Neoliberalism Has Conned Us Into Fighting Climate Change As Individuals

The Guardian - Martin Lukacs

Stop obsessing with how personally green you live – and start collectively taking on corporate power

Wimbledon, London, UK. 27th April, 2015. A waste management company named Dirty Harry uses a poster of Lord Kitchener to urge the public to recycle. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Alamy

Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.
The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.
Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.
And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.
These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breath. But we could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71 percent. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.
Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare.
Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.
At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.
Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no such thing as society.”
Studies show that people who have grown up under this era have indeed become more individualistic and consumerist. Steeped in a culture telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens, as self-reliant instead of interdependent, is it any wonder we deal with a systemic issue by turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts? We are all Thatcher’s children.
Even before the advent of neoliberalism, the capitalist economy had thrived on people believing that being afflicted by the structural problems of an exploitative system – poverty, joblessness, poor health, lack of fulfillment – was in fact a personal deficiency.
Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and shame if you can’t secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse.
Of course we need people reducing consumption and innovating low-carbon alternatives – building sustainable farms, inventing battery storages, spreading zero-waste methods. But individual choices will most count when the economic system can provide viable, environmental options for everyone—not just an affluent or intrepid few.
If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won’t opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power and politics.
Eco-consumerism may be able to expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.
The good news is that the impulse of humans to come together is inextinguishable – and the collective imagination is already making a political come-back. The climate justice movement is blocking pipelines, forcing the divestment of trillions of dollars, and winning support for 100% clean energy economies in cities and states across the world. New ties are being drawn to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous rights, and fights for better wages. On the heels of such movements, political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.
None more so than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifesto spelled out a redistributive project to address climate change: by publicly retooling the economy, and insisting that corporate oligarchs no longer run amok. The notion that the rich should pay their fair share to fund this transformation was considered laughable by the political and media class. Millions disagreed. Society, long said to be departed, is now back with a vengeance.
So grow some carrots and jump on a bike: it will make you happier and healthier. But it is time to stop obsessing with how personally green we live – and start collectively taking on corporate power.

Links

• Need climate hope? Imagine the promise of green left-wing victories in Canada
• Trump presidency 'opens door' to planet-hacking geoengineer experiments
• Surrendering to fear brought us climate change denial and President Trump
• Matt Canavan on Q&A: exporting Adani coal does not affect Australia's emissions

Backlash Against Doomsday Article That Predicts A Climate Change Induced Apocalypse

NEWS.com.au - Benedict Brook

HUMANS boiled alive and “death smogs” are predicted for Earth. Some scientists are scathing, others say it’s spot on.

“Perpetual war” is predicted in the controversial article. Source: Supplied

 AUSTRALIAN scientists have said a hugely controversial article that predicts a climate change driven apocalypse is “scary” and “embellished” but entirely plausible despite the extreme scenario dividing climatologists worldwide.
David Wallace-Wells’ startling — and unashamedly doom ridden — essay in New York magazine, entitled ‘ The Uninhabitable Earth ’, has ruffled feathers.
“I promise, it is worse than you think,” he says in the opening line of the article published last week.
Even if Australians manage to survive major cities being in “permanent extreme drought” or poisonous sea “burps” it’s likely we’ll be finished off by “rolling death smogs” or “perpetual war” instead, the article states.
Doomsday could occur by the end of the century.
Mr Wallace-Wells’ piece has been heavily criticised. But not by the climate sceptics — it’s climate scientists who are up in arms, claiming it is “irresponsible” and “alarmist”.
Respected climatologist Michael E Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, has said the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence … [and this] article fails to produce it.”
Richard Betts, from the UK’s University of Exeter told website Climate Feedback,
the Earth becoming uninhabitable within the timescale suggested was “pure hyperbole.”

IMAGE

But Australian climate scientists news.com.au spoke to said while some of the descriptions of the future earth were fanciful (one called them “dramatised”), fanciful didn’t mean they were false.
“It’s absolutely true these things could happen,” said Dr Liz Hanna, President of the Climate and Health Alliance and a researcher into the health impacts of climate change at the Australian National University (ANU).
“It’s alarming but not alarmist.”
Professor Will Steffen of the Climate Council of Australia said the predictions were not from “ultra greenies” but were a sober assessment of the societal collapse extreme climate change could bring.

The cover of New York magazine issue which contained ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ article. Source: Supplied

The most dire predictions
In his essay, Mr Wallace-Wells says the effects of global warming were already happening.
The Global Seed Vault, surrounded by supposedly permanent ice, has flooded. On Wednesday, a trillion-ton block of ice twice the size of the Australian Capital Territory sheared off from the Antarctic ice sheet. The last three years have been the hottest on record globally.
The articles he said, “was not a series of predictions of what will happen. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action.”

How the size of the sheared Larsen C iceberg compares to Australian states and cities. Picture: Supplied

The outlook was dire. “No plausible program of emissions reductions can prevent climate disaster.
“Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century.”
He writes that the Earth had a mass extinction 250 million years ago when the planet warmed by five degrees triggering the release of methane encased in Arctic ice.
“This ended up with 97 per cent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a faster rate”.
That same melting ice could also release dormant deadly diseases frozen in time, such as smallpox and the plague.

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Humans cooked from inside out
The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which the USA has withdrawn from, has an aim of holding the increase in global temperatures to “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels. Many climate scientists think this goal is already unachievable.
Mr Wallace-Wells said if global temperatures rose by around 4C, hot and humid equatorial regions would be unliveable.
“Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.”
Oceanic acidification could kill off fish creating “dead zones’ and poisonous hydrogen “sulphide burps” might bubble up from the sea floor.
In a 4C warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem — Australia included — will boil with a constant swarm of tornadoes, floods and droughts, “that not so long ago destroyed whole civilisations.”

A map showing sea level rise risk in Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. Source: Supplied

It’s depressing stuff and, in a Facebook post, Penn State’s Prof Mann, hit back claiming some of the data used was “just not true”.
“The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”
Prof Mann added, he “was not a fan of this sort of doomist framing,” which spread “a sense of doom and hopelessness”.
Mr Wallace-Wells has said his critics who paint the article as being just a worst-case scenario miss the point. “[That] is a factual description of the story and its explicit goals”, he said on Twitter.

