One More Post on Pinker, Centrism and Climate Change

"I realize that most intellectuals and journalists think it is serious and responsible to sound the alarm on everything that’s going wrong, and frivolous or panglossian or whiggish or Polyannish to point out what’s going right, but I argue that this is mistaken. If people are constantly told that their society is a flaming dumpster, they’ll be receptive to demagogues and firebrands who say that reform is futile and that the institutions of liberal democracy and applied expertise must be wrecked. They will be complacent about the rollback of measures that have—the data show—done tremendous good, such as ones that have combated poverty, pollution, and workplace accidents. And they’ll be cynical about the very possibility of improving life, and fatalistic about looming threats. If poverty, war, pollution, and crime are permanent and intractable problems, why even bother trying to solve them?"

Pinker, here... https://www.amazonbookreview.com/post/866e8865-5672-4b52-939a-635d63472d7f/talking-to-stephen-pinker

This ethical claim of Pinker's definitely makes a certain kind of sense.... I am one of those of the view that intellectuals who claimed or claim that there's no morally important difference between Clinton and Trump are very irresponsible! I think that those academics who say stuff like "Capitalism is intolerable, and we should rise up in revolution!" are also kind of irresponsible - or they would be, if they had major influence. I think that the intellectuals who encourage political violence are definitely irresponsible, even if they have limited influence (I think encouraging Anti-fa is a pretty silly idea, because, so far as I can tell, the only effect of Anti-fa demonstrations is to increase political violence). Although Chomsky still encourages people to vote for Democrats, it's not impossible that his very passionate rhetoric about, e.g., Obama's drone campaign, reinforces for a nontrivial portion of his audience the idea that there is no point voting for mainstream parties - which would definitely be a bad thing if it is the case (even on Chomsky's own lights). And it seems pretty plausible that Pinker plays a positive activist role himself (even from a lefty-type perspective) in converting some number of extremist libertarians to a more moderate neoliberalism which sees a role for a strong welfare state and environmental regulations.
All this said, I think Pinker takes this attitude significantly too far. My major gripe is that I think climate change is a far too fast-moving problem for the technocratic, neoliberal, centrist establishment to deal with effectively, mired as it is in the wet concrete of Capital, with its 'thought-leaders' in possession of a linear and gradualist mindset much like Pinker's.  I strongly believe that Pinker's linear mindset is a big flaw in his thinking, and that, at least on the issue of climate change, intellectuals probably do have a responsibility to be quite alarmist. Allow me to explain, in slightly more detail than I have done before on this blog.
A lot of the stuff Pinker writes and claims seems to betray a pretty naive understanding of both complex systems and how to interpret statistics. I've written about this before, but it never fails to annoy me that he says in The Better Angels of our Nature and (in an extract I saw in The Guardian from) Enlightenment Now (and in many of his interviews) that he is not in the business of prophecy and can't say with high confidence that things will keep on improving, and yet simultaneously loves to trumpet the idea not just that things have gotten better but that things are "getting better" and that we need to remind ourselves of "what's working". This strongly suggests (unless he is literally just contradicting himself) that he does think that, if we maintain the institutions of liberal democracy (by which I suppose he means roughly, 'Keep voting for the centrists!') then he does think that there is very good reason to think that all the happy trends he identifies will either continue or level off in a non-destructive way. But this is pretty dumb! It's a very naive kind of induction, which makes it sound as if he's never read an ecology or biology textbook. Yes, human ingenuity and technological improvements have helped us get this far while growing the global economic pie at a very fast rate. Yes, we have so far been able to 'deal with' pollution, soil erosion, climate change and all the rest to the extent that we have not really seen a growing food or health crisis in most places of the world. Yes, we are improving our recycling methods and consumption habits across the developed world. And yes, many doomsayers have been wrong - sometimes very wrong - in predictions of overshoot (though, contra libertarian myth, reality has not at all falsified the modelling framework of those involved in the Limits to Growth project (http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf) (given that we are in a pessimistic scenario in terms of how much action we've taken on climate change and waste, if we make it through the next twenty years without growing problems with food production, declining lifespans and weaker economic growth, then the framework will have been shown to be in error)).
But none of this should even reduce your credence more than a fraction in the idea that we, as a civilisation, are heading for a fall, once you realise that we are living on a planet with a carrying capacity, that pollution is far easier to create than to remove (that, e.g. plastic pollution, has been on its own dramatic upward trend for several decades), that problems like soil erosion and salinisation and pesticide-pollution have only been getting worse for decades and cannot be remediated by any existing technology, that insect populations may well be collapsing (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/14/a-different-dimension-of-loss-great-insect-die-off-sixth-extinction), and that climate breakdown is a rapidly accelerating juggernaut, with very worrying feedback loops starting to kick in (see my Wadhams extracts for how the Arctic albedo is dramatically diminishing while we are probably experiencing the beginning of a major methane leak).
To be clear, I do still lean towards the view that our only hope for dealing with climate change to the extent that we don't cause a dramatic reduction in health outcomes, wealth and living standards for tens of millions of people comes from doing it 'within existing institutions' (roughly speaking). As I remarked to H, saying that we need to "destroy capitalism" to deal with the impending climate crisis is like a surfer responding to the massive 5m wave about to crash on top of him not by trying his best to duck-dive and swim under the swell, but by deciding to try to ascend the crest with superhuman, gravity-defying paddling even as the wave is foaming at the top, then, once he reaches the top, doing an ollie and triple backflip, to finally glide smoothly back down to the safety of flat ocean while doing a handstand. 
But, to my way of thinking, that still means that it is absolutely the right thing (probably) to vote for the hardline greenies among mainstream politicians, like the Sanders and Corbyns, and support the hardline lefy factions, over the centrists still beholden to corporate interests and not radical about environmental problems. Pinker clearly doesn't agree with this! In fact, I suspect that he may well think that Sanders counts as a "demagogue". I personally really don't think Sanders counts as a demagogue (you can't say "Oh, but what about the cult of personality around the guy", unless you also want to indict Clinton or Obama as demagogues, or most politicians (it's certainly wrong to say that Sanders has tried to cultivate a cult of personality around himself (his advertising campaigns barely focus on him at all))), nor is Corbyn much of a demagogue: Corbyn's rhetorical style is very quiet and understated (yes, his rhetoric can be passionate, but it is not highly rousing and dramatic), and he has not campaigned in a way that is self-focussed (I concede that many of his supporters have focussed on him in a cultish way). My strong worry is that if we fail to support the lefty factions of 'social democratic' parties in the developed world, that will be like responding to the 5m wave by simply swimming towards it as if it is not there at all. Which is to say, it will turn out very badly indeed. If this is our course, we will realise just as we are being pushed beneath the water that we didn't do enough, but, by that point, there will be nothing we can do to avoid the impending washing machine experience. In a situation of massive overshoot, there is no stopping the disaster.

