Inconsolable Loss and Overpowering Damage

Egypt Dispatch 4: Reckoning with the Legacy of our Era

I took that on my cellphone yesterday, and just looking at it again makes me quiet and still.

When I first saw the Grand Canyon, I thought: this really is as remarkable as everyone says. And it turns out the same is true of the pyramids at Giza: they are clearly a human artifact, but so old and so big and so majestic in their design that, viewed from a ridge a quarter mile away, they seem as if they’d grown from the earth, as perfect a form as the planet has ever produced. It is not unlike gazing up at Everest from the basecamp at Rongbuk—and the bustle of Cairo, which now comes up almost to the edge of the great monuments, seems somehow to make them seem more timeless stil. If I seem at a loss for eloquent description, I take consolation in the fact that the great historian Herodotus—on a tourist trip to the site in 450 BCE, about 2,700 years after they were built—could manage only that the pyramids “were greater than words can say.”

Our sense of the world that left behind this legacy is sketchy—but there are only three of these giants (and six mini ones, for wives and girlfriends). Clearly the prosperity and power of that moment was…concentrated. Our day has its absurdly hoarded riches too, expended on more ephemeral vanity projects (buying Twitter, say)—but we live, in the West, in a world of unprecedented and unprecedentedly widespread wealth. That wealth came, above all, from harnessing fossil fuel; if the pharoahs, by some estimates, had about 100,000 laborers working on their pyramids, each of us in the global north ghas have at least a few dozen servants represented by the concentrated energy in a barrel of oil or a ton of coal.

That fossil fuel made us modern and comfortable, and it leaves behind a legacy even more overpowering than the pyramids—an altered atmosphere. Each day the warmth our carbon emissions trap is the heat equivalent of 500,000 Hiroshima-sized explosions. A half million! We’ve melted half the sea ice in the summer Arctic, begun to thaw the Antarctic, profoundly altered the jet stream and now the Gulf Stream. Shelley’s traveler was gazing at the Sphinx when he wrote “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” but he might as well have been studying the latest co2 data from Mauna Loa. (417.73 parts per million today, up exactly 2.10 ppm from a year ago).

We can measure some of the damage from what we’re doing (among other things, damaging Egyptian antiquities, as new deluges increasingly come to the desert) but something this big defies true calculation. Clearly the costs of climate change will be in the tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars. And clearly they will fall hardest on the people who have done least to cause them.

The closest we’ve come to attempting this moral mathematics travels under the name “loss and damage,” and it is the main, or at least the most incendiary, discussion underway at these talks. It is mostly discussed in the bland jargon of international diplomacy: the great hope of activists is that the UN will agree on a “facility” for loss and damage, which is to say some kind of fund to compensate the poor nations that will then be filled or not over time by the rich countries. But it is nearly as impossible to capture quite the emotion of this phrase as it is to describe Cheops’ great ziggurat.

I was out a few nights ago with a group of young Christian climate activists from around the world, here to observe and to lobby at the COP. Most of them were earnest evangelical Americans—bright, sensitive, committed, hardworking. But, like me, products of a place and time where tragedy mostly still seems a little theoretical—at least the kind of overwhelming tragedy that can’t be remedied by insurance or FEMA. They were describing their first week at the talks, and last to speak was one of the few representatives of the majority world in the group—in this case, a young woman from East Africa. And she said—and I paraphrase here—that “loss and damage” was unbearably real to her, in the faces and bodies of the people from the Horn of Africa now suffering through the fifth straight dry rainy season, with a sixth on the horizon. They, of course, had done nothing to cause what now destroyed them and their culture-the average Somali emits 1/300th as much carbon as the average American.

There has rarely been a clearer moral argument for what amounts to reparations: we got rich burning fossil fuel, but they had no access to it and its residue in the atmosphere is making them even poorer. “Loss and damage” is the great ethical question of our time and place, in the way that slavery perhaps seemed in the 19th century—a case so obvious that it makes itself for those who can see.

But of course that case was not obvious in the 19th century to the people who profited from it. And it is unlikely—highly unlikely, I would say—that the U.S. Congress is going to vote large sums of taxpayer money to repairing this damage. Token sums, perhaps, with a little more from Norway and the other usual noble suspects. But nothing like the actual cost, which is measured in trillions. We haven’t even begun, after all, to make reparations for slavery yet.

Hence the dancing by western officials to deal with an entirely legitimate and in some ways politically impossible demand; instead, the West wants to figure out ways to provide “climate finance,” less to compensate for damage than to allow the global south to start building solar farms and wind turbines. This is a good idea, though it’s not the same thing (and it would be self-serving, in that it cuts the carbon that now threatens us as well, and anyway much of the technology would be purchased from the north). Even that is hard—Biden proposed $11 billion in “climate finance” in his last budget, but Congress has not rushed to do it; one suspects it is not high on Kevin McCarthy’s to-do list.

The best that western negotiators think they can do is use their power over the Wrold Bank and similar “multilateral” institutions to change the cost of capital for poor nations—that would free up the vast horde of accumulated wealth in, say, western pension funds to go to work building out that clean energy (and getting a low-risk stable return in the bargain for those investors). And even that is a lift.

None of it will come close to changing the legacy we’re leaving behind, all of us. The co2 from the Plymouth in which I learned to drive is up there in the atmosphere drying out the Sahel; my debt is clear, and yours as well. We will not pay it off, not entirely or even close, though we must try—which is is in part what our activism is about. (The rest, perhaps, is about building a workable future for those still to come). That legacy will last at least as long as the pyramids, and it will come with no stark beauty to compensate for sweat and tears.

In other news from the world of climate and energy:

+Oil Change International revealed that Japan is the world’s top public financier of fossil fuel expansion,

providing 10.6 billion USD per year between 2019 and 2021. Japan has been leading the drive to expand gas consumption in Asia and is the world’s leading financier of gas infrastructure globally, spending USD 6.7 billion on gas projects on average each year between 2019 and 2021.

+Two runoff elections in the offing that have important climate bearing. You know about Raphael Warnock in Georgia, but what about Davante Lewis, running for public utility commissiner in Louisiana and committed to making renewables work in that oil and gas empire?

+Interesting: Washington Post exit polls show that climate was tied with abortion as the second-most important issue facing the country for last week’s electorate—and ahead of the ‘crime’ issue endlessly flogged by the media.