Bye Miami, it’s been real. Picture: Istock Source: istock

Ultra greenies
Mr Steffen, an ANU emeritus professor, told news.com.au there were issues with the piece but it still painted a realistic picture.
“[The article] was dramatised and somewhat embellished but it did raise an important issue and that’s if you look at this one per cent to five per cent risk you get pretty scary and plausible scenarios.”
Despite the low probability of the various horrors coming true, we ignored them at our peril, he said.
“A one per cent risk to aviation industry would mean maybe ten planes crashing a day and that’s not a risk we would tolerate.”
Current projections suggested these far-fetched outcomes were becoming, if anything, more likely.
“These are not wild risks being put forward by ultra greenies — they are sober risks understood by people in the Pentagon and Australian military,” Prof Steffen told news.com.au. “It’s not far fetched if the Pentagon are looking at it.”

Wars where climate has played a role, such in Syria, could become the norm. Picture: AFP Source: AFP

Society could collapse
“When people can’t eat they fight, move or do both but they don’t just sit there and starve.
“It’s not at all too big a stretch to say society could collapse.
“By the end of the century the population could drop from seven billion to one billion because what you’re facing is a changing rainfall regimen that will wreak havoc with global food systems and see sea level rises which could inundate industrial areas,” he said.
Dr Hanna agreed the bleak future prophesied was more plausible.
“Could parts of the world become uninhabitable? A definite yes.
“Darwin is already problematic in the build-up and could become problematic for everyone aside from extremophile for much of the year.”

Darwin could become uninhabitable. Source: News Corp Australia

The “permanent extreme drought” predicted to afflict densely populated parts of Australia might not come to pass, she said, but devastatingly deep and longer lasting droughts certainly could.
There were brighter spots, she said, including the rise of renewables, despite them becoming a political punch bag,
Even Mr Wallace-Wells has hope pointing to the success in gradually depleting the hole in the ozone layer.
Dr Hanna says she has little time for the argument that such apocalyptic descriptions should be kept from the public.
“Some say that people will be paralysed by fear, ‘what can li’l old me do about it?’
“But if we tell people how grizzly it could become, it might not lead to paralysis — it could jolt them into action,” she said.
“By the time people go ‘shit we’re in real trouble now,’ it could be too late.”

Links

• The Uninhabitable Earth
• Stephen Hawking says Trump ‘could push Earth over the brink’
• Trump’s stance on climate change is ‘sociopathic', top economist says
• Nearly 700 'natural thermometers' prove global warming is real
• Trump is 'blocking' a G20 agreement because it includes climate change
• Is climate change real, and is the world actually getting warmer?

More Than Half Of Federal Liberal MPs 'Don't Trust' Climate Science: Think Tank

AFR - Aaron Patrick

Former prime minister John Howard said at a US Studies Centre forum last Thursday that he is becoming more sceptical about climate change. Daniel Munoz

The majority of federal Liberal MPs are not convinced the science behind climate change is settled and support reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases for political reasons, according to an prominent conservative think tank.
John Roskam, the executive director of the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs, said he hadn't conducted a formal count but found most Liberal politicians shared his doubts about what many experts say is the greatest global threat to mankind.
"More than 50 per cent are solid sceptics and more than 50 per cent feel they need to be seen to do something," he said in an interview. "The science is not settled."
The overwhelming majority of climate change scientists accept the atmosphere is warming and humans are responsible. The burning of fossil fuels contributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from 280 parts per million before 1800 to 396 parts per million in 2013, according to the Australian Academy of Science.

Not convinced
But many right-wing politicians, commentators and voters aren't convinced the scientists are correct, or suspect the consequences of global warming are being exaggerated for ideological or economic reasons. Some Liberals unenthusiastically support climate change policies in the hope scientific opinion will shift in future years, Mr Roskam said.
The most senior Liberal expressing doubt is former prime minister John Howard, who remains an influential figure in conservative circles.
"I have become increasingly more of a sceptic on climate change," Mr Howard told a forum organised by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney last Thursday. "I was never a paid-up enthusiast."
Liberal MPs' doubts about climate change science explain why many are reluctant to favour renewable energy over coal, which is cheap and abundant in Australia.

A protest over climate change, which experts say is the greatest global threat to mankind, drew thousands of people on to the streets of Melbourne in 2015. Eddie Jim

Their scepticism is making it harder for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's government to produce an energy policy that can get passed by the Senate.

'Climate theology'
The Coalition backbench is "deeply sceptical about climate theology," the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Peta Credlin, wrote in the Daily Telegraph last week.
"Make no mistake, even his strongest supporters in Cabinet understand that climate change remains Malcolm Turnbull's kryptonite," Ms Credlin wrote.

Institute of Public Affairs executive director John Roskam, left, next to now-Melbourne MP Tim Wilson in 2016. Supplied

A failure of its energy policy would be a huge political blow to Mr Turnbull, who lost the Liberal Party leadership in 2009 because of his support for a carbon trading system.
Tim Wilson, a Liberal backbencher from Melbourne, said it was silly to ask if he believed in climate change science, which has found that each of the most recent three decades has been warmer than all preceding decades since 1850.
"Science is not something you 'believe' in," he said in an email. "It isn't a belief structure. That's religion. I accept the scientific evidence of anthropogenic contributions to a changing climate."

Overstated
Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg, who has said he accepts human activity is making the atmosphere warmer, declined to comment.
One senior Liberal Party official, who is not a climate sceptic, said Mr Roskam's 50 per cent estimate was probably too high. He put the true figure at 25 per cent, and said the sceptics were mostly Liberals from suburban, regional and country electorates.
Mr Roskam said 90 per cent of Nationals MPs were probably sceptics too. A spokesman for Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce didn't respond to a request for comment.
Some of Mr Turnbull's conservative critics cite his belief in global warming as evidence he is too left-wing for the Liberal Party.
"[I had] a long discussion I had with Turnbull on climate policy many years ago in which he dismissed my view that human activity had not caused global warming and refused to examine several highly questionable aspects of the dangerous warming thesis," Melbourne conservative Des Moore wrote in an email newsletter three weeks ago.

