The late great Mike Davis saw far into the distance, often by looking very closely at things as they were. In 2010, he penned an impressive essay for New Left Review with the alternatively plaintive or thrilling title: “Who Will Build the Ark?” Gramsci saw the old world as merely “dying” but Davis here is more definitive:
Our old world, the one that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended
In doing so, he presages Bill McKibben’s Eaarth in treating the birth of the Anthropocene with the gravity it deserved. You should, as they say, go read the whole thing, but a couple of highlights. It’s built as an argument with himself — first the pessimistic view of a world addicted to fossil fuels and then an optimistic perspective focusing on the possibility of cities as saviors rather than symbols of our excessive consumption. The pessimism was well-deserved. We can forget now how different the future looked a mere decade and a half ago. Coal was king, and many including the doyens of MIT saw little prospect of that changing. Solar and wind were rounding errors in an energy system where alternatives to burning things were dismissed as wishful thinking. Tesla even receives a mention, not as a global behemoth but as a frail flower likely to be crushed by the vicissitudes of global financial markets and oil prices.
That Davis had the capacity amidst all of this and see cities as potential solutions rather than the culmination of our rift with nature is impressive. McKibben took a bit longer but has come to similar conclusions. Cities — dense with people and amenities — leave land for nature and are critical for decarbonizing a planet of 8 billion people (or 9 or 10). We might not agree on who will build the ark, but much of its form being urban is hard to debate.
As it happens, apparently the good people at Verso agree that this essay is worth your while as a new edited volume of climate essays from the NLR will be coming out soon, taking Davis’s title for the book as well.
I’ve poked Adam Tooze recently, but his prodigious output remains an incredible record of analysis on all things political economy. His green hydrogen essay is worth your time, dismissing much of the hype but reminding everyone of the scale of the existing hydrogen business, which is mostly a combination of refining, chemicals, and fertilizer. As ever, he argues that we can’t start anywhere but in the middle of things.
We’ve already entered managed retreat season on the climate calendar. It always follows Earth Day but usually we have a bit more time; spring disappears into a single lovely afternoon.
The joint Quinn Slobodan and Benjamin Braun renaissances really making me think about my baldness in a way that I haven’t in quite some time.
Finally, I’m not going to jinx it, but having a new post by Liu Hongqiao is always a treat.