#nathaniel rich

[bossupsettledown]

Dark Waters (2019)

"The system is rigged. They want us to believe that it'll protect us, but that's a lie. We protect us. We do. Nobody else. Not the companies, not the scientists, not the government. Us."

[moviesframes]

Dark Waters (2019)

Directed by Todd Haynes

Cinematography by Edward Lachman

[rjzimmerman]

Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis

In David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” and Nathaniel Rich’s “Losing Earth,” we have a picture of the increasingly dire problem of global warming.

Excerpt from this New York Times book review:

Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged around individual and group interests. These interests have to do with class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your own list. By asserting these interests, we call out to each other so that as a collective we see and hear one another. From that beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition, representation and rights.

The problem with climate change, as an existential challenge to humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet. And because the areas first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.

The demand climate change makes on us is to feel empathy for the unborn poor of the global south, and change our economies to act on the basis of their needs. That’s something humanity has never done before.

“The Uninhabitable Earth” gives readers’ emotions a thorough workout along that pessimism-to-despair spectrum, before we are brought round to the writer’s “acceptance of responsibility.” I stress the emotional aspect because it is crucial: We are facing a call to action that we are, on the evidence of our behavior so far, likely to ignore, unless we directly feel its urgency. We know this, because that’s what we have been doing. The science of global warming has been settled for 40 years, but we have not just continued to pollute, we have accelerated the rate at which we’ve been doing so. Most of the carbon humans have put into the atmosphere has been emitted in the last three decades. As Wallace-Wells tartly puts it, “We have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on the climate than in all the centuries — all the millenniums — that came before.”

This is part of the tragedy. It’s not just that we know what’s happening, it’s that we’ve known for years and done nothing. Nathaniel Rich observes in “Losing Earth: A Recent History” that “nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979.” His gripping, depressing, revelatory book is an expanded version of a whole-issue article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine last year. It is an account of what went wrong — of how it was that a moment of growing awareness of climate change, and an apparent willingness to act on the knowledge, was allowed to dissipate into stasis and inaction.

[bgrand]

[writers-hq]

He was flagrantly rust belt. He looked like a swing voter

Odds Against Tomorrow, Nathaniel Rich

[rjzimmerman]

Why We Didn’t Act on Climate When We Had the Chance

Nathaniel Rich tracks the tragic and complicated history of “Losing Earth”

Excerpt of a review of Nathaniel Rich’s book, “Losing Earth,” from the Sierra Club:

Losing Earth is the book-length version of a 30,000-word article Rich published in The New York Times Magazine last year. The magazine dedicated an entire issue to Rich’s story, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change”—the first time it had ever committed a whole issue to one piece (and to one subject). “Losing Earth” chronicles how during the 1980s, a clear scientific consensus was in place (the result of climate science research that had gone back decades) that human industry was heating up the planet by burning fossil fuels. Scientists, policy experts, and members of both the Republican and Democratic parties all believed in the science and that something needed to be done. There was no such thing as “climate denialism.”

Some of the heroes that emerge in this story are familiar—people like James Hansen, whose 1988 congressional testimony about global warming is one of the most famous. But Rich’s story begins long before, when Rafe Pomerance, the head of Friends of the Earth from 1980 to 1984, and geophysicist Gordon MacDonald began what Rich calls the “Gordon and Rafe carbon dioxide road show.” The story of their efforts to rally successive administrations throughout the 1980s to act on climate, and the way in which those efforts ultimately failed, is a reminder that the reasons why we are fast approaching planetary catastrophe are a complex mix of corporate greed, missed opportunities, and a devil’s bargain with mass consumption and convenience—a bargain in which we are all implicated.  

“There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without an understanding of why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance,” Rich writes in Losing Earth. “For in the decade that ran between 1979 and 1989, we had an excellent chance.”

[rjzimmerman]

In the decade between 1979 and 1989, humans had a good shot at solving climate change. What went wrong?

Excerpt from this Grist article:

Nathaniel Rich published his 30,000-word account of the years between 1979 and 1989 — the decade humanity missed its chance to fix climate change — in the New York Times Magazine last August. The response to the piece was so staggering that Rich put aside his other projects and started turning it into a book the very next week. Losing Earth: A Recent History is out on the shelves April 9, just eight months after the magazine version hit newsstands.

Our near-constant companion throughout the whole sordid tale is an environmental lobbyist by the name of Rafe Pomerance. In 1979, when the story begins, Pomerance happened upon a report warning that continued use of fossil fuels would cause “significant and damaging” changes to the planet’s atmosphere in the span of a few decades. Alarmed, Pomerance, with the aid of a geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, decided to try to bring the issue to the attention of the U.S. government.

At first, serious progress appeared to be underway. The Carter administration commissioned a report to ascertain whether the issue was really as dire as some scientists were saying. (It was.) But when a team of scientists, policy experts, and government officials convened at a hotel in Florida to craft a framework for addressing the problem, they couldn’t even agree on what the opening paragraph of their statement should say. Thus began an excruciating decade of indecision, delay, and obstruction.

If you finished the marathon task of reading the original magazine article, you’ll find the plotline more or less familiar, though there are some new chapters. And this time around, Rich addresses something many readers, including this one, were left wondering: What do we make of this history?

[punkgardener]

You guys should all read Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich so you can all understand how. fucking. Close. We were. To large scale climate action.

I'm not done with the book yet but everything so far has made me want to scream at someone or start crying. We were so so fucking close.