Internal split
The split within the Liberal Party is illustrated by its own think tank, the Menzies Research Centre. Executive director Nick Cater is a climate sceptic and vociferous critic of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body established to provide an objective assessment of global warming.
"The IPCC is a serial embellisher," Mr Cater wrote in The Spectator in 2015. "It never passes by a chance to inflate, embroider or lay it on thick.
"In such a climate of uncertainty, scepticism is the only rational response."
The think tank got a new chairman last month, businessman Kevin McCann. As a chairman of Origin Energy he backed the introduction of a carbon pollution reduction system under the Rudd Labor government, a push that failed.
"We support the policy decision that an emissions trading scheme is to be at the heart of the Government's plans and that a trading scheme is the best mechanism to move to a low-carbon future," Mr McCann said in 2008.
Asked for the think tank's current position on climate change, Mr Cater replied in an email: "Should we have one?"

Links

• Are human activities causing climate change?
• How has climate changed?
• Why energy reform has to be delivered by the Coalition
• Power deal moves in right direction 
• Those who don't support coal 'are delusional'

A Mysterious Underwater Forest Warns Of Earth’s Rapidly Changing Climate

Washington Post - Peter Holley

Divers inspect the remnants of an ancient forest off the coast of Alabama that scientists believe was killed by rising waters during an Ice Age. (Photo courtesy of Ben Raines)

The discovery began with a rumor about a fishing “honey hole” somewhere off the Alabama coast where the red snapper was plentiful.
By the time Ben Raines — an environmental reporter for the Mobile Press Register — heard about the location, the rumor had evolved.
Apparently, a local dive shop owner told him, the fish were congregating around an underwater forest peeking out of the sediment 60 feet below the surface.
Raines spent months persuading the man to take him to the secret location 10 miles offshore, an effort that paid off in 2011 as soon as Raines got his first glimpse of the forest.
“It was like entering a fairy world,” he told The Washington Post. “You get down there, and there are these cypress trees, and there are logs lying on the bottom, and you can touch them and peel the bark off.”
“It was an otherworldly experience where you knew you were in this ancient place,” he added.
How ancient exactly? That was the question Raines and researchers from Louisiana State University and the University of Southern Mississippi were determined to answer when they began dating chunks of wood at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using radiocarbon dating.
The expectation, researchers said, was that the trees would end up being around 10,000 years old. Nobody expected to find out that the trees were about five times that age, Kristine DeLong, a paleoclimatologist at Louisiana State University, told The Post.
Suddenly, DeLong said, researchers realized they had stumbled upon something extraordinary. The site was not merely a forest, but a prehistoric time capsule of the coastline and its climate during a 1,000-year period, when sea levels were much lower and much of the continent was hidden beneath a one-mile thick sheet of ice.
In terms of the bald cypress forest's age, experts say there is nothing else like it in the world.
“That 10,000- to 12,000-year time frame is one that scientists do a lot of research on,” DeLong said. “But there's just not a lot of records from 50,000 years ago because the ice sheets either covered it up or sea level has changed so dramatically that those sites are underwater now. That's one of the reasons that we're so excited about this site.”

This image shows the Gulf shoreline during an ice age 60,000 years ago. You can see the ancient shoreline, the modern shoreline, and the spot where the forest was found. Maps courtesy of Deep Time Maps.

The quest to reveal the forest's scientific secrets is captured in a newly released documentary directed by Raines and produced by the multimedia group This is Alabama and the Alabama Coastal Foundation. Raines and his team filmed the forest during dozens of visits to the site in recent years.
The forest, which stretches the equivalent of multiple city blocks, is located in the Gulf of Mexico, but was miles inland from the ancient shoreline. That estimate is partially based on pollen analysis and the fact that cypress trees cannot tolerate exposure to saltwater.
Researchers believe the area was a valley about 50,000 years ago that had rivers running through it, wildlife and swamps.
Scientists believe the forest may have remained hidden were it not for Hurricane Ivan, which caused billions of dollars in damage after it slammed into the Alabama and Florida coast in 2004. The storm produced massive waves that may have scooped out about 10 feet of sediment covering the forest.
Before it was revealed, likely by a hurricane, the forest had to be preserved, which required a number of circumstances.
When the forest was alive, it may have been part of a swamp in which the sediment had low levels of oxygen. Without oxygen, bacteria are slower to decompose organic material. If the forest was buried quickly in a flood, for example, the trees may have been preserved before they had a chance to rot.
“These trees were basically entombed or hermetically sealed,” Raines said. “They have nine feet of sediment over them, and oxygen is locked out. It's similar to peat bogs in Ireland, where scientists have found human bodies that were preserved by the unique environmental conditions.”
“This is the same phenomenon, but with trees,” he added.
When the chunks of the trees are removed from the ocean, researchers noted, ancient sap — still sticky and fragrant — oozes from the wood.
Grant Harley, a dendrochronologist who has analyzed wood collected from the site, told AL.com that he was amazed by the quality of the samples.
“When we ran those samples through the band saw, you could smell the resin just like you were cutting into a fresh piece of wood today. Same thing with when we sanded them down. They smelled fresh. Very well preserved,” Harley said. “Given the fact that these samples are thousands of years old, I was astonished.”

Removed from the water and split open, the 50,000-year-old wood is remarkably well preserved. (Photo courtesy of Ben Raines)

Researchers said one of the most interesting secrets revealed by the forest came not from the trees, but from pollen found in sediment core samples surrounding the trees. Analysis of the pollen reveals that it more closely resembles a coastal forest in modern-day North Carolina and Virginia, where the winter climate is much colder.
“The top meter of that core is just sand, like you sink your feet into the beach,” Andy Reese, a pollenologist at the University of Southern Mississippi, told AL.com. “Then, the next meter is sand and marine clay. Then, all of a sudden, it transitions to peat. That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in an oceanic core like that, just perfectly preserved peat, that runs a half a meter down.”
Peat, as AL.com noted, is a type of organic matter that is found at the bottom of swamps and bogs.
Analysis of the sediment cores shows tree pollens switching to various grass pollens as water levels rise and shoreline creeps inland, killing trees in the process. The cores have given researchers a window into ancient climate change during a period in which they suspect sea levels may have been rising as quickly as eight feet every 100 years.
In some ways, the forest is a preview that helps scientists understand what they can expect as the planet warms once again.
“It’s pretty rapid change geologically speaking,” Martin Becker, a paleontologist from New Jersey's William Paterson University who has visited the site, told AL.com. “We’re looking at 60 feet of seawater where a forest used to be … I’m looking at a lot of development, of people’s shore homes and condominiums, etc., you know. The forest is predicting the future, and maybe a pretty unpleasant one.”