Realisations

One of Graeber's main arguments in Debt: The First 5000 Years (his very sloppy (http://www.bradford-delong.com/2014/12/2014-11-24-mo-ann-leckie-on-david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-mistakes-handling-the-sumerian-evidence-smackdown.html) anthropological-philosophical-economic bricolage which sold millions of copies) is that there is something deeply psychologically uncomfortable about the social arrangements involved in capitalist exchange - about the making of arrangements to perform constructive activities by renting oneself out to serve or by renting someone to serve via contracts rather than on the basis of friendly or neighbourly trust and affection. I discovered this personally the first time I quit a job about 7 months ago. It was hard not to feel guilty about telling the people I was working with that I didn't want to work there, even though, as I kept trying to remind myself, I was fully within my rights contractually, legally and morally. I think the fundamental reason why I had this reaction is that although, legally, I had no obligation to the company whatsoever to continue my contract (only a contractual obligation to perform tasks to the best of my ability while I was under contract), I couldn't help emotionally feeling as if I had some obligations to support my fellow workers in the collective enterprise we were continuously participating in, rather than 'abandoning ship'. I also realised that I was severing personal connections; I knew that I was going to lose touch with the people I'd formed relationships with. Even if those relationships weren't all that strong - and they weren't highly strong - it was hard not to feel like this was a rude thing to do. The whole thing felt very 'unnatural'.
Today, when I had completed my (4-hour) paid gardening gig at a stranger's house (when he asked how long I would be available for, I told him 4 hours even though I had no major obligations for later in the day), I had the same problem. My employer indicated that he wanted me back next week and intimated that he was assuming that I would be available weekly long-term, and I told him that I probably could not establish a regular, weekly arrangement with him (I told him I'd tell him by Wednesday if I'd be available for next week, even though I don't want to do that work next week for two or three reasons I won't reveal here, and I will therefore tell him I can't probably before Wednesday). To say this made me feel like a bad person. It's true that I don't have any commitments set in stone that would absolutely rule out the establishment of a regular visit to his place, so in that sense perhaps I was being mendacious (although there were serious considerations against). But from the point of view of capitalist logic, what I did was absolutely just and fine. I rented myself to him for 4 hours, and there were no other conditions to the contract at the time I agreed to it (he implied that he wanted me next week soon after I started). As a market-participant, I am within my rights to choose to whom I sell my services and under what conditions. I am, evidently, able to adhere to this logic, but it is somewhat emotionally burdensome - and this is for me, someone capable of callousness. I imagine it would be much harder for a lot of people I know. (Of course, one of the other correct arguments Graeber makes is that long-term business relationships based on loyalty and trust are ubiquitous in capitalism, and it's pretty clear that things work a lot better in businesses when people feel like they are not mere tools (http://evonomics.com/what-happens-when-you-believe-in-ayn-rand-and-modern-economic-theory/). Humans inevitably form emotional bonds and we aren't motivated to act as if we are the only thing that matters in the world, and 'defectors' or 'knaves' (people who avoid agreeing to things that are not in their near-term interest) have to be extremely canny and clever if they are to maintain a reputation as trustworthy, which happens to be crucial for business.)

On a vaguely related note, I have been cut off my mother's teat this month in terms of income. I want to move out of the family home again but it's extraordinarily hard work to save up to do such a thing without any parental support. It's hard for me to fathom not having the privilege of strong parental support. If you are working hard all the time, you are far too exhausted to do the things I do, as exhibited on this blog. Idleness is very important for intellectual development.
A sobering thought.

Extract Three: Wadhams on Geoengineering and other Drastic Measures

Third Extract from Chapter 13 of Wadhams’ Book: Drastic Solutions

Geoengineering

“[…] Geoengineering comprises a suite of techniques to artificially lower surface air temperatures, either by blocking the sun’s rays directly or by increasing the albedo of the planet so as to change the radiation balance. For the Arctic, the aim of both SRM and CDR must be to bring back the ice that we’ve lost, and in this way halt the loss of offshore permafrost and reduce the likelihood of a giant methane release. To achieve this, we need to not merely slow the pace of warming, but to reverse it. Let us look at the different ideas proposed, how effective they are likely to be, and the political difficulties.

SRM is the rapid ‘sticking plaster’ which can be implemented quickly at moderate cost. It does not deal with CO₂ levels, and so phenomena such as acidification of the oceans, which depend mainly on CO₂ levels rather than temperature, will continue apace, with serious consequences for bleaching of coral reefs, for shellfish survival, and in fact for the entire marine ecosystem. So SRM does not let us off the hook about reducing CO₂ levels as well.

Two major types of SRM methods have been proposed to date. In 1990 John Latham at the University of Manchester proposed ‘whitening’ low-level clouds by injecting very fine sprays of water particles into them. This increases the cloud albedo and causes them to reflect more incoming solar radiation. The brilliant marine engineer Stephen Salter at Edinburgh University designed the systems to carry out this injection. Others have proposed the injection of solid particles at high elevations from balloons or jet aircraft afterburners, which would form aerosols that reflect incoming radiation.

Marine cloud brightening (MCB) involves increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back into space from the tops of thin, low-level clouds (marine stratocumuli, which cover about a quarter of the world’s oceanic surface), thereby producing a cooling effect. If we could increase the reflectivity by about 3 per cent, it is estimated that the cooling will balance the global warming caused by increasing CO­­₂ in the atmosphere. To do this we need to spray sea-water droplets continuously into the cloud. Salter developed plans for a novel form of spray-droplet production, and designed an unmanned wind-powered vessel that can be remotely guided to regions where cloud seeding is most favourable. Instead of sails, such a vessel could use a much more efficient motive power technique – Flettner rotors. These spinning vertical cylinders mounted on the deck are named after their inventor, the German Anton Flettner, and make use of the Magnus effect, whereby a spinning vertical cylinder has a pressure difference across its sides which gives force at right angle to the wind direction. Flettner rotors were used for ships in the 1920s and have been revived today as a way of reducing fuel consumption at sea. The rotorship houses the spraying system which sprays sea water droplets from the top of the rotors into the cloud base. The power required for spraying and communications comes from electricity generated by current turbines built into the vessels. The key to the design is the fine nozzle which produces particles o the required diameter of about a micrometre (a millionth of a metre), such that when the droplet evaporates in the atmosphere it produces a tiny salt particle which is of just the right diameter (a nanometre or so) to brighten the cloud. This makes use of the so-called Twomey effect, that a mass of tiny particles in a cloud is brighter than the same mass of larger particles. This effect has been observed from ships leaving the equivalent of a con-trail of brighter clouds, visible from space. Several hundred vessels distributed worldwide would be needed to achieve the aim, but the total cost, while substantial, is small compared to the massive costs of global warming to the planet – billions of dollars per year compared to global warming costs of trillions. A huge advantage of the plan is that it is ecologically benign, the only raw material required being sea water. The amount of cooling could be controlled, via satellite measurements and a computer model, and if an emergency arose, the system could be switched off, with conditions returning to normal within a few days.

