Leap Month
A very mild winter commences the Year of the Dragon
There’s this article that’s been sticking with me for a while:
Not so good. Here’s an excerpt:
British firm Emissions Analytics spent three years studying tires. The group found that a single car's four tires collectively release 1 trillion “ultrafine” particles for every single kilometer (0.6 miles) driven. These particles, under 100 nanometers in size, are so tiny that they can pass directly through the lungs and into the blood. They can even cross the body's blood-brain barrier. The Imperial College London has also studied the issue, noting that “There is emerging evidence that tire wear particles and other particulate matter may contribute to a range of negative health impacts including heart, lung, developmental, reproductive, and cancer outcomes.”
1 trillion “ultrafine” particles for every single kilometer driven. You should read the whole thing. It’s rough. One of those stories that makes you remember how totalizing a machine we’re embedded in. (Note: the article says that the problem is potentially worse with electric vehicles due to higher weight and torque.)
This got me curious about natural tires, to the extent that they do exist. What I learned is there is a growing “eco-friendly” tire industry—and as with other green tech, I am skeptical. You read claims like “high percentage of recycled materials.” What exactly does that mean? How many “sustainable ingredients” are plastics to begin with, how many come from rare plants that only grow in Asia/Africa/South America, how many depend on vast monocultures? Judge for yourself:
Goodyear's contribution looks like it might be promisingly close to reality. At CES 2023, the company revealed a tire in which 90 percent of its components are materials that come from sustainable sources. Goodyear says there are 17 sustainable ingredients that include things like recycled polyester and plant-based components like soybean oil, rice husk waste, and "bio-renewable" pine tree resin. It also uses steel with "high recycled content" and "ISCC certified mass balance polymers from bio- and bio-circular feedstock."
As should be thematically clear in this newsletter, tech innovation absent massive downscaling (and redistribution) is generally unhelpful. Perhaps driving isn’t the answer. Degrowth, again, is essential.
In regional climate news… Northeasterners (and most Americans) are experiencing a historically mild winter, though I must say the few cool patches we’ve had have been refreshing, seasonable. But they seem especially scattered: anecdotally from me, this winter’s been as mild or milder than last year, that itself much milder than 2021–22. While several inches of snow sit on the ground in central Vermont, over in the Champlain Valley there is virtually none. Lake Champlain itself is pretty much devoid of ice aside from some weak stuff that I nonetheless recently felt compelled to test near the shore (I wouldn’t venture far). I imagine the lake was more or less doomed not to freeze by the extreme warmth in December. I recall ten years ago walking out a couple hundred feet on the lake to an old weather station; no more.
Last month was in fact the warmest January on record. And the picture gets more comprehensive. Antarctica was colder than average (sea ice was still way below average, but let’s take minor victories where we can). Global precipitation was the second-highest on record. I guess all that melting ice needs to go somewhere. Positively, perhaps, snowpack was high in much of the United States. Supposedly this includes the Appalachians but this seems dubious to me, in Vermont at least, and I can’t find the official comparisons to previous years.
On top of this, we are now looking at an extreme warming trend over late February–early March that—judging from predictions for next week—will almost surely break records. Is this it for winter?
AMOC collapse remains a risk… Last year, as Atlantic temperatures warmed to their highest on record, a study made the rounds warning that collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could happen as soon as 2025, with 95% confidence that it would happen by 2095. That study was simultaneously accused of being poorly done and downplayed in significance; I recall one outlet saying something to the effect of AMOC breakdown being “manageable.”
As with virtually all climate-related predictions (e.g., 1.5° C), that is an incredibly risky proposition, and a new study expands on the possible impacts of a maybe-coming AMOC collapse. The authors write that a collapse of AMOC—caused by a freshwater influx into the ocean from melting glacial ice and overflowing rivers—would dramatically affect global climate, leading to drastic and rapid sea level rise on the US East Coast (up to a meter, on top of what’s already baked in due to global warming), the extremely rapid cooling and drying of Europe, and dramatic changes to Asian monsoon and Amazon rainfall patterns:
Some of the projected impacts would be nearly impossible to adapt to, said Peter Ditlevsen, an ice and climate researcher with the University of Copenhagen Niels Bohr Institute and the author of a 2023 paper in Nature Communications that warned of a mid-century AMOC tipping point.
“A lot of discussion is, how should agriculture prepare for this,” he said. But a collapse of the heat-transporting circulation is a going-out-of-business scenario for European agriculture, he added. “You cannot adapt to this. There’s some studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.”
Sea level rise is not the only threat to coastlines… Melting glaciers and rising seas are intersecting, quite literally, with another environmental issue: land subsidence. This is a problem along much of the East Coast, with particular areas—Boston, New York, Baltimore, South Florida—especially vulnerable. A major cause of sinking land is groundwater depletion, which destabilizes soil, but this is compounded by other factors, like past engineering projects (e.g., the construction of much of Boston on reclaimed marshland).
Finally, briefly, on the political front… It has been beyond dismaying to follow virtually all national and international political trends as 2024 starts. First is the ongoing war in Gaza, which the United States enables daily with weapons deliveries, funding, and diplomatic cover. I hesitate to even call it a war, which implies some level of symmetry. It is a genocide, an absolutely horrific assault, unprecedented in the twenty-first century. It is shedding whatever bare minimum of rhetorical credibility this government might have had after the (first) Trump era in terms of standing for anything remotely resembling stated American ideals (liberty, human rights, democracy).
This is exactly what was supposed to have been invigorated, incidentally, by American involvement in the war in Ukraine. That war, for those who still pay attention, has also arrived at an awful, if predictable, place. Irrespective of the legitimacy of Russian war aims, the American approach to that war (which those of us who are American citizens to some degree participate in) has by all accounts made things much worse. The country is flooded with weapons, increasingly autocratic, environmentally devastated, a large chunk of its population refugees and the remainder surely embittered by the war, including a substantial population of disabled war veterans, with the number of amputees rivaling levels seen in World War I.
Now America has more or less forgotten about that war; to the extent the Biden administration publicly addresses it, it is via a proposal extraordinarily cynical even by the rotten standards of the contemporary Democratic Party, a half-attempt to make some sort of draconian deal with the far right that would basically end the right to seek asylum in the US in exchange for more weapons for Ukraine—a more aggressive border posture than Trump’s.
The link between the two conflicts, Israel and Ukraine, then, seems clear, no matter how much Biden’s goons contort themselves to defend it: maintenance of American hegemony. I’ve struggled to really understand why the US has taken such an absolutist position on Israel but I think the answer lies in there, in the absolute need for preservation not just of empire but of its illusions. American power, this country’s wealth, stem in large part not just from raw power but from these illusions, from the perception of invincible American power and control and the global hegemony that comes with that. The abiding concern of the American government, whether Biden’s or Trump’s, appears to be preservation of this power.
Of course, in attempting to maintain it, they squander it, and in the neoconservative-reminiscent effort to cynically portray itself as the great defender of democracy, the Biden administration has increasingly delegitimized and degraded the concept itself, which perhaps partly explains the disturbing fact that since the war in Ukraine began at least four European countries have elected far-right or far-right-enabled governments. And should the polls prove correct, the Biden Administration may end up doing the same thing here, too. Dialectics, folks.