The Underwater Forest, a new documentary by Ben Raines produced by This is Alabama, details the discovery and exploration of an ancient cypress forest found sixty feet underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, due south of Gulf Shores, Alabama. The forest dates to an ice age more than 60,000 years ago, when sea levels were about 400 feet lower than they are today.

Links

• Mapping the Ancient Bald Cypress Forest off the Alabama Coast
• Alabama's 60,000-year-old underwater forest spills its secrets in new documentary
• Polar bears hurt by climate change are more likely to turn to a new food source — humans

How to Plant a Tree in the Desert

New Yorker - Russell Shorto

A Dutch engineer has developed a cheap and easy way to restore vegetation to barren landscapes, and a for-profit business to go with it. Courtesy Land Life

President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord was perplexing to Europeans for many reasons, not least of which was their determination that climate change represents a for-profit opportunity. In particular, the Dutch, who more or less invented water management in Europe, a millennium or so ago, have developed a specialty in climate-change-related innovation.

Four years ago, Jurriaan Ruys was a partner at McKinsey, focussing on global sustainability issues. The Dutchman had been an environmentalist since the age of eight, when he went door to door handing out stickers to save the sea turtles, but he became frustrated by the abstract nature of his work—flying around the world, advising governments on long-term climate strategy. Eventually, he up and quit. Ruys had trained as an engineer, and he was convinced that the current moment, thanks in part to instantaneous communication, was one in which grassroots solutions to yawning environmental problems could yield results. He decided to focus on desertification, which is both a symptom and an intensifier of climate change. It’s also one of the most multilayered problems on Earth, the results of which lead to human misery, political strife, and war. For the next year, Ruys hunkered down in a storage space, tinkering furiously, making frequent trips to the local hardware store.

The result of this freelance engineering is a low-tech invention that is succeeding beyond Ruys’s expectations. Three years after he emerged with his prototype, his invention has been adopted in Mexico, Cameroon, Malawi, Peru, Chile, Spain, Italy, Greece, Israel, China, Dubai, and the U.S. The company he formed, Land Life, with Eduard Zanen, an entrepreneur, has twenty employees who are working with the U.N., the World Wildlife Fund, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the U.S. National Park Service, and in remote villages and refugee camps. José Luis Rubio, the vice chair of the European Soil Bureau Network, called Ruys’s invention “remarkable” in its results and told me that it represents “an innovative method” to restoring vegetation to barren landscapes.

Jurriaan Ruys’s invention, which can be buried underground, contains a sapling, water, and beneficial fungi. Courtesy Land Life

So what did Ruys invent? One way to restore degraded soil is to plant trees—lots of them. The catch is that seeds and saplings won’t grow in such soil, but if a young tree becomes large enough that its roots can reach groundwater it stands an excellent chance of thriving. Previous efforts often followed two paths: cumbersome and impractical irrigation techniques, or tossing a few million seeds out of an airplane and hoping for the best. Ruys’s innovation was to develop a doughnut-shaped waxed-paper cocoon, the base of which is buried underground. It contains the sapling, enough water to sustain the tree while it establishes a root system, and a small lozenge of beneficial fungi. The cocoon is cheap, easy to plant, scalable—a community can plant hundreds of acres of them in a short time—and biodegradable. Rubio told me that in the desert regions of Spain where his organization is working, other efforts have resulted in a success rate of ten to twenty per cent; “the cocoon,” he said, “is providing around ninety-five per cent survival rate of trees.”

In its three years of existence, Ruys’s company has planted a quarter of a million trees in twenty countries. Its current projects include reforestation in China, renewing mesquite forests that have been harvested for charcoal and reëstablishing the trees in which monarch butterflies nest in Mexico, planting forty thousand trees for shade and wood fuel at a refugee camp in Cameroon, and restoring ecosystems in Italy, Spain, and Greece.

Maybe more interesting than Ruys’s invention is the way he has worked himself into and around the bureaucratic complexities of the issue. The cheapness of the product and the ease of planting helped him to leapfrog over old-school N.G.O.s and establish direct relationships with villages. Olaf Tchongrack, an administrator with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told me that his people in the field were impressed precisely because of the cocoon’s simplicity: “It’s actually an ancient technique. What’s innovative is they’ve found a way to industrialize it and keep costs low.” Its success has gotten the attention of governments, the U.N., and private investors. At the moment, the company isn’t able to fill, or even respond to, all the requests it is getting for the cocoons.

The cocoon is a bit deceptive in its seeming simplicity: a good deal of high-tech thinking went into it. “Everyone likes biodegradable,” Ruys said, “but it’s actually a tricky concept. You want a thing to work over a period of time, then completely disappear. It’s hard to do, which is why, as consumers, we still buy plastic.” Ruys solved the problem with a particular kind of wax coating that dissolves at the right time. He also spent a lot of time developing a wick that would precisely feed water to the plant.

His company’s approach is similarly deceptive in its apparent simplicity. As a former McKinsey partner, he is used to thinking at a macro level, and his true goal, he told me, is nothing less than “to professionalize nature restoration.” Where agribusiness is highly professional, nature restoration, he said, remains “a charity.” He wants this to change. “Agriculture has developed satellite technology, G.P.S. locationing, remote sensors. We want to bring all of that to bear,” he said. Land Life is working on an app that uses Google Earth and other existing technologies to allow for real-time monitoring of every one of the trees it is planting.

Ruys and his partner insisted from the start that Land Life should be a for-profit company. As of this year, it is breaking even on revenue of approximately 2.5 million euros, with clients ranging from N.G.O.s to private companies to an Israeli businessman who has paid Land Life to plant trees on both sides of the Israel-Palestine border. Ruys is part of a generation of Europeans who believe that tackling climate change has to be commercialized if it is to succeed. And, as dire as the ecological threats are, he finds the nature-restoration field to be wide open. The big aid agencies, he said, are receptive to new ideas in ways they never were before, and so are communities in need of reforestation. “I see this as a very doable technological challenge,” he said. “And I see a generation that sees it as a no-brainer, that is ready to buy a product called ‘fix this planet.’ ”

Links

• India Plants 66 Million Trees In 12 Hours In Record-Breaking Bid To Meet Paris Agreement Promise
• India plants millions of trees after reaffirming Paris agreement pledge
• Trees company: Indian state plants 66.3mn saplings in 12hrs (VIDEO)
• India has planted nearly 66 million trees in 12 hours
• 10 Things You Can Do About Climate Change
• The ambitious plan to plant nearly 100,000 trees a day with drones
• A warming Melbourne may need to consider a Sydney tree-change
• Tree planting critical in war against climate change
• Indigenous Knowledge Helps Scientists To Assess Climate Change
• Nature a Powerful Force to Fight Climate Change

Why a Warming Arctic May Be Causing Colder U.S. Winters

National Geographic - Sarah Gibbens

A new study shows how a warming Arctic could negatively impact regions thousands of miles away.