Much work is needed before a cloud brightening system could be operational. We would have to complete the development of the technology, and conduct a limited-area field experiment in which the reflectivity of seeded clouds is compared with that of adjacent unseeded ones. We would also have to perform detailed analyses to establish whether there might be serious or harmful metereological or climatological ramifications (such as reducing rainfall in regions where water is scarce) and, if so, to find a solution for them. One question is, must we spray worldwide and thus achieve global effects or, if we specifically desire a regional outcome, can we spray in particular locations or at particular times of year? The very urgent question of cooling the Arctic comes to mind. If it is the open water over the Arctic shelves in summer which allows warming of the subsea permafrost and a potential methane catastrophe, can we stand this off by bringing back the summer sea ice without necessarily having to cool the entire planet?

This regional question was tackled by John Latham and colleagues in 2014. We found that indeed it is possible to focus the cooling on the Arctic and cause some advance in the sea ice limits, especially in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, although there may be compensating problems such as reduction of rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa. Clearly this is cautiously promising. In an earlier study, it was estimated that spraying over 70 per cent of the marine global cloud cover could eliminate the warming due to CO₂ doubling and halt losses of sea ice. The cloud brightening is basically reducing the radiation falling on the ocean surface, so, if regionally targeted, this might also have beneficial effects in reducing the vigour of hurricanes (which depend on sea surface temperature) and the rate of bleaching of coral reefs (which depend on water temperature as well as ocean acidity). Finally the Antarctic sea ice could also be affected: the 2014 study showed that global seeding will increase the Antarctic sea ice area and also cool the subsurface currents which at present are threatening to cause the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers to collapse, which could cause a serious, 3-metre rise in global sea level if it occurred suddenly. So MCB may offer not only global relief with respect to warming, but also relief from regional threats, especially in the polar regions.

Stephen Salter mapped out a development plan which estimates that taking a cloud brightening system to full operational effectiveness would cost £73 million in research and development costs, a fortune in terms of normal science budgets but a pittance in terms of the urgent global need. If Britain were serious about fighting global change, this would be an area where it could take a lead.

Aerosol injection is the second large-scale geoengineering method that has been proposed. Some of the implications were studied in a recent project supported by the UK Government called SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering), although support was withdrawn before the scientists could actually try a system out. The idea is to disperse a large mass of aerosols, tiny particles, into the stratosphere at high level, so that they can directly reflect sunlight back into space. The injection would have to be continuous, as the aerosol gradually falls out of the upper atmosphere. The original ideas called for the creation of a stratospheric sulphate aerosol cloud, either through the release of a so-called precursor gas – sulphur dioxide (SO₂) – or through the direct release of sulphuric acid (H₂SO₄). If SO₂ gas is released it will oxidize in the upper atmosphere and dissolve in water to form sulphuric acid in droplets far from the injection site. This does not allow control over the size of the particles that are formed but the gas is fairly easy to release. If sulphuric acid is released directly then the aerosol particles would form very quickly and, in principle, the particle size could be controlled to optimize the climatic effect. If the aerosol is injected onto the lower stratosphere it will remain aloft only for a few weeks or months, as air in this region is predominantly descending, so to ensure a longer lifetime of years, higher-altitude delivery is needed.

How might this be done? Delivery systems suggested include artillery shells, high-altitude aircraft, or high-altitude balloons, either supporting vertical pipes from the ground or rising freely until they burst, with the precursor gas inside them. The cheapest systems appear to be existing tanker aircraft such as the US KC-135 or KC-10 military tankers, only nine of the larger KC-10 aircraft being required to deliver 1 Teragram (1 million tons) of sulphur dioxide per year at three flights per day. Sixteen-inch artillery shells are comparable in cost, as are a huge number of small balloons in which hydrogen sulphide (H₂S), another possible precursor gas, is mixed with hydrogen to give a buoyant balloon which bursts when it reaches the stratosphere; 37,000 commercial balloons would be needed per year. The systems are simpler than for marine cloud brightening, but the quantities involved are very large and the chemicals have to be hoisted high into the atmosphere.

We know that high-altitude particles can indeed affect climate, because of volcanic eruptions – the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, for example, produced a noticeable global cooling for three years afterwards. The cost would be within bounds, being estimated as 25-50 billion dollars per year to fully counteract Man’s additions of carbon dioxide, according to Paul Crutzen who was an early proponent of this idea. However, many potential problems have been identified. Rainfall would be reduced, which might have a serious impact on the Asian and African monsoons; there might be an increase in the rate of ozone destruction, leading to a regrowth of the ozone hole; it is difficult to predict how the cooling will be distributed worldwide, so some countries may experience less cooling than others, or even warming, and so on. Behind it all lies an unease with the idea of injecting large quantities of an undeniably toxic chemical into the upper atmosphere; marine cloud brightening with sea water particles sounds positively benign by comparison. One relentless opponent of aerosol injection, Alan Robock of Rutgers University, has recently changed his views, however; he co-authored a 2016 paper which showed that the aerosol cloud would not only reduce direct radiation reaching the ground, it would enhance diffuse radiation, which would combine with the cooling to produce an increase in plant photosynthesis rates. This increase in plant growth would itself play a role in reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, an unexpected extra benefit.

A few other geoengineering techniques have been proposed. One is the space reflector, a very large mirror or system of mirrors in orbit, to reflect large amounts of sunlight into space. However, nobody has come up with a feasible plan that could assemble anything like this in orbit at anything other than colossal cost.

Carbon drawdown

I have explained why carbon emission reduction is unlikely to happen, at least not fast enough, and if it is done slowly, as it will be, it will leave a legacy of excess CO₂ in the atmosphere which will continue to drive future warming. Geoengineering can counteract the impact of carbon dioxide and methane on the atmosphere, but at the cost of leaving the CO₂ to continue tis work in acidifying the ocean, which could ultimately destroy our marine ecosystem (and thus our global ecosystem, since the ocean makes up 72 per cent of the planet’s surface area). My bleak conclusion is that in the end (and that end may be close) we have to find a way of taking CO₂out of our planetary system if we are to defeat global warming and save our civilization. How do we do it?

