Here is the article as pdf.
Huge planetary problems were fixed in the past, yielding lessons for the current climate crisis — yet this time a solution is justice - [Book review]
Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again Susan Solomon Univ. Chicago Press (2024)
From lead pollution to the hole in the ozone layer and climate change, Earth is no stranger to human-made — often, man-made — global disasters.
In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit. Solvable is a harrowing read, but Solomon is an engaging writer and there is a lot to learn in this book about the environmental crises of the past century.
Solomon relates the story of US marine biologist Rachel Carson, who rang alarm bells about persistent pesticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her eloquent book Silent Spring (1962). Now that we know just how harmful these pesticides are, it is jarring to read how difficult it was to stop their use.
Carson described how falcons and other birds of prey started to lay eggs with thinner shells, then almost no eggs at all; various other bird populations shrank markedly; DDT in mammals led to the development of tumours and caused sterility. Although the overwhelming evidence for the effect of DDT on animals that Carson presented was independently confirmed by the then US president John F. Kennedy’s own science advisory council, Carson was belittled and portrayed as a hysteric by politicians and the media.
This playbook of deliberate ignorance of the scientific method, disinformation and a hefty dose of misogyny is all too familiar to those advocating for climate justice today.
In the United States, it took a non-governmental organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a few highly publicized lawsuits to ban DDT in 1972 — seven years after Carson’s death. Others followed suit, slowly, including in the European Union with partial bans from 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1984.
Yet, the chemical industry continued to manufacture and export DDT to countries that lacked regulation, such as those in Africa and southeast Asia. A global limit was placed on DDT use in 2004 — when the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants came into force. It’s hard to assess adherence, however, because there’s little monitoring.
Geopolitical inequities
In another parallel with the climate crisis, exported DDT found its way back to nations that had banned it, through global supply chains, such as those involved in importing fashion goods from Asia, which often rely on farms that use DDT to grow cotton. Similarly, by consuming goods produced in Asian nations, European countries are exporting their production of carbon dioxide emissions, as well as exploiting cheap labour.
As inexpensive, practical and short-lived alternatives have been found, DDT use is slowly fizzling out. As a result of the bans, populations of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) in the United States and Europe are recovering. Solomon takes hope from this, even though she points out that the alternatives, such as neonicotinoids, are not harmless either. Because of them, bees are now dying out.
Lead additives in petrol and paint are another example of policymakers and industry dragging their feet. Solomon highlights how, in the 1920s, Thomas Midgley Jr, a chemist at the US automotive company General Motors (GM), discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol increased the efficiency and lifespan of internal combustion engines. The health hazards associated with lead were well known — even the ancient Romans had realized, centuries before, that drinking wine from lead-lined pottery caused poisoning. Yet, GM’s compound, marketed under the trade name Ethyl, became widely used.
Lead contaminated the environment and caused serious public-health issues, affecting the brains and nervous systems of many children, causing comas, convulsions and even deaths. From the early 1960s, citizen groups demanded change, citing strong scientific evidence. Yet, policymakers didn’t feel compelled to stop the use of lead in paint and petrol for more than a decade. The US Environmental Protection Agency limited the amount of lead allowed in petrol in 1973. Although the harm such fuels caused — exacerbated by the increasing number of vehicles on the road — was known, they were only fully banned in the 1990s.
Lead-based house paints were banned in 1978 in the United States. Yet, even today, some people are still exposed to lead in old, peeling paints. Similar to climate change, it is often Indigenous communities, people of colour and other marginalized groups who are disproportionately paying the price, with their health and lives, for the decades of profits that have enriched a few in the petroleum industry.
Within a decade, now at the Frigidaire division of GM, Midgley had turned his attention to refrigerants and was involved in the creation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), particularly Freon. CFCs were initially celebrated for their non-toxic, non-flammable properties, which made them ideal, or so it seemed, for use as coolants in refrigerators and as propellants in aerosol sprays. In the mid-1970s, it became apparent that these compounds break down at cold temperatures and react with ozone.
Over the next 15 years or so, CFCs created a massive hole in the ozone layer that protects Earth and its inhabitants from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Rates of skin cancer rose. In what Solomon, rightly in my view, sees as an outstanding success of international collaboration, leaders around the globe agreed in the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. The ozone hole is now closing. But, once again, this phasing out was planned to be very slow, and only sped up when CFCs were replaced with safer alternatives, in the mid-1990s — more than a decade after their harms were known, and only after companies making and using them had found a profitable alternative.