A piece of ice breaks from Juneau's Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska. Photograph by Pete McBride, National Geographic Creative

When a U.S. Republican senator threw a snowball onto the Senate floor in late February of 2015, he used it to underscore his belief that human-made climate change was an alarmist conclusion. The snowball had been rolled from the Capitol grounds in Washington D.C., which, at the time, was experiencing an uncharacteristically cold winter.
If global warming was real, he posited, how could the nation's capital experience such severe cold?
Uncharacteristically cold winters, however, just might be one of the most hard felt effects of climate change, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience by a team of researchers.
The study found that unusually cold temperatures in northern North America and lower precipitation in the south central U.S. all coincided with periods of warmer Arctic weather.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed how teleconnections in the Arctic cause cooler winters in North America. Teleconnections are largescale weather anomalies that influence weather across continents and span large portions of the atmosphere. The most commonly watched teleconnection weather patterns are El Ninos/as, but teleconnections are observed around the globe.


El Niño is a series of complex weather patterns that occurs every two to seven years. It causes drastic changes in weather that can lead to billions of dollars in damages, high death tolls, and disease. Find out what causes El Niño, how it can affect you, and why it is so hard to predict it.

Anna Michalak, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, was involved in creating an ensemble of models used to support the study's findings. She explained that the massive system of climate models, called MsTMIP, creates a large dataset that allows researchers to study the changes in the Earth terrestrial biosphere.
In order to reach their conclusions, the study's authors looked at how the terrestrial biosphere (all the plants and soil on the Earth's surface) contributed to or pulled carbon from the atmosphere. They found that over the past three decades, plants pulled less carbon from the Earth's atmosphere during periods of warmer weather in the arctic.
"Even though we're talking about the Arctic, it has immediate impacts on what we experience at lower latitudes," said Michalak.

What Does It Mean?
Beyond a need for more scarves and gloves, colder winters could have serious implications for North American farms.
In an op-ed published in Nature alongside the study, noted climate scientist Ana Bastos wrote that the warming temperatures have the potential to weaken vegetation and shorten spring growing periods. The study looked at crop yields recorded by the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and found crop production declined by an average of one to four percent during warmer Arctic years. Some states, however, saw a decline of almost 20 percent.
Bastos cautioned that the link between a warmer Arctic and harsher U.S. winters was more complex than a simple cause and effect mechanism. Weather patterns can be notoriously unpredictable, and other factors such as soil health and farming practices can impact crop growth.
The study suggests that as warmer Arctic years become more frequent, crop productivity could be increasingly hard hit. All of this could lessen the impact of carbon sinks, a term that refers to how much carbon a terrestrial biosphere is capable of pulling from the atmosphere. With fewer plants available to absorb more carbon, Arctic warming could accelerate, further weakening the carbon sink, suggested the study.
"Whether the relationship found implies a decreasing carbon sink capacity of North American ecosystems in the coming decades is unclear," wrote Bastos. She cautioned a need to study how Arctic warming affects other regions in the Northern Hemisphere.
While the specific repercussions of warmer Arctic seasons and the severity at which those repercussions will be felt requires further research, the study effectively underscores the interconnectedness of Earth's atmosphere.
Speaking about how human influence changes weather patterns, Michalak added, "Winters could be harsher; flooding is more intense; droughts are more frequent... By emitting greenhouse gasses, we're not just warming temperatures, we're perturbing the Earth's entire system."

Links

• Extreme Research Shows How Arctic Ice Is Dwindling
• Our Antarctica Maps Show the Larsen Ice Shelf's Stunning Decades-Long Decline
• The Larsen C Ice Shelf Collapse Is Just the Beginning—Antarctica Is Melting
• Scientists Collect Ice Cores From Glaciers Before They Disappear

Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended All Life On Earth

The Atlantic - Peter Brannen

A road trip through the geological ruins of our planet's worst mass extinction.

Mike Hollingshead / Corbis / Getty

“Who you with?”

“I’m a science journalist,” I said, jolted from my reverie on the shoulder of I-68 in Maryland, where a crowd of geologists had gathered on a field trip to poke at some rocks revealed by the highway department’s dynamite. The rocks, slate gray and studded with pebbles from a punishing ice age, spoke to a mysterious global die-off at the end of the Devonian period, hundreds of millions of years ago.

“I’m researching a book on mass extinctions,” I said.
“Cool, I work on the end-Permian boundary in Wyoming.”
My ears perked up. He was talking about a line in the rocks that recorded the greatest catastrophe the Earth has endured in its entire history.
“I didn’t really realize there was a—”
“Let’s go out there. Want to go out next week?”
This was my introduction to Jonathan Knapp, a PhD candidate at West Virginia University. The surprisingly bold introductory exchange, I would later learn, was not atypical for Knapp, for whom there are no half measures. A week later I was in his passenger seat on a road trip across the country to Wyoming to see the worst thing that’s ever happened in person: the end-Permian mass extinction.

