Storyboard for the dream sequence of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, in the Harry Ransom Center.
Research on solar geoengineering has been side-lined, and its possible role in climate policy has gone largely undiscussed. All those who take part in such discussions as there are stress that solar geoengineering should at best be seen as a complement to decarbonisation, shaving off extreme risks while the world moves towards a fossil-free economy. But the fear that it would instead be treated as an alternative is sufficiently persuasive as to be pervasive. If 2023 is not an aberration, though, and the world really is moving into an accelerated phase of warming, that reluctance might be reassessed. Emissions reduction should be able to slow the warming of the Earth within a few decades. Pursued with real zeal, it might bring it to an end this century. But it provides no cooling in the meantime. If that proves to be what the world wants, solar geoengineering is the only thing which looks able to provide it.
Encyclopedia Babylonica 5: a brief hiatus
I just realized that I need to pause this series for a while. Why? Because I’m reading Ellul’s The Meaning of the City and am finding it so provocative, so maddening, so profound, so bizarre, that it will clearly take me some time to process it. I mean, the guys writes things like this:
And the Christian, like everyone else, is looking for a solution in laws. What should the Christian position be regarding these problems (which we call "the problems of modern life, instead of giving them their permanent name? Arrange things somehow, make city life possible; moralize the city, its leisure time, its work, its dreams. This is how Christians plan. What to do? God has revealed to us very clearly that there is absolutely nothing to be done. God has given us no commands with regard to the city. He affords us no law. For the city is not an inner problem for man. God can say to us, “You shall not commit adultery,” but he has never said, “You shall not live in the city.” For on the one hand we have a personal attitude with a man, which he can modify according to his readiness to obey God's commandments. And on the other, the city is a phenomenon absolutely removed from man's power, a phenomenon which he is fundamentally incapable of affecting. For man is not responsible for making the city something other than it is, as we have already seen. There is nothing to be done. And the problem does not change. It is still what it was when, forty or fifty centuries ago, they built up those thick walls of clay whose foundations still subsist. For God has cursed, has condemned, the city instead of giving us a law for it.
What am I supposed to do with that? Such a bold (and apparently crazy?) argument requires further reflection, and the same is true of the rest of the book. Some books need to be read slowly, with much annotation, or not read at all.
Posting will continue, but for a little while it won’t be about Babylon. (And you know what? As the world’s leading advocate of reading at whim, if I happen to read something else before I get to Ellul then it might be a larger while.)
And just as I’m posting these I see this from Craig Mod — serendipity!
One more.
And as I look through those photos, I find myself thinking: the Lake District — not unattractive!
My beloved! Taken on a trail overlooking Grasmere, 2011. Today we celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary.
This is a fact we often miss about our Constitution. It works by setting competing interests and powers against each other, which critics sometimes caricature as substituting an almost mechanical proceduralism for morally substantive civic formation. But that is precisely wrong. This approach actually begins from the insight that, in order to be properly formative, our politics must always be in motion—that moral formation is a matter of establishing habits, and that civic habits are built up by civic action more than by a proper arrangement of rules. The different interests, priorities, and power centers set against each other in our system do not rest against each other, like interlocking beams holding up a roof. Rather, they push, pull, and tug at each other and unceasingly compete for position. They are living political actors, not inanimate structural supports. And none can achieve anything without dealing with the others, who are always in their way. The result is a peculiar style of politics, which feels frustrating and acrimonious at almost any given instant, but can be remarkably dynamic in the long run.
A brilliant essay.
Greenwich Observatory, by Eric Ravilious (1937)