For Solomon, all these examples show that change happens when impacts are personal, perceptible and practical solutions are available — “the three p’s”. For the climate crisis, in her view, the three p’s have been met: its devastating consequences are being felt around the world and renewable energy has become affordable. Thus, she concludes, we can “do it again”.
Broader solutions
I love Solomon’s optimism and agree that it is important to show that the climate crisis is solvable. Yet, as a climate scientist and philosopher, I don’t quite share her outlook. Each struggle she explores, from pesticides and smog to lead in paint and petrol, demonstrates just how keenly policymakers listen to industry — over other people and living things.
None of these cases were solved by overwhelming scientific evidence, or public concern and outcry. Each time, the industry responsible let go of a harmful product (such as DDT) only once it was sure to make a profit from selling its substitutes (other pesticides) — a strategy it could implement owing to its immense lobbying power in governments. But to solve the climate crisis, technological substitutions won’t be enough.
The harms of persistent pesticides were known long before governments banned them.
Substituting every internal combustion engine with an electric vehicle is not sufficient, neither is replacing coal with solar energy: energy demand needs to fall, too. The consequences of climate change are already very dire. Unlike the issues with the ozone hole or peregrine populations, they will not go away once we stop burning fossil fuels.
Ecological restoration is essential. It includes the sustainable management of forests and rivers, as well as changes in agricultural practices to focus less on livestock and more on diverse, drought-resistant crops. These are not just technical issues that can be implemented by one industry. They require an innovative approach to environmental management, through more decentralized industries and wider participation. The industries that profit from exacerbating the climate crisis will not be the same ones that will profit from change. Ultimately, the justice issues that have been set aside in the more-limited solutions of previous planetary problems — which had inserted technological substitutes into an untouched business model — cannot be ignored any longer.
Solvable is essential reading. I am convinced that Solomon is right: the climate crisis is solvable and this fight does have parallels with previous global challenges. But to address — or rather, redress — the climate crisis, any solution must have human rights at its heart, instead of the continued profits of industries.
I hate that I’m so pessimistic but as far as I can tell this train is so far off the rails there’s no saving it. Human rights will never trump profits, we’re already in the death spiral.
You aren’t alone. We should try to change everything we possibly can, not because there is a solution, but because it’s the right thing to do now that we know we caused it.
Climate change isn’t a crisis or a problem, it’s a predicament. The difference is that a predicament has no solution, you only live with the consequences. That’s what we’ll have to do, regardless of if we take action or not. There is no going back nor a “normal” to return to, only the world we’ve changed and the feedback we’ve started.
I very rarely see any news on how we’ll plan to adapt to a more hostile world. I guess that is too much.
I’ve heard plenty about adaptation - there is much talk about resiliency, water scarcity, cooling as a right, etc. I like how you framed it as a predicament in some ways, but that seems to undermine that we (collectively) still have agency over how bad it gets. Also people seem to have difficulty grasping the complexity of the issue, so talk about adaptation can unfortunately undermine carbon reduction efforts. Let’s say we harden our homes and utilities against heat/fire/floods/whatever, that’s time and money that could be spent on carbon reductions. There has to be a balance somewhere, and I’d argue that almost all resources should be spent on carbon reductions first because that’s likely to cost pennies on the dollar compared to adaptation measures that are always 2 steps behind.
I think we can do both, there’s absolutely a balance for short and long term effects. We need to get rid of the greenwashing though, profiting on climate change without accomplishing either. And again, we can’t fix this, only minimize further damage and prepare for the worst case. But (and I’ll use a line I’ve been hearing from scientists and media and everyone for decades now) we as a global society need to start NOW.
That’s fair. In my neck of the woods for example (Colorado) the utility preemptively shut power down for a bunch of customers the other month because they didn’t want to be liable for (another) fire during a red flag event. This is a first for Colorado, although it’s been happening in California for awhile. It didn’t go over well (for many reasons) but I’ve heard of several neighbors going out and spending $10k on gas generators to backup their homes. This is frankly fucking stupid to me - spend the money on solar/battery if you must, then you can have resiliency while also reducing carbon massively. Yes I know solar/storage costs more upfront than $10k, but a) if you’ve got $10k on standby for outages only you can afford solar/storage, and b) that money actually has a real payback period vs the sunk cost of a whole home gas generator. It’s madness. So when people I talk to in my sphere talk about resiliency, it’s generally ass backward conventional thinking that’s often counterproductive and a waste of resources. We have got to find a way to have smarter conversations about this and educate folks, rather than let the prepper industry play that role. Sorry for the rant!