First of all, we must take the whole problem seriously. In fact, if it the most serious question facing the world – can we bring ourselves back from the brink of runaway climate change and retain the basis of viable life for the humane race? Or must we grapple hopelessly with accelerating climate change which makes large parts of the planet unlivable? In this respect one of the most shameful failures has been that of the IPCC. In its Fifth Assessment report in 2013, the IPCC recognized that the only way to a viable climate is to follow the RCP2.6 route. I have already expressed my suspicion that the ‘RCP’ formulation of radiative forcing conceals the realities of what is needed to avoid disastrous climate change. But the result is a paradox, unstressed by the IPCC: the only way to save ourselves is to follow the RCP2.6 route, and the only way to do that is to actually take CO₂ out of the atmosphere, since we will very shortly reach the CO_­2 concentration (421ppm) which is the ceiling for ‘acceptable’ climate warming. We are certain to pass that limit without even noticing it in about a decade, so fast are CO₂ levels rising, and beyond that point our only hope is actual carbon removal. The IPCC knows this but ignores the problem of how we might actually remove CO_2. A further crucial component of CO₂ removal is the impact that large-scale application of it could have on ecosystems and biodiversity. This has to be studied on an international scale before we begin attempts at large-scaled CO₂ removal; again, this is ignored by the IPCC.

Two possible techniques have assumed prominence recently. They are bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), and afforestation. BECCS involves growing bioenergy crops, from grasses to trees; burning them in power stations; stripping the CO₂ from the resulting waste gases; and compressing the gas into a liquid for underground storage. Afforestation – planting trees – also relies on photosynthesis to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere; storage is achieved naturally, in timber and soil. If we are to limit the global temperature rise to 2^oC, we need to remove some 600 gigatons of CO₂ by the end of this century. Using BECCS, this would require crops to be planted solely for the purpose of CO₂removal on between 430 million and 580 million hectares of land – around one-third of the current total arable land on the planet, or about half the land area of the United States. This is clearly impossible, unless we can achieve remarkable increases in agricultural productivity which greatly exceed the needs of a rapidly growing global population. It is more likely that we will need that arable land to feed people (and in any case it will probably be less productive because of the extreme weather effects arising from Arctic change). BECCS would have to use primary forest and natural grassland, which equally we cannot spare because afforestation is itself one of the possible ways of removing CO₂. These wild places also contain the last strongholds of vast numbers of threatened terrestrial species, the loss of which might be disastrous for the continued survival of the planetary ecosystem. A further fundamental concern is whether BECCS would be as effective as is assumed at stropping CO₂ from the atmosphere. Planting crops at such a scale could involve more release than uptake of greenhouse gases, at least initially, as a result of land clearance, soil disturbance and increased use of fertilizer. When such effects are taken into account, the maximum amount of CO₂ that can be removed by BECCS (under the RCP2.6 scenario) has been estimated to be 391 gigatons by 2100, about 34 per cent less than the amount assumed to be needed to keep the temperature rise below 2^oC. If less optimistic assumptions are made about where the land for bioenergy crops can come from, the net capture by 2100 comes down to 135 gigatons. So it already looks as if BECCS cannot do the job alone. On top of all this, we would be planting bioenergy crops into a world of changing climate: what will their water requirements be in a warmer world? How will they compete with food production if overpopulation really leads to a race for cropland? And (as with other techniques) how do we capture and where do we store the carbon dioxide?

Afforestation sounds a gentler way of taking CO₂ out of the atmosphere, since we don’t have to put it anywhere. Everyone assumes that an increased forest cover is environmentally desirable – even while we are busy chopping down the Amazon and Southeast Asian forests for their hardwoods and to grow soya beans or keep cattle. How do we grow more forest when all the pressure is towards forest loss? Afforestation can also involve the loss of natural ecosystems, if we are replacing natural forest by managed monospecies forests. We are only at the beginning of the proper study of key forest species whose loss could be disastrous either for preserving our global ecosystem, or for keeping down serious pests like the bark beetle. A third of new drugs are developed from forest plants. And planting swathes of managed forest will cause complex changes in cloud cover, albedo and the soil-water balance, through changes to evaporation and plant transpiration. One undesirable change is occurring with the northern boreal forest. With global warming the treeline is moving north, which one might think of as a good thing except that during the season of snow cover a terrain covered with tree foliage (bare branches or evergreen needles) is darker than flat snow-covered grassland or tundra, so the overall albedo is reduced and again there is a net warming effect. Systematic use of afforestation will involve cutting down the trees (and storing the wood) when they have reached a certain stage of growth, followed by replanting; this will not work if increased fires, droughts, pests and disease cause the trees to die and fall before harvesting.

Many other ideas have bene proposed for CO₂ removal by biological, geochemical and chemical means. For all such schemes, modelling theoretical potential can give a completely different picture from that obtained when environmental impacts – not to mention practicalities, governance and acceptability – are considered. A case in point is the long history of discussion, research and policymaking on ocean fertilization, another CO₂-removal technique. When a link was first made between natural changes in the input of dust to the ocean, ocean productivity and climatic conditions, there were high expectations of how effective ocean fertilization might be as a way to avoid human-driven global warming. During the 1990s, researchers postulated that for every ton of iron powder added to sea water, tens of thousands of tons of carbon (and hence CO₂) could be fixed by the resulting blooms of phytoplankton. This estimate has been whittled down over the years and after fourteen small-scale field experiments, with the realization that most of the CO_{2 ­}absorbed by such blooms – stimulated either by adding iron or other nutrients to sea water, or by enhancing upwelling through mechanical means – is released back into the atmosphere when the phytoplankton decompose. Moreover, a large-scale increase in plankton productivity in one region (across the Southern Ocean, say) could reduce the yields of fisheries elsewhere by depleting other nutrients, or increase the likelihood of mid-water deoxygenation. Such risks have resulted in the near-universal rejection of ocean fertilization as a climate intervention, through bodies such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

More recently, other ocean-based CO₂-removal techniques have been suggested, such as the cultivation of seaweed to cover up to 9 per cent of the global ocean. The specific environmental implications of this method have yet to be assessed. Yet such an approach would clearly affect, and potentially displace, existing marine ecosystems that have high economic value, especially in shallow waters.

Back on land, other techniques include those to increase the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil, for example by ploughing in organic material such as straw, reducing ploughing (to limit soil disturbance) or adding biochar. Biochar has an interesting history all of its own, because of the efforts of a band of enthusiastic supporters to persuade the world that this is the answer to global warming. Crop materials or farm wastes are digested by a process called pyrolysis, which produces a liquid and leaves a charcoal-like spongy material that can be dug into soil and allegedly gives it special properties. It is never properly explained how all this disposes of CO_2. Another idea among some enthusiasts is to enhance weathering, which involves the absorption of CO₂ from the atmosphere by certain silicate rocks, especially olivine. The material has to be crushed to provide as much surface area as possible, and thus would need to be spread on beaches and other surfaces as a fine white sand. A slow chemical reaction then ensues which absorbs CO₂ and emits oxygen. It is true, as the enthusiasts, that this is the chemical process in the early Earth which first released oxygen from rocks. Yet to reduce the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere by 50 parts per million, to get us back to 350 ppm from our current 400 ppm, 1-5 kilograms per square metre of silicate rock would need to be applied each year to 2-6.9 billion hectares of land (15-45 per cent of Earth’s land surface area), mostly in the tropics. The volume of rock mined and processed would exceed the amount of coal currently produced worldwide, with the total costs of implementation estimated to be between $60 trillion and $600 trillion, far more than geoengineering techniques. Like geoengineering, the application would have to be continuous, since once the chemical reaction is over the rock is of no more use and must be covered with fresh layers. Clearly the whole thing is unfeasible. Yet it is crucial to know ore about the permanence of carbon storage for biologically based methods, and the environmental impacts that might result if such approaches are used at vast scale, so a wide range of research is needed.