Imagine you took a random spin in a time machine and ended up in the Permian. Now imagine the time machine breaks down. You slam your fists on the dashboard and a digital red “251.9 MYA” dimly flickers and dies. The view out the cockpit window reveals red sand dunes and little else. From what you remember of your geology training you know that 252 million years ago is just about the worst thing you could possibly read on your display.
You kick the door open and—holy hell is it hot. You scarcely believe your breath. As you reach for the latch to slam it shut you’re startled by a thundering roar coming from the other side of the dunes. Curious, you step out into the primeval landscape. There’s no life, save a wilting weed here or there, where the dunes give way to barren soils, cracked and crusted with salt. The sandblasted husk of some odd creature sprawls across the wastes, its fangs bared.
A sole mayfly buzzes in and out of your sight—its presence in this desolate wilderness is comforting. Scrambling over the red sand, and gasping for air, you follow the distant roar. You notice that, though the sun is out, there’s a funereal gloom to the day. As you crest the dunes you see why. A strange ocean spreads out before you, hosting the largest waves you’ve ever seen. They’re eerily backlit and slosh a sickly purple and green. Through the haze, and over the roiling ocean, a sublime darkness organizes on the horizon.
You walk down to the shoreline and take a few steps into the lapping waters, drawn toward the enveloping gloom. The seawater is almost painfully hot. There’s nothing alive under the waves. There doesn’t seem to be anything alive anywhere really. You squint and marvel at the growing terror on the horizon. You’ve seen billowing thunderclouds before, but this panoramic tempest seems to tower into eternity. Wild hot winds begin to whip in all directions. You find it difficult to breathe. Slowly baking, you know should head back to the temporary safety of the ship, but you linger here all alone on the dimming coast, transfixed by the blossoming apocalypse just over the Earth’s curve. A putrid odor begins to ride in on the swirling winds and, as you finally turn back in a panic, you pass out. Before long, this doomsday storm makes landfall, and what meager life clings to this country is stamped out for millions of years.

This is one vision of what it might have been like to visit the world as it ended a quarter billion years ago during the end-Permian mass extinction—the worst moment in the planet’s entire history. The nightmare was sketched for me by the head of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, Lee Kump, whose “horror movie” speculation was that there might have turbocharged “hypercanes” of almost unbelievable intensity assaulting the supercontinent Pangaea—the result of runaway global warming. These mega-storms might have had 500-mph winds, filled with poisonous hydrogen sulfide sucked out of a rotting ocean that topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Admittedly, this is mostly Kump’s speculation, but we do know that something apocalyptic was unfolding then, when the Earth suffered a catastrophe that nearly sterilized the planet. Once magnificent coral reefs, built of strange Paleozoic creatures, and hosting a party of tentacles, trilobites and technicolor fish, were turned into piles of bacterial slime, as oxygen-starved and rapidly acidifying seas spread out onto the shelves, killing almost everything in the ocean. The planet’s forests all but disappeared for almost 10 million years. With Earth’s vegetation destroyed, rivers stopped meandering in narrow channels, instead spilling forth in wide, sloppily braiding torrents. Even insects suffered a mass extinction, their only such misfortune across all of natural history. Meanwhile an odd menagerie of misfit proto-mammalian offshoots—some rhinolike and lumbering, others lupine and athletic—seem to have been nearly wiped out. Fungus spread across the Earth.
The cause of all this misery—a growing consensus of paleontologists and geologists believe—was burning fossil fuels. Though acid rain and a ravaged ozone layer likely played a role as well, geochemical signals in the layers of ancient rock that capture the global die-off suggest a carbon dioxide-driven global warming catastrophe—one so profound it would dwarf even the extraterrestrial disaster that cut short the dinosaurs’ reign almost 200 million years later.
Near the top of the supercontinent Pangaea in what is now Siberia, a gigantic plume of magma—enough to cover the lower 48 states a kilometer deep—was burbling through one of the most coal-rich regions in the world and covering millions of square miles of Pangaean countryside in basalt lava. As the molten rock ponded underground, seeping sideways into the crust, it incinerated not only untold seams of coal laid down by ancient forests in the hundred million years before, but huge deposits of oil and natural gas as well. The ignited oil and gas exploded at the surface, leaving behind half-mile craters. The volcanoes injected as much as 40,000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. This unthinkable volcanism, and the greenhouse gases it liberated, account for the extreme global warming and ocean acidification seen in the rocks spanning the dreaded Permian-Triassic boundary. It’s even been called The Great Dying. Carbon dioxide, it seems, nearly killed the planet.

****

I was picked up at Midway Airport in Chicago in a forest-green Jeep Wrangler. Knapp, an oil geologist, had plastered a geological time scale to the center console, and the trunk was filled to the roof with rocks, camping equipment and two luxuriant, wool-lined, full-length farwa coats he had picked up in Saudi Arabia. The farwas, he said, would protect us from the brutal mid-continental Wyoming November cold.

If having a good conversation partner is the key to a successful road trip, Knapp should be inducted into the road-trip hall of fame. Not only has he accumulated an endless supply of good stories in his young but colorful life aboard oil rigs—from the Gulf of Mexico to North Dakota to Nigeria (“people would go up to the pipeline and make holes in it in and fill their Zodiac boats with crude oil”)—but he can illuminate the featureless stretches of middle America with the revelatory light of geology.

The unassuming, diffuse infrastructure of flyover land is, in fact, the country’s circulatory system.

Western Kansas is crushingly boring to drive across, but a little less so when you realize its flatness belies a former life at the bottom of the Cretaceous Interior Seaway, an inland ocean filled with 50-foot-long killer mosasaurs. Knapp can convincingly hold forth on virtually anything you point at—which is exactly what I did as we drove through the long, drawing board-flat monotony of the heartland.
“Natural gas compression station,” he said, as I pointed to an anonymous facility in the distance.

“Natural gas pipeline transfer station,” he said, when I indicated another.
And another.
“Unconventional well pad,” he said. “It probably goes down a mile and then goes over two miles.”
In the hubbub of a New York City or San Francisco one gets the intoxicating sense that the city streets and skyscrapers are where the business of the country is conducted—that that’s where the action is. But driving around the heartland with an oil geologist you realize these glitzy coastal diversions are a facade. The unassuming, diffuse infrastructure of flyover land is, in fact, the country’s circulatory system: unmarked metal boxes on the side of the highway, inscrutable pipes and polished valves behind fences at the edge of the prairie. This is the inconspicuous hardware that delivers the glowing screens and cheap meat of modernity.
The road trip reminded me that the coasts are separated by a sea, just as they were a hundred million of years ago, but this one is made of corn and soy rather than seawater. These amber waves of grain are fed by fertilizers synthesized from fossil fuels. The artificial bounty is then transformed into the millions of cows crowded on the vast, sweeping feedlots of western Kansas and eastern Colorado that we passed along a 150-mile stretch of road that smelled like shit, even with the windows rolled up. In some of these roadside tableaus the entire modern life cycle was in view, with oil pumpjacks bobbing up and down in the middle of the vast cattle multitudes, whose farts account for a more than a quarter of US methane emissions. Knapp noted that the road we were driving on was made of asphaltene, the heaviest component of crude oil. Food, livestock, electricity, pharmaceuticals, roads, plastics—it’s fossil fuels all the way down.
“ExxonMobil is a chemical company,” says Knapp. “That’s what we forget.”

