Heat

There's been a heatwave and very little rain these last couple of weeks. The press that I read has been very focussed on the pernicious and systematic nature of these heatwaves, clearly linked to climate change driven by human emissions, mostly of carbon.

The Economist had two articles about it: Today's heatwaves are a warning of worse to come, and The increase in simultaneous heatwaves which clearly set out the current set of problems and challenges ahead.

The Guardian, naturally, also contains warnings about the situation, including a typical piece from the inimitable George Monbiot: This heatwave has eviscerated the idea that small changes can tackle extreme weather; and an Opinion piece on the public perception of what needs to be done, and the almost impossibly political predicament we're in: The Guardian view on public attitudes to the climate crisis: burning for change

It's all just politics?

Deciding to do things for the environment, and how fast, is a political matter, possibly the biggest of our time. How to ensure that humanity continues to develop whilst permitting nature to recover, without massive and sudden sacrifices or a return to excessive hardship is hard. Connecting this thought to the boneheaded, insular, selfish and populist-nationalistic messages streaming and steaming from the minds, mouths and military of such leading lights as Putin, Erdogan and their authoritarian ilk, and from the ever more similar sounding, coal-fired Republican Party in the US (or the coal-powered Democrat Manchin), leaves me feeling rather down on our direction as humanity, as does the self-destructive infighting with right-leaning nationalists in Italy leading to this comment from (where else?) the Economist about:

...their ambition, narrow self-interest and failure to understand, or perhaps care, that events in their troubled country have unfortunate implications far beyond its borders

Fortunately, there are teams and institutions working on solutions - some piffling and perhaps wrong-headed (Heliogen?), many promising (the whole stream of Long-Duration Energy Storage, LDES, investigations, well summarised, again, by the Economist in their article Decarbonisation of electric grids reliant on renewables requires long-duration energy storage

There are institutions and companies, ranging from traditional behemoths like BASF (itself a huge customer of Russian gas) to clever startups who will likely not make it, even if their ideas will, eventually. This gives me hope.

What can I do about it?

As a long-term employee / inmate in the automotive industry, I've made my contribution to mobility and its environmental downsides. With the part of the company that I work for settling in as a low-cost commodity with a long but time-limited future, I have the ever-stronger feeling that it's time to move on to more climate positive initiatives.

Whether this involves joining the hydrogen economy in some capacity (attractive, but ambiguously beneficial), or batteries, or insulation, or positive recycling, I don't know. It's all contingent on me finding something that involves as little commuting as possible - so, either close to where I live now, or somewhere where the family would gladly want to move, having never moved out of the city we live in now. Maybe my experience and energies would be better spent in adjacent, perhaps "agnostic", but enabling industries, such as coatings or fittings, where better and cheaper products enable better and cheaper climate solutions...

I won't and can't post my thoughts and investigations into alternative employment here - no radical openness here, I'm afraid / to your relief - but this is a subtle little starting point for what might come later.

Might... But after my holiday break from it all! (driving, but not flying anywhere)