All these methods therefore have serious, if not fatal, drawbacks. We are left with something that has yet to be invented, but which ought to be the subject of a research programme on the scale of the Manhattan Project, direct air capture (DAC). DAC means pumping air through a system which removes the CO₂ and either liquefies it and stores it or turns it chemically into something else, hopefully something useful. When I say it has ‘yet to be invented’, I mean that a system which is not impossibly expensive has yet to be invented. DAC can, in principle, be undertaken by passing air through anion-exchange resins that contain hydroxide or carbonate groups, which, when dry, absorb CO₂ and release it when moist. The extracted CO₂ can be compressed, stored in liquid form and deposited underground using carbon capture and storage technologies. The huge operational costs for DAC cover a similar range to those estimated for enhanced weathering, at the moment amounting to more than $100 per ton of carbon, although a recent (2016) breakthrough promises $40 per ton. The extraction process would also need land and probably water, and, as for BECCS, there is a risk of CO₂ ­leaking out of geological reservoirs. Such risks can be minimized by storing the liquid CO₂ beneath the sea or by using geochemical transformation, which involves in situ reactions between CO₂ and certain rock types. In theory, cooling (rather than chemistry) to liquefy the CO₂ could also be used to remove CO₂ from ambient air. The technical feasibility, costs and potential environmental impacts of this approach – which could involve setting up plants on high polar plateaus such as Antarctica or Greenland – have yet to be investigated. Since my own belief, based on the above reasoning, is that Direct Air Capture is all that we are left with as a way of maintaining the world in anything like its present condition in the long run, then if we carry out serious research on the scale of the wartime Manhattan Project we may be able to bring down the cost in the same way as solar photovoltaic energy has plummeted in cost in recent years.

A valid criticism of geoengineering or carbon removal is that it encourages us to do little or nothing about reducing our carbon dioxide levels, and that our urgent actions should focus on emissions reduction and not on an unproven ‘emit now, remove later’ strategy. But the unfortunate reality is that the global population, especially in the West, is extraordinarily reluctant to give up the comforts and conveniences of living in a fossil fuel world. We will eventually, because we will have to. But we don’t see why we should just now. Just one more Ryanair flight, and isn’t that SUV a good way of getting the children to school? But even if a drastic and immediate effort is made to cut emissions, significant geoengineering and CO₂ removal operations will need to begin around 2020, with up to 20 gigatons of CO₂ extracted each year by 2100 to keep the global temperature increase below 2^oC. We need to know if that is feasible, in order to answer the next question.”

Extract 11 of the Memoirs

Cats: Urine and Fury

One of those early memories that has been reinforced and possibly distorted by frequent recollection and a categorisation as one of my strong early memories is a memory from possibly age three of being on the Turpentine/forest end of the verandah with the black family cat Barry (at that time, probably the only cat we had). I hiss at Barry and he reacts in fear and retreats from me under the big cedar outdoor table on the verandah. I smile and possibly giggle as a result. Something of that nature.

I recall that I used to draw on this memory often as a child in support of the narrative that I treated Barry appallingly badly (I remember recounting the memory on more than one occasion), and was incapable of feeling any pity for him (instead, extracted pleasure from harassing him). I think this narrative has a lot of truth to it. I’m quite sure that I treated Barry as little more than an amusement which I could treat as I pleased (until maybe the age of five or so) –  at least when my dad wasn’t around to scold me for doing so. I certainly never cuddled with Barry like my dad; for me, he was the sick black creature who had issues with peeing who we put in the laundry at night, even though it got really cold in winter and that was cruel.

Barry died when I was six (I think), of feline AIDS. Actually, that’s not quite true; we put him down (though I think he was pretty sick so it was possibly the right thing to do, etc (I mean that’s the sort of thing people say, isn’t it, even though they’re not even operating within a systematic ethical framework when making such evaluations and their claims should therefore be analysed as mere expressive speech acts)). I wasn’t there when Barry hopped off this mortal coil, but I think my sister was, along with my dad. My dad was really attached to Barry and so he was very sad about the execution, even though he was the one who ordered and paid for it (it’s sort of fucked up, in a way).

We had a proper funeral and burial ceremony for Barry. My dad dug a grave, in a heavy downpour, crying (is that a false memory influenced by pop cultural representations of grave-digging or was it actually raining heavily?), and then the whole family, with our new cat Millie (a lot more on her in a few paragraphs’ time) gathered together for the funeral. I think it was a pleasant afternoon, with sunlight breaking through the big Turpentine in a lovely lacework pattern (actually, a lot of that is extrapolation). I think maybe some of the trees around us were still a bit wet, with water dripping off leaves and the like… but I can’t assert that with the same smug confidence with which I assert that climate change is an existential threat to civilisation as we know it, or that the United States is the world’s biggest terrorist organisation (this is meant to be fractally ironic or some such (the phrase “fractally ironic” only recursively amplifying the irony (this pseudo-mathematical addendum only amplifying further (oh but now you see the recursion yes?))). Was it early Autumn 2003? I don’t know; basically, I don’t remember anything about this event with confidence 60%+. My dad actually had prepared a proper eulogy including poetry recitation, and it may be that my sister had prepared something also. I don’t think I had prepared anything. I must admit that I wasn’t the least bit cut up about it; it may well be that the thought on my mind as the ceremony was about to commence and then after it did commence was something like “Isn’t dad getting a bit carried away?”. I very dimly (perhaps erroneously) recall developing an attitude of mild disapproval, although I very dimly (perhaps erroneously) recall trying and failing to cry when everyone else was (maybe? Man the fact that I can’t remember shit from my own life really casts into doubt all of history). Anyhow, I do know with high confidence (largely, I suspect, because my sister brought it up after the event on a number of occasions) that my dad was crying throughout his eulogy and his recitation of the poem. What poem, you ask? I don’t recall and I wouldn’t bet good money that my dad does himself. Perhaps it was something by Blake. Whatever it was, I think it was something with gravitas and dignity, suitable for such a noble cat as Bartholomeu (or whatever the fuck his full name was, if he had one). I don’t know. I don’t think it was a poem about cats, that’s for sure. That would have been shit.

