This is what extinction feels like from the inside.
In our age of Republican minority despotism, attempts to grapple with anthropogenic climate destruction have been warped to encourage several varieties of despair, rendered acute by the ticking-time-bomb nature of the problem. The losses suffered by Earth and its populations — plant and animal — are neither reversible nor remediable. There is no future filled with reparations. There is no long moral arc. Ten or fifteen years ago it was possible to think of the polar bear and the white rhinoceros as martyrs, dying off to shame us into better harmony with the natural world. Not ruined archaic torsos but videos of extinct creatures would say, “You must change your life.” The same hope held with respect to coral reefs, forests, and certain small Pacific Islands. A dark glimmer of progressive thinking (the “bargaining phase,” as it were) was discernible in the Kyoto Protocol and at the Paris conference, where the prime minister of Tuvalu’s call to impose a strict not-to-be-exceeded target of a 1.5-degree-Celsius rise in global temperature — the minimum required to save his people from a homeless future in a world hostile to refugees and immigrants — was dismissed in favor of pragmatic mitigating maneuvers intended to induce the cooperation of holdout nations such as the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.
At least now we can see things clearly — if only we could focus on the problem. Whatever they may say or tweet, the Trump Administration is not in denial about climate change. In fact, it has the perverse distinction of being the first US administration to address it head-on. In 2000, we had a presidential candidate who understood the perils facing us, even if he underplayed them to try to get elected. (By a margin of one United States Supreme Court justice, he was not elected.) Instead, the Bush Administration pretended climate change did not exist, though back then it was called global warming; “climate change” was a Bush/Rove term of obfuscation that eventually carried the day, even among scientists. President Obama spoke softly about the seriousness of human-driven climate change in public while his administration chipped away at automobile emissions and provided token green-energy incentives. These may have been the correct policies for a major, developed nation . . . in the early 1990s. But like much else after the financial crisis in 2008, the opportunity for a visionary shift in national focus — one that would have required investment at least equal to that being poured into the unwinnable war on terror — was bartered away to chase after an illusory political consensus with the terminally uncompromising opposition.
By contrast, from its first days the Trump presidency brought a series of cabinet appointments and executive orders clustered around the single purpose of hastening ecological collapse: Bring back coal! Shackle and corrupt the EPA! Remove climate change information from government websites! Withdraw from the Paris Agreement! A candidate whose platform called for pushing carbon dioxide levels past the frontier of scientists’ most dire predictions could not have expressed that desire more swiftly or succinctly. It was almost as if that were the whole point. As indeed it was.
There are two clearheaded ways to deal with what’s happening to the Earth. One is to Manhattan-Project the implementation of clean energy sources and immediately stop burning fossil fuels. We also need to ditch the patriarchal models of wealth and status reproduction that have been constitutive of nearly all expansionist, war-making, and resource-depleting societies of the past ten thousand years. While we do that, we can try to ameliorate the many catastrophes that have already been set in motion.
The other way, the path we’re on currently, is to concede that billions of people will see their economic and cultural lives ruined before dying off at a scale to make the casualties of World War II appear insignificant — and “gameplan” not to be among them. That’s what “winning” in the climate-changed future amounts to, and that’s the world the Republican Party has committed itself — and the rest of us — to endure: a social-Darwinist survival of the “fittest,” “wealthiest,” or most prepared, at least in the sense of stockpiling the most guns and canned food. It’s been painfully apparent since the term ecological refugee was popularized by a UN report in the mid-1980s that unthinkable numbers of people would be forced into migration in coming decades by climate change. Immigration, national borders, and food, water, and energy distribution will be the central issues facing all governments. From there it’s a short step, if it’s even a step at all, to a vehement resurgence of open racism and bigotry among those with the good fortune to inhabit the least immediately vulnerable areas, be they the highlands of Burma, the fertile Pannonian plain of Hungary, or the plunder-enriched sprawl of the United States.
The looming prospect of a panoply of belligerent, Blut und Boden regimes has always been one of the scariest potential political outcomes of widespread ecological collapse. Through a series of accidents and “influences,” we got our version early in the United States. We can and should get rid of it, but the paranoid energies that enabled its triumph are durable and already have pervaded much of the world. Trumpism is our first national response to climate change, and it’s a brutal, fearful, vengeful, and gloating response — one that predicts and invites warfare on a global scale. For all the terrible statistical projections, alarming models, and buried reports, what’s most immediately terrifying to the human imagination about climate change is the revelation of how large numbers of our species behave under conditions of perceived threat, scarcity, and danger. (...)
Truly, we have fucked it up in so many ways! Yet while climate change increasingly feels like an inescapable doom upon humanity, our only means of recourse remains political. Even under the heavy weather of present and near-future conditions, there’s an imperative to imagine that we aren’t facing the death of everyone, or the end of existence. No matter what the worst-case models using the most advanced forecasting of feedback loops may predict, we have to act as if we can assume some degree of human continuity. What happens in the next decades is instead, as the climate reporter Kate Aronoff has said, about who gets to live in the 21st century. And the question of who gets to live, and how, has always been the realm of politics.
The most radical and hopeful response to climate change shouldn’t be, What do we give up? It should remain the same one that plenty of ordinary and limited humans ask themselves each day: How do we collectively improve our overall quality of life? It is a welfare question, one that has less to do with consumer choices — like changing light bulbs — than with the spending of trillions and trillions of still-available dollars on decoupling economic growth and wealth from carbon-based fuels and carbon-intensive products, including plastics.
The economist Robert Pollin makes a convincing case that only massive investment in and commitment to alternative energy sources stands any chance of lowering emissions to acceptable levels. All other solutions, from “degrowth” to population control, will fall well short of intended targets while causing greater societal pain and instability. To achieve a fairly modest 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions within twenty years, Pollin suggests in a recent New Left Review essay, we would have to invest, per year, “1–1.5 per cent of global GDP — about $1 trillion at the current global GDP of $80 trillion,” and continually increase that investment, “rising in step with global growth thereafter.” Whether we call this a Manhattan Project for renewable, sustainable energy or a Green New Deal, as Pollin and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have named it, the point is to change the political discourse around climate change from either mindless futurism of the kind that proposes large scale “geoengineering” projects or fruitless cap-and-trade negotiations at the mercy of obstructionists. