the individual – Leonid Teytelman – has been fighting to highlight the fact that the conference is an attempt to use “the issue of scientific reproducibility as a Trojan horse to undermine trust in climate change research” (source), and that Wood’s claim to “hold to a rigorous standard of open-mindedness on controversial issues” extends only so far as upholding his own views, using the rest of his diatribe on the WSJ to slap down Teytelman’s contentions as an unfortunate byproduct of “cancel culture”.

We’ve all heard of this trope and those of us on Twitter are likely to have been part of one at some point in our lives. The reason I bring this up now is that Wood’s argument and WSJ’s willingness to offer itself as a platform together recall an important but largely unacknowledged reason tropes like this one continue to play out in public debates.

A friend recently expressed the same problem in a different conversation – that of India’s Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964. These rules discourage government employees from commenting on government policies, schemes, etc. to the press without their supervisors’ okay or participating in political activities, and those who disobey them could be suspended from duty. However, public opposition to India’s new Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, has been so pronounced that there appears to be renewed public acknowledgment of the idea that the right to protest is a fundamental right, even if the Constitution doesn’t explicitly encode it as such.

So after the government sought to use the CCS Rules to prevent its staff from participating in protests against itself, the Tripura high court ruled that simply showing up at protests doesn’t constitute a ‘political activity’ nor does it cede sufficient ground for suspension, dismissal, arrest, etc. This was obviously heartening news – but there was a catch.

As my friend, who is also a government employee, said, “Civil servants becoming openly political is harmful for the country. Then one doesn’t even have to maintain a façade of neutrality, and the government can’t run if it is busy quelling open rebellion in offices.” That is, to maintain a democracy, its outermost borders must be organised in a non-democratic system – a loose, but not unrecognisable, analogue of the argument that free speech and the slice of freedom it stands for cannot be absolute.

To quote from Laurie Penny’s timeless essay published in 2018, “Civility” – and its logics – “will never defeat fascism” or, presumably, its precursors. Freedom has borders and they are arbitrary by design, erected to keep some actors out even if those on the inside may agitate for unlimited freedom for everyone, and aspire to change their opponents’ minds through reason and civil conduct alone. The borders prevent harm to others and keep people from instigating violence – as the first amendment to the Indian Constitution, under Article 19(2), reminds us – and they just as well entitle us to refuse to debate those who won’t play by the same rules we do.

The liberal democrat’s conceit in this regard is two-pronged: first, that all issues can be resolved through reason (not limited to or necessarily including science), debate and civil conduct alone; second (this one more of a self-imposed penance), that one is obligated to engage in debate, and more generally that to disengage – from debate or from public life – is to abdicate one’s duties as a citizen. So the option to refuse to engage in debate might offend the liberal democrat’s commitment to free speech – for herself as well as others – but this ignores the fact that free speech itself can be productive or liberating only within the borders of democracy and not beyond its outer limits, where the fascists lurk.

And unless we imbibe these limitations and accept the need to disengage or boycott when necessary, we will remain trapped in our ever-expanding but never-breaking circular arguments and argumentative circles.

In the present case, Teytelman tried to expose the NAS as a threat to public trust in climate science but failed, thanks in large part to the WSJ’s ill-founded decision to offer itself as a broadcast channel for Wood’s tantrum. Perhaps Teytelman has more fight left in him, perhaps others do too, but the time will come when the appeals to reason alone will have to cease, and more direct and pragmatic means, equipped especially to disrupt the theatre of fascistic behaviour – part of which is the conflation of ignorance and knowledge and often manifests in the press as ‘he said, she said’ – will have to assume centerstage. (I.e. The WSJ can’t solve the problem by next inviting Teytelman to write a one-sided piece.)

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop is a more pertinent example. Goop trades in specious ‘alternatives’ to treat made-up diseases. But in spite of what one professor of law and public health acknowledged to be “immediate and widespread … backlash by health-care professionals and science-advocates”, and what many science journalists celebrated as inspirational examples of good communication, the company is set to launch its own Netflix show (more of an infomercial) on January 24. Note that as of December 2019, Netflix had 158 million paying subscribers.

It’s time to stop playing nice, and to stop playing this as individuals. Instead, science communicators – especially those committed to beating back the tentacular arms of pseudoscience and organised disempowerment (à la organised religion) – should respond as a community. While one group continues to participate in debates if only to pull some of the more undecided people away from ‘evil in the guise of good’, another must demand that the video-streaming platform cancel its deal with Goop.

(We could also organise a large-scale boycott of Goop’s products and services but none of the buyers and sellers here seem to want to change their minds.)

Responding this way is of course much harder than simply calling for violence, and quite painful to acknowledge the grossly disproportionate amount of effort we need to dedicate relative to the amount of time Paltrow probably spent coming up with Goop’s products. And in the end, we may still not succeed, not to mention invite similar protests from members of the opposite faction to our doorsteps – but I believe this is the only way we can ever succeed at all, against Goop, NAS and anything else.

But most of all, to continue to engage in debates alone at this time would be as responsible a thing to do as playing fiddle while the world burns.