I notice on re-reading the paragraph that I am really undercutting the sombre gravity of this event in my relay thereof, and it is rather grotesque. I regret it, but I won’t do anything about it because it’s arguably a funny paragraph. I mean, to be clear, it was a fucking sad afternoon. Fucking sad, I tell you.

Before we interred Barry, Millie hopped in his grave and we had to get her out. Millie knew what was going on, we decided. I think it may have been a touching moment, or at least one of those moments that you think Fuck that’s an anecdote happening in front of my very eyes.  

We buried Barry next to Stumpy – which reminds me that the Reader has no clue who Stumpy is. Stumpy was a cat who turned up at my parents’ doorstep in Marrickville (or was it a house they had before Marrickville?) before I was even born with a fucked-up tail on account of some incident involving a firecracker (some sadistic asshole had apparently attached a firecracker to its tail). The fucked-up tail is why it got the name Stumpy. Stumpy was a cat that ended up dealing with health issues and ultimately died of leukaemia. I have no memory of Stumpy, even though she must have survived long enough to make it to Wahroonga in order to be buried there, which means that she must have been around at least until I was almost 2 and probably a little later than that. Stumpy’s grave was marked with a glass bottle.

Anyhow, we got Millie out of the grave and then Barry was buried (I actually don’t remember any details of how Barry was buried (was he in a casket or some shit? Pretty sure my dad wasn’t holding some stiff with rigor mortis and maggots coming out its eyes, because I’d definitely remember that (like how I have a vivid memory of the stinking, bloated rat on the lawn with maggots wriggling out of virtually every pore of its body)).

The long and short of this memory is that Barry died and we put the post-animated body in the fucking dirt, so that he could become a feast for the various disgusting creatures of the underworld. Now onto Millie.

Millie lived with Barry for about a year. She always wanted to play with Barry and he didn’t have the energy or zest to join in. I remember there was a lot of, like, playful mounting and things of that nature that we found amusing, because Barry would always be extremely dyspeptic and cantankerous but was too good-hearted or frail to lash out.

How and why did we acquire Millie? I’ll deal with the why first. We acquired Millie because my sister wanted a dog and we couldn’t get a dog because we couldn’t easily fence off our property to prevent the dog straying too far during the day, and a cat was the next best thing (if that ‘explanation’ doesn’t satisfy you, I’ve got a fistful of words to throw angrily at you: fuck off you cunt, I simply don’t give a shit). I think it was in very late 2002 – perhaps a few days before my sister’s birthday (it was a birthday thing) – when we travelled to the RSPCA to choose a kitten (nobody wants adult cats). I remember we ended up at this sunny, semi-covered area with like a very long row of cages containing kittens (if I am remembering the place correctly in my mind, it was probably far too hot for these little kittens and therefore kind of cruel). Miranda had the option to pick ones she liked the look of and (try to) cuddle them, with the assistance of an experienced employee. I think Millie was not the first. I think that the first few she picked up were, naturally, pretty frightened and therefore somewhat resistant to the whole embrace-with-a-member-of-a-different-and-much-bigger-species thing. But Millie, the beautiful black-and-grey tabby with magnificent green eyes (and perhaps a bit of Chincilla) (she looked quite a lot like the tabby kitten that is on Whiskas cat food)), acted completely calm in Miranda’s arms and allowed Miranda to give her a long cuddle without disturbance or incident (she may well have purred too). And so Millie had succeeded. Later we had discovered that Millie – that devious Mephistophelean schemer – had just been dissimulating. It turned out that she hated affection and cuddling, that she was selfish to her core, perhaps incapable of love altogether (a.k.a a typical domestic cat, a species which was domesticated much more recently than the dog and belongs to a less social Family than dogs)…

Millie has always been, in most respects, a rather repugnant creature. Not physically. Physically she is beautiful (I know that sounds like I want to have sex with my cat and… well I do). As a kitten and in her younger ‘adulthood’, she was very sleek, lithe and agile, capable of astonishing leaps and hunting feats. After her kittenhood phase of spending her time sleeping in the drawers of desks and any other tightly confined spaces she could find (young cats seem to have claustrophilia), she moved onto the other quintessentially feline activity of leaping up to the tallest possible perch in any given room (which often involved quite dangerous acrobatic feats, like 1.5m+ leaps from one surface to another). She was so agile, in fact, that she managed to kill a couple of birds in her early life in spite of her bell.

But as far as personality is concerned, she has always been a monumental asshole. I mean, sure, she used to do cute things as a kitten, like sleep in the desk drawer downstairs and play in boxes, and, sure, you could get her to sit on your lap after dad trained her on that (but she would only accept being on your lap facing away from you), so there was an element of affection. And, sure, it was fun watching her run around the house insanely in pursuit of toys thrown by my dad (while he repeatedly said “Skitch ‘em, Milly”, for some unknown reason). But most of the time she was an annoying asshole. The biggest problem was that she used to moan and scowl and whine for food relentlessly and endlessly. (She’s still alive and she still does this, but it’s not nearly as bad. She’s mellowed a lot.) As a child coming home from school, the first thing I would do would be to fill her bowl with ‘nibblies’, even though my dad didn’t want me to feed her at that time, since the alternative was to be jumped on, scratched and generally tormented wherever one went in the house, and whatever one was trying to do. Even when you had just fed her, she would often keep pestering you for attention (or more food?). Often, when you had just put food in her bowl, she would apparently not notice or think, “I deserve something better”, and thus continue her moaning and whinging until you wanted to kick her to death.

In later years, when I was on my laptop (I only got my first PC in late year 9, I think), playing Skyrim or TF2 or doing homework or writing a terrible poem, she would start walking all over the keys, fucking up my shit. And sometimes she would try to claw me if I kept ignoring her and brushing her away. After she had done this several times, and I had thrown her off the desk several times, I would eventually resort to closing the door of the room I was in so she couldn’t get in. I got more brutal over time (to be fair, I felt like she did, too, like a mini-arms race). Similarly, when I was playing FIFA by myself during one of those long, lonely school holidays, Millie would often try to jump on my lap, even after I had angrily pushed her off. This caused me great frustration. If she persisted, I would eventually be forced to angrily carry her to the window and toss her outside. For most of my life, Millie has just been an immense annoyance.

Before she became severely arthritic, Millie was also a terrorist to the animals around the house. Under dad’s command, we would always have to bring her in at night (if it was night-time and “someone had let Millie out”, he’d blow his top, as is his custom). This was a sensible policy, given that she would kill possums if given the opportunity. On one occasion, in 2009 (there or thereabouts), my dad discovered Millie on the veranda eating a possum whole, bones, guts and all (I guess it was a ringtail), leaving only the tail. Most of the time, her hunting practice would be to stun and stupefy a rat or big lizard from the garage (or wherever else she found them) and then carry it to the veranda, mewing at us to open the veranda door so that she could present her kill to us inside the house.

