Once again, it’s unbearably hot, the nights aren’t cooling and nature, along with us humans, is suffering. Yet the roads are still full of mostly combustion-engined vehicles, EVs sloughing off tyre particulates, the skies full of aircraft. It’s amazing - but not at all surprising - that we all don’t just stop to think about what we’re doing to everything.

Last month, during the second - and so far worst - heatwave, Ars Technica hosted an article from Inside Climate News on the “sad inevitability” of Europe’s heatwave. I have to say, the article takes its time to get to the point, embellishing everything with the effects rather than the contributing factors involved in the whole miserable set of conditions we’re still in. But eventually the authors started linking to papers such as one from PNAS called simply and clearly Climate change will accelerate the high-end risk of compound drought and heatwave events.

Ultimately, we really really do need to aim for and hit net zero - but with everyone carrying on as normal for as long as possible (hindered by bosses worrying more that we won’t be productive enough, our only chance is to focus on large-scale structural change, voting for parties that will prioritise climate action, and switching economies to carbon-neutral industries.

In this context, the prospect of a company like VW looking to jettison tens of thousands of jobs, maybe a hundred thousand looks scary - but perhaps Volkswagen with its trade unions and state investments is a good place to start: they will be able to (have to!) throw resources at aiding their employees in the search for transformation jobs in transformation industries. The Americans and Chinese would basically just dump the jobless on suddenly underfunded communities, as the British did to the mining towns in the 1980s. The fear is that the sclerotic and currently very fossil-conservative government here in Germany will combine to prevent any sort of realignment towards energy efficiency or transformation.

In the meantime, I voted in a local referendum for a large wind turbine project that’s been proposed for the nearby hills: news just in - it turns out that 2/3 of those who voted voted for the project to continue… So that’s something, I guess!

In a recent episode of the Climate Denier’s Playbook (their “Mailbag” one, where they answer listeners' questions), Nicole Conlon referred to an post by Hamilton Nolan on his blog How Things Work , called When Do You Need to Quit Your Job?. It’s a call for people working at scummy, fascism- and climate-denialism-enabling companies (tech, mostly, but big oil, too, of course), to quite for the sake of their souls and our societies.

Nolan is a strong proponent of organiz(s)ed labo(u)r in the US, and encourages people in companies and industries that are worth fighting for, to do so by unionising and fighting to rebalance the economy towards society at large. This chimes with much of my recent reading (I am planning a post on that!), about society and capitalism in particular: Nolan channels a righteous anger that I’ve not been focussed enough to write myself, so I’m grateful for that.

The question of ethical work is something that niggles at me a where I work, since a major customer of our sensor systems is the fossil fuel industry. I can only hope that our sensors help them to be as efficient as possible and minimise leaks, etc, whilst our other sensors in renewable energies, pharma and other neutral-to-positive industries gain in importance.

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)