369: I See a Darkness—The Climate Movement Expects Deep Overshoot
I came back from New York Climate Week energized. I loved seeing everyone. But many of the conversations I had profoundly scared me. We're staring into the abyss of deep overshoot, and it's staring back into us.What would it mean for us to make peace with a world that doesn't decarbonize fast enough? That doesn't scale carbon removal before tipping points are reached? That is forced into more radical geoengineering approaches that may just be one more layer of intervention that we will likely manage just as badly?This is an emotional show. It's about war. It's about the Holocaust. It's about what it means to fail, and to fail gracefully, and how imagining how you would feel if you lost everything can potentially offer an unexpected lightness.This Episode's SponsorsAbsolute Climate: the only standard that’s developed independent of registriesPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Peter Minor from Absolute ClimateListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLPBecome a sponsor by emailing carbon.removal.strategies[at]gmail.comUse this affiliate link to use Descript's transcripting and podcast editing serviceSign up for the 9Zero climate coworking space with my referral codeResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackThis episode title is a reference to Bonnie "Prince" Billy's excellent song, "I See a Darkness." I enjoy the slow version, but I adore the jauntier one's sense of irony, hope, and despair.The art is William Blake's work on Job.The riding the bomb scene from Dr. StrangeloveThucydides TrapDestined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison338: Carbon Security and the Geopolitics of Carbon Removal—w/ Sarah GodekThe Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping's China by Kevin Rudd (here's his correct name!)Guns and butter"Ukraine's Zelenskyy issues a stark warning about a global arms race and AI war", NPRCassandraJobEternal returnLiberum Veto330: Frostpunk 2: Climate Video Games and Humane Storytelling at 11 bit studios—w/ Maciej Sulecki of This War of Mine, Frostpunk 1 & 2Ken Krimstein's When I Grow UpBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy SnyderHasidic JudaismVilna GaonPartitions of PolandMolotov-Ribbentrop PactHolodomorThe RoadThe Bridge on the River Kwai"Life unworthy of life"The unfinished business of ghostsDante's Divine Comedy—both Cantos VI & XVI have this feel"In man's life his time is a mere instant, his existence a flux, his perception fogged, his whole bodily composition rotting, his mind a whirligig, his fortune unpredictable, his fame unclear. To put it shortly: all things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit in a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.What then can escort us on our way? One thing, and one thing only: philosophy. This consists in keeping the divinity within us inviolate and free from harm, master of pleasure and pain, doing nothing without aim, truth, or integrity, and independent of others' action or failure to act. Further, accepting all that happens and is allotted to it as coming from that other source which is its own origin: and at all times awaiting death with the glad confidence that it is nothing more than the dissolution of the elements of which every living creature is composed. Now if there is nothing fearful for the elements themselves in their constant changing of each into another, why should one look anxiously in prospect at the change and dissolution of them all? This is in accordance with nature: and nothing harmful is in accordance with nature."— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Two, 17
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