Speaking of lizards, one very tragic thing about Millie’s presence is that she dramatically reduced the lizard population around the house. Before her arrival, you could barely step ten centimetres around the house without stepping on a lizard (which would subsequently drop its tail and slither around absurdly and piteously). This may not be connected to Millie’s arrival, but I also remember that we used to also have a blue-tongue lizard visitor (by this I really mean that I have a memory of a blue-tongue lizard sitting perched above us in the neighbour’s garden visible from the driveway, and also a very hazy, possibly false memory of my dad saying, when I told him of this memory, that this was not a one-off event). After years of Millie’s marauding about the garden – after her brutal, ongoing campaign of terrorism and rapine against the local reptiles – you could barely spot any lizards whatsoever (I’m saying by about 2006 we noticed there were many fewer lizards).

(One very tragic and really scary thing about the ecology of the garden around the house is that there used to be masses of snails in the garden at the front of the house, leaving slime trails all over the brickwork and the marble porch). Then we suddenly noticed around 2007 or 2008 that they had disappeared, completely: it went from a thriving population to total extinction. I also recall that there used to be occasional butterflies in the back garden. I’m not sure I’ve seen one for years. My dad has repeatedly lamented ever since I was a kid how there used to be many more insects around when he was a kid, including butterflies of all different kinds, cicada shells on virtually every tree, and also far more spiders and snakes. I seriously worry about the rise of the manicured garden, and herbicide and pesticide overuse. I seriously worry about ecology in general. That study of insect populations in Germany recently publicised in the Guardian [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809] was jaw-droppingly ominous. Unfortunately, the percentage of the population that knows a lot about ecology and cares about it is vanishingly small. The percentage of the population that is capable of nonlinear thinking about environmental threats is similar.)

Ever since Millie became arthritic, she stopped hunting completely. Luckily, the lizard population recovered. A couple of years ago, I was walking along the newly made path by the side of the house near the bamboo, and, looking down, suddenly had an incredible flash of déjà vu. So many lizards were wriggling about my feet, darting away into the shade as I approached – just the way it used to be when I was a little boy. The lizards were back. How thrilling it was.

There are various more random details about Millie that must be included, for the sake of comprehensiveness.

In January 2003 or January 2004 (not sure! (if it was 2003, Millie would have been only a few months old and not yet at full size probably)), we decided to try taking Millie with us on our annual two-week holiday to South Durras, a sleepy beach town 15 minutes north of Batemans Bay (where we rented the same house for perhaps 8 years in succession). I wasn’t in the car with Millie; it was either my mum, my sister and her friend M, or my dad, my sister and her friend M. (I can’t remember which parent I was taking the trip with.) I think originally she was being kept in her cat cage in the backseat – a cage which she later came to associate with terror and trauma – and I believe that she got quite bad motion sickness and perhaps vomited while in this cage. Understandably, she was terrified. At some point the people in the car (I’m leaning towards the view that it was my mum driving that car) decided that it might be a good idea to let her out of the cage, probably motivated by anguished mewing and such. But this was a disaster. As it was recounted to me when we met up with them at (I think) some petrol station at some point in our journey (maybe at Braidwood, a town with a wonderful old-fashioned boiled lolly shop which we often stopped off at when we weren’t just taking the slightly quicker coastal route), Millie went bezerk when let out of the cage. She was wide-eyed, stiff-tailed, climbing all over the place, in a mad panic. If I recall correctly, she also micturated in the car, possibly due to pure terror. So it was a disaster. And so the family vowed that Millie would never be taken on a long car trip again. Thereafter Millie would reside in a boarding house for the duration of our holidays longer than three days (if it was three days, we could get my dad’s mum to come over to feed her or, later, for a few years, J, the girl in my year at primary school, who lived up the street).

Millie is a very furry cat in winter, and always malted massively in summer. Our house had a lot of cat fur in it (we also used to have (until 2009) these horrible grey carpets through the house that smelled pretty rank and musty because the house has always had major dampness problems, being both poorly designed, without air-conditioning (a choice, for environmental reasons) and in the wettest part of Sydney (a city which, contrary perhaps to people’s perception, has the second highest aggregate rainfall of all Australia’s capitals (behind only Darwin (so Wikipedia told me a few months back)) (it’s true that even in La Nina years we rarely get relentless rainy periods, but when it rains in Sydney it pours (the frequency of rain may well be lower than Melbourne)) so it was lucky I didn’t have any allergies (but absolutely shit for my dad and sister)).

In winter, when we had the fire going (as we did every night from mid-Autumn to the end of Winter (house has no heating either)), Millie would prostrate herself in front of it, fully stretched out to prevent overheating. In summer, she would do/does the same thing under the verandah.

As parenthetically mentioned above, Millie has been terrified of her cage her entire life. It is very difficult trying to put her in it in order to take her to the vet or to the boarding place in Glenorie. She doesn’t get severely car sick these days, though, luckily.

Millie once got a paralysis tick and my dad only saw she was in serious trouble late at night (I think she was having serious trouble breathing) and had to rush her to this place at, I think, Ryde before she died. He ended up getting a speeding fine for going too fast on the Highway near Lindfield Public School.

Millie used to have a feline friend that she would ‘chat to’ on the driveway every now and then. By and large, though, she has always been very antisocial.

Whenever we used to eat at the dinner table (which was rare), Millie would sit on one of the chairs with us and sometimes (at least the first few times) try to eat the food. It seemed like it was an important status thing for her to be up high with us when we were eating.

When we started connecting an office projector to our shitty TV to watch TV and movies and play PS2 on the opposite living room wall (which we did for many years, powered by my technical expertise alone), we would often like to joke when Millie was present with us in the living room that Millie was watching whatever we were watching with us. It sometimes seemed as if she was watching. Perhaps she was too.

When the brush turkeys arrived at our house in 2009 or 2010 (whenever it was), we were very concerned that Millie would hunt them and eat them. She didn’t. They were too big for her, I guess; I think they scared her. She would initially sort of stalk them but she never leapt on them. Perhaps she would have if they had arrived a couple of years earlier.

Millie often spends her time resting in the bamboo, surreptitiously. Maybe her penchant for doing this intensified with the arrival of the brush turkeys. I think she likes surveilling them from a covert position.

Millie has often been terrorised by the yappy Bichon Frise dogs from the big house next door (whereof there have been several generations now, never more than two at once). These dogs, starting from the OG, “Lemmy”, have possessed and passed down a trait of extreme territorial belligerence and yappiness. I don’t think the family that owns them has ever walked any of these dogs they have ever owned (they do have a large amount of lawn space to roam), which probably is one of the factors that helps explain their extreme territorialism. The second two dogs in the lineage used to attack me whenever I took out the bin (I guess they figured the street near their house was their territory too). Even though they were small, they would scare the shit out of me and I recall that there were several occasions where I took the bin half-way down the driveway, then saw that the dogs would assault me if I went further and decided to return home and finish the bin job a few hours hence. Many years back there were a few incidents where the original two dogs (Lemmy and Ruby (Ruby came much later than Lemmy, who was there for years by himself, and turned Ruby from a friendly, cuddly dog into a monster)) literally chased Millie right back to the house. Once I seem to recall they forced Millie to run up a tree right near the front of our house.