Those who rail against the corporate sins of companies like Exxon tend not to appreciate the extent to which their existence, as well as the entire upside-down ecosystem of modernity, depends on it. And now that we have 7 billion people, most of whom sprang from this artificial surfeit of geological energy, it will be far harder to put that genie back in the bottle than most imagine. But the failure to do so will mean the end of the world as we know it. Knapp’s familiarity with burning hydrocarbons and coal wasn’t incidental to his study of the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history. It was the kill mechanism.
“Need petroleum?” Knapp asked me, offering chapstick.
No industry is more responsible for our knowledge of the ancient Earth than fossil fuel companies, which have funded much of the world’s geology research for over a century. It makes their calculated and coordinated misdirection on the topic of climate change all the more jarring. At a recent geology conference, sponsors like Hess and Exxon were prominently thanked for their generosity, while climate change activists and academics like Naomi Oreskes and James Hansen were invited to take center stage as honorees and keynote speakers. The energy industry is schizophrenic: at its best, staffed with brilliant geochemists who understand the carbon cycle better than anyone on Earth and, at its worst, recklessly following economic incentives into a civilization-threatening tailspin.

Knapp provided an insider’s perspective on the industry: he champions natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a zero-carbon economy (certainly a debatable strategy at this late stage in the world’s carbon budget crisis) and is the part-owner of a drill rig in Michigan, but insists that if we burn all our coal, an end-Permian catastrophe isn’t out of the question.
Near Lawrence, Kans., at the gateway to the prairie, Knapp swerved off the highway and pulled over next to an unremarkable road cut. He invited me to look closer. There were fossil seashells everywhere and, in some of the layers, ancient plant roots dug down into the fossilized muck. He pointed toward an oval knob sticking out of the ancient strata.
“Lungfish burrow,” he said. “This was normal. This was life. There was everything here. The world was happy.”
This was before the Permian.
After driving for three more hours into south-central Kansas on the border with Oklahoma, the prairie fell away and the landscape suddenly took on an alien aspect. Everything went rusty red, and the unending flatness gave way to ragged crimson hills and buttes. Shimmering seams of salt and gypsum crystals from dried up seas slumped out of the hillsides like shattered glass. There were no more shells, no more lungfish burrows, no fossils, nothing. It didn’t look like any version of Kansas I had ever pictured, or really much like any place I’d ever seen, for that matter. Once again Knapp swerved onto to the shoulder.
“Permian?” I asked.

Knapp nodded as he stepped out of the car and pulled a thicket of tumbleweed out of a gully. He invited me to crawl under a barbed-wire fence to take a closer look at the rocks. I grumbled that I wasn’t eager to be shot for trespassing.
“Trespassing is a vital skill for geologists,” he retorted.
These were the Gyp Hills near the border of Oklahoma in central Kansas. The unusually hilly terrain (for Kansas) is a product of the enormous Permian salt layers that had dissolved underground, giving the region its strange topography. Some of the hills had crosses on them (memorials for the Permian, I liked to imagine).
This was no country for Kansas farmland. Here the earth was literally salted, from dried-up Permian seas. Some of these dissolved Permian salt layers have formed caverns underground, which are used to store reservoirs of fossil fuel.
Earlier in the trip we’d dropped by the University of Kansas core lab in Lawrence, Kans., an Indiana Jones-style warehouse of ancient wonders: cylinders of rock drilled out from the far corners of the state. Knapp pulled out a famous core from the same rocks as those we’d seen in the Gyp Hills, a core that had been drilled a half-century ago by Amoco in search of oil. The rock alternated between Martian-looking dusty reds to huge sections of pure salt. In 2013 Knapp’s advisor at West Virginia, Kathleen Benison (then at the University of Kansas) found that lake water trapped in the salt reached literally otherworldly temperatures on the day that it was sealed away in these rocks, as high as 163.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

“These are the most extreme conditions in all of Earth’s history that we have a record of,” says Knapp. Even stranger, this was happening on an Earth that, not long before, had had ice on its poles. “It’s a different planet.”
Unsurprisingly, there’s no life in these ghastly rocks (even most plant life checks out at temperatures not much more than 40 degrees Celsius), making them exceedingly difficult to date.
“There’s absolutely nothing to date in any of these rocks because everything’s dead,” says Knapp. “But what we can say is that this is definitely Permian.”

“It should be a national priority to study the Permian to figure out what the hell happened.”

The rocks most likely predate the greatest mass extinction of all time, possibly by millions of years. They may be indicative of a world that was stumbling toward its date with Armageddon, its supercontinental configuration making life on Earth increasingly unpleasant. The period is punctuated with mysterious minor extinctions, like one that might have taken out sail-backed proto-mammals—creatures like science museum star Dimetrodon, whose bones are mostly known from neighboring Oklahoma and Texas. As the Permian planet limped to its finale plants and animals would continue to thrive elsewhere and, to the south, coral reefs in Texas would blossom as well, leaving behind the Guadalupe Mountains and a trillion of dollars of oil—but here in Kansas it was hell. Rocks similar to the Gyp Hills extend all the way to North Dakota, indicating that this wasn’t some quirk of local geography like Death Valley.
“This isn’t local,” says Knapp. “This is all of central Pangaea.”

Southern Methodist University geologist Neil Tabor has dubbed these vast lethal expanses that took over the middle of the planet in the Permian the “wastelands of tropical Pangea.”
To Knapp the Kansan rocks indicated that much of the world was already getting quite weird in the run-up to the greatest mass extinction ever. One speculation, borne out by modeling, is that supercontinents promote giant arid interiors that shut down the processes of rock weathering—the planet’s most effective way of drawing down excess carbon dioxide over geological time spans. As a result, the Permian planet might have been less effective at regulating its temperature.
“So what I like to talk about is ‘the Great Weirding’ and not just the Great Dying because the Great Dying seems to have been a relatively quick event at the very end. But if you just talk about the Great Dying you’re missing all of this other crazy stuff that led up to it,” he said. “The Earth was getting really weird in the Permian. So we’re getting these huge lakes with these negative pHs, which is really weird, we don’t know why that happened. Another thing is that the whole world turned red. Everything got red. You walk around today and you’re like, ‘Hey, there’s a red bed, I bet it’s Permian or Triassic.’ The planet started looking like Mars. So that’s really weird. We don’t know why it turned red. Then you have a supercontinent, which is weird in the first place. Plate tectonics has to be acting strangely when you have all the continents together. Eventually it rifts apart and we go back into normal plate tectonics mode, but during the Permian-Triassic everything’s jammed together. So there has to be something strange going on. And then at the end, the Earth opens up and there’s all these volcanoes. But we’re not talking about normal volcanoes, we’re talking about weird volcanoes.”