I’m right there with you. I get the feeling that the richest people in power are counting on the coming apocalypse to solve it. What slows greenhouse gases, plastic usage, oil refining, overfishing, etc? Less people. We’ll have oil wars, water wars, and kill/die off. Until then, make as much money as possible to wall yourself off in a bunker and survive. It’s easier to continue to exploit the economy than to fix it, make less, and have less people die. If we’re all dead, everything is solved for them and they’ve maximized profit that they can then use to boost survival and stay on top.
I don’t see an incentive for them to do otherwise.
Yeah, I’m kinda in the same spot, and part of the reason is that 90% of the people I know who care - if you ask them whether there’s a climate emergency they say yes, if you ask whether we should do something they say yes - but 90% don’t bother doing anything other than that: say they care when asked. Don’t vote with a focus on climate (if they vote at all), consume a lot of red meat, burn gas they don’t need to burn, some don’t recycle.
If even people who claim to be aware of the issue and care about it don’t act like it, what hope is there? I try to nudge them, but there isn’t much more I can do.
Don’t vote with a focus on climate (if they vote at all), consume a lot of red meat, burn gas they don’t need to burn, some don’t recycle.
how long have you been voting The Right Way, eating The Right Way, burning The Right Amount of gas, and recycling? how many people would need follow your example to even impact this trend?
the solution has nothing to do with what we decide to buy or who we vote for and everything to do with what options are present when we are making our choices. people sometimes turn down copies of the paperwork my office produces saying “save a tree” but the tree is already dead, pulped, pressed, packaged, shipped, sold, and stocked. if you want to save a tree, you gotta go to where the trees are and save them.
Not sure what point you’re trying to make, exactly. What would your suggestion for a solution be then, after you eliminated all options? And the amount of people that need to follow the example is the same no matter what solution you come up with - unless your solution is to kill everyone on the planet. If 2/3 of the planet lived in trees and caves, and the other third kept doing all the same things we do now, we might not accelerate so fast but the problem would not go away.
the solution has nothing to do with what we decide to buy or who we vote for and everything to do with what options are present when we are making our choices.
Yes… options like voting for a green party that actually has the environment as a focus instead of one that does the bare minimum (if anything) and pats themselves on the back like they’ve done so much, or even one whose leader says “there is no climate emergency, that’s sensationalism”; like eating in a sustainable way instead of eating so much beef and pork; like taking public transport when available instead of buying a gas car with high consumption when for that price you could have just bought an electrical.
I genuinely don’t understand your point.
my point is that you aren’t going to convince people not to make choices that they want to make. you need to deny them the destructive choices at the point of decision, which means stopping the production and transportation of the detructive goods. it may mean stopping bad actors from participating in politics, never appearing on ballots in the first place. it may mean preventing non-recyclable material from being brought to consumers, thereby making all waste recyclable. it may mean making high-consumption vehicles unavailable.
E.L.F. has done things like this in the past. i think they are radioactive now, for obvious reasons, but that is in no way an impediment to other people employing the same tactics under a different banner.
I hear what you’re saying, but the problem with that mode of thinking is that (ironically) it is not sustainable, at least not on a large enough scale, because unless you can convince people to make a change then the vast majority will stand against you when you try to force that change; they’d label you a terrorist and be okay with your imprisonment and perhaps even murder.
Consider this:
People will choose to take a car instead of a train (even when presented with the option), because they prefer their personal space. People say they are pro carbon tax, but they will protest when gas prices (or anything prices) go up, even though that is the obvious conclusion of a carbon tax and the reason it works (companies won’t just absorb the cost, and people will be forced to consume less). When protesters block roads, a lot of people start talking about using violence against them. Even here on Lemmy, people will go out of their way to go into a vegan community when a post gets a decent level of traction just to talk about how much they love meat.
Why would the society I just described - our society - be ok with any of that, and just stand by as it happens? If they won’t make a change when given the option to, why would they be okay with it being forced on them?
EDIT: spelling
it doesn’t matter if they’re ok with their choices: if every suv in 300 miles has been burned to a crisp, they will buy what’s left.
Right I get that, my point is I don’t think it works long term. Eventually you’d be caught and either imprisoned or killed. The amount of people who are ok with that are pretty small, which means the movement would be crushed before any significant impact is really made. For it to work, you’d need to get a lot more people on your side; and if you get that many people on your side, you can probably go with an option other than (essentially) starting a civil war.
“World peace is a reachable goal if humans stop slaughtering themselves”