Millie has always been terrified of dogs (no doubt the nasty personalities of these dogs described above have contributed to this complex), which, along with the fence problem, is another reason my dad was always hostile to the prospect of us getting a dog after Millie (even though dogs are 9 million times better than cats). When we minded our maternal cousins’ super friendly, young and energetic labradoodle Styx for one week in 2014, Millie was initially absolutely terrified and couldn’t tolerate being indoors when Styx was indoors. Eventually, she overcame that (and I think she hated the idea that she might be losing access to her own house), but when Styx approached Millie when Millie was perched up on high (like on the ironing board at the back of the house), she would stiffen and hiss and we would have to pull Styx away.

Millie typically sleeps in my parent’s bed at night, though she definitely always preferred resting on and sleeping in my bed to my sister’s, when my sister and I were both living in the family home. This is probably mostly because I always was the one to feed the cat and because I spent much more time with Millie. Maybe also because I was bigger than my sister in the period I am talking about and because I became more aggressive with Millie as I got older (I think Millie realised that I had become at least as alpha as her, or more alpha, so she respected me). I have snuggled with Millie every night whenever I have held the fort alone (I have done this for quite long stretches in the past – I did it in 2015 for four weeks, resulting in Raskolnikov levels of solitude). Often Millie just sleeps on soft objects (like my washing) in my room. My dad trained Millie to get under the covers in Winter. Millie has gotten under the covers with me a few times. Not many. I remember I used to have big issues whenever Millie tried to sleep on me, because I sleep almost on my tummy and move from side to side a lot and I would always have to shift her. Eventually, she would lose patience altogether after being knocked off so many times.

As suggested before, I feel as if Millie’s personality might have mellowed. She’s a lot meeker now and less strident in her demands for food. I think she doesn’t even care to jump on your lap when you’re watching TV these days, like she used to. She mostly minds her own business now, which is actually wonderful. She’s no longer that much of an asshole.

For the last few years, Millie has had bad arthritis (getting worse) as well as an only recently vet-diagnosed kidney issues (overwhelmingly common for cats in old age) which cause her to drink a vast amount of water and want to piss all the time. The arthritis has long been an issue; she probably stopped doing acrobatic leaps way back in 2012, maybe earlier. She now walks with a limp most of the time and doesn’t run at all, although we have been giving her this stuff in her food for a while that seems to alleviate the symptoms. The kidney problems came later. I remember my dad told me to take her to the vet to see what was wrong back in, like, 2015, but I didn’t and told him I did and that there was nothing wrong because I was a lazy piece of shit. The excessive peeing is a pretty terrible problem, because it means we have to empty her tray way more, and also because she often tries to pee in my shower. (Several years ago, it occurred to her that it must be ok to urinate in the bathroom if that’s where we do it and, despite castigations after implementations of this false lesson, she still tries to do it.)

She’s probably actually in pretty good nick for her age. She’s very old – 15, if it’s correct that we did get her near the end of 2002. She may not die for a couple more years yet. Who is to say?

Anyhow, I like my cat and all, but I think cats are a scourge – in my country at least. They kill far too many native animals [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-04/cats-killing-one-million-birds-in-australia-every-day-estimates/9013960]. And they’re mostly rubbish to be around.

Millie is ok. I spend most of my time joking about eating her. I have joked to one or both of my parents, “When are we going to kill Millie?” hundreds of times. My dad used to get quite angry at this; I would try to explain to him that Millie clearly viewed us with total contempt and was an extreme Randian egoist who, if incarnated in human form, would be repugnant and intolerable. Nevertheless, I still felt a bit guilty myself when he pressed me on it. I never seriously thought about killing my cat.

A Strong Case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6czRFLs5JQo

Not sure that I want to endorse the characterisation of Alice Dreger contained in this video, whose book is clearly written in good-faith by a person totally without the kind of mindset that leads one to want to "trigger PC cucks", but in this video, 'Contra'/Natalie makes a convincing case that: a) Ray Blanchard's typology for transwomen is off the mark (she argues this in recognition of the purpose of a reductive typology, which can be diagnostically powerful even if they misfire); and b) there is a perfectly legitimate possibility for a conceptualisation of the psychology of gender-transitioning that neither involves a mystical gender essentialism nor Blanchard's typology. She contends, in superficial agreement with Blanchard, that there are two recognisable fuzzy categories of trans women, in terms of sexuality and life history, but that Blanchard's second category does not really map onto "Cluster B" (in her terminology) at all. (It appears that she does believe that a lot of transwomen ("Cluster A") fit the description of being, in their former lives, very effeminate homosexual men, although she suggests that thinking of their motivations for transitioning as almost entirely sexual is way off the mark.) As I interpret her video, the nutshell of her opposition is this: even if sexuality is involved in motivations, as it always is with adults (and yes, probably most transwomen have a strong preference for being a female-presenting person in a sexual context), nobody is going to make the very drastic, daunting and life-changing decision to transition - it's an extremely scary thing to do - without a high degree of dysphoria. And nobody experiences debilitating dysphoria just because of sexual dissatisfaction, even if extreme.

(Note that I have read Michael Bailey's book (years ago, via a PDF online) and Dreger's book (which I spent money on (I thought it was ok and definitely broadly agreed with the thesis that justice activism does not require one to abandon the scientific mindset and a reverent attitude towards the Truth (I mean, in a sense, this idea is just Deweyan)). Note also that I think that Contra, like her fellow self-identified Youtube "SJW" "Shaun" (Shaun and Jen), tends to steelman 'leftists' way too much (put clever and nuanced beliefs in the mouths of ordinary folks without the intellectual sophistication they have). I cannot get on board intellectually or emotionally with their "SJW"/"leftist" tribalism. For example, I hate the fact that Contra in this video identifies as a "Postmodernist" when, as she soon clarifies, she still believes in striving for objective truth and the epistemic authority of bona fide science and simply thinks that Bailey does not practise good science. It is so bizarre to me to signal identification with the tribe of "Postmodernists" if this is what you believe, because non-reactionary people who rail against Postmodernism and Postmodernists (like me or Chomsky: http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html or Nussbaum: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf) are not talking about people like this at all! This kind of tribal signalling is pernicious! It is also sad to me that those two seem to be happily tribally affiliated with the PhilosophyTube guy, whom I find to be embarrassingly incompetent and irrational, and also that they are part of the gang of people who like to call everything bad in the world "Capitalism" for some reason (this is another pernicious tribal thing).)