As we continued north on Route 287, over the Colorado-Wyoming border, the trappings of society fell away and the sun set again over the pale grasslands. Driving through Carbon County, Wyo., the unending darkness of the barren plains was pierced by a glittering Oz on the prairie. This was Sinclair, Wyo., (named after the oil company) and an enormous, illuminated refinery twinkled like a lonely Manhattan, ceaselessly digesting carbon from the ancient seafloor day and night.
“If we understood why things got so crazy in the Permian I would be a lot more comfortable,” Knapp said, breaking the silence. To some geologists, the extraordinary nature of the end-Permian catastrophe represents a level of environmental chaos so extreme that humanity could never hope to emulate it. But Knapp wasn’t so sure.
“I see [a few] possibilities. The first is that things just really got that crazy. Shit happened. The second is that we just really don’t understand positive feedback loops yet. That’s the scary option. The third is that you can’t do it without a supercontinent. We need to be studying these time periods when carbon dioxide caused problems, because right now we don’t understand them at all. It should be a national priority to study the Permian to figure out what the hell happened.”

****

The next morning we set out from Rawlins, Wyo., for the extinction boundary. But we couldn’t look at the prototypical rock section, first described in the 1960s.

“It’s on a ranch and they won't let you access it anymore,” Knapp said, eyes blearily searching the horizon, pulling from a cup of cheap coffee. “They say it's a liability thing but I think it's because they don't like geology and global warming and think the Earth's 6,000 years old. That's been the most challenging part of my work. I can't get access to any of the outcrops because they’re all on ranches.”

The end-Permian rocks of Wyoming can be seen from space, or (more easily) from Google Maps. They appear as strange little shocks of crimson peeking out from under the faded tans of the prairie. In the northeast corner of the state they fleck the periphery of Devil’s Tower. But there aren’t many people studying these rocks. When Knapp returns to the same outcrop in central Wyoming every few years he finds his rock hammer on the same rock he left it on.
We drove over a ridge that looked out over an empty basin and pulled off the road and into a small canyon of red rocks. At the top of the canyon the rocks gave up their Martian hue at long last, and were etched with the geological traces of tranquil lakes and river channels and even dinosaur footprints. Up in those rocks the Earth was finally recovering, and the reptiles of the Earth’s most storied age—the Mesozoic—were making their tentative claims to a world that they would come to rule for more than 100 million years. But down here along the dusty trail was the end of the Permian, and the planet was still fighting for its life. In the huge stacks of red rock Knapp saw an alternating hellscape of sheet floods and red desert soils, and even some piles of bacterial slime that festered in grotesque ephemeral lakes.

“One thing I don’t see anywhere here is roots,” he said. “At the top of that rock over there in the Triassic, we start to see tons of roots. It’s the same depositional environment as here. But here everything’s dead.”
Here, at the end of my pilgrimage, I picked off a rock from this end-Permian wall and turned it over in my hand. As this pebble was forged, 90% of life on Earth was going extinct, even at the poles. Faraway in northern Pangaea volcanoes burning through fossil fuels were ruining the planet for everyone, driving global warming and ocean chemistry changes that nearly rid the planet of complex life.

****

We still had one final sightseeing adventure in Wyoming, a four-hour detour. We were off to see an open-pit coal mine. And not just any open-pit coal mine, the largest surface coal mine in North America. Though there aren’t many landmarks to lead you through eastern Wyoming—save prairie grass—the colossal open-pit coal mines of the Powder River Basin are easy to find.

“We’ve just got to follow the train tracks,” Knapp said. We kept the tracks to our left and kept pace with a ceaseless parade of empty train cars rolling headlong toward the Powder River Basin to be refreshed with coal. The train tracks they glided along were immaculately well-maintained, and why shouldn’t they be? Their precious cargo was the lifeblood of civilization. The empty train cars were returning from the nodes of civilization, like spent red blood cells, to this giant, unyielding pump of geological energy in the prairie. The train cars heading out of the basin, freshly topped off with jet black mounds of fossil jungles from the Paleocene. They were shuttled along the infrastructural aorta before branching into capillaries where they’d deliver their carbon to far off power plants to be metabolized near cities, by metropolitan mitochondria. The trains pulled in and out of the Powder River Basin all day and all night, every day, every year without interruption.
Finally, after taking some wrong dirt roads and being rebuffed by surly coal mine security workers—and even scarier signs (“ORANGE CLOUD POSSIBLE AVOID CONTACT”)—we found an overlook into the manmade chasms. As you’ve probably heard about large industrial mining operations, encountering their inhuman scale in person is stupefying. It’s the biggest thing you’ve ever seen happen. The walls of these manmade canyons were shaded mostly in dull grays and browns, but hundreds of feet down at the very bottom was a 25-foot-tall stripe of pure black that wrapped around the entire pit. Here a tiny earthmover came face-to-face with the planet’s history and dug in. It pulled out forests from 60 million years ago, when atmospheric carbon dioxide was much higher and Wyoming was a lush swampy Eden haunted by crocodiles. The little toy trucks shuffled this trapped sunlight, stored in the earth, up the sides of the pit wall to be delivered to the far corners of the world and burned.
After visiting ancient fossil reefs and lifeless rock exposures, this might have been my best view of what was happening at the end of the Permian. As far as we can tell, we’re shooting carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere ten times faster than the ancient volcanoes of Russia did during the end-Permian mass extinction, an episode that almost ended the project of complex life on Earth. Our planet is once again at a crossroads, and the tangled path to redemption is still very much open. But we now find ourselves falling towards the first steps down an older, much darker road.
“What we’re doing is the equivalent of that supervolcano going through Siberia,” Knapp said, overlooking the pit. “By stripping out all of the coal from everywhere it exists on Earth and burning it. And we’re doing it really, really fast. So we have an analog in Earth’s history. And it’s fucking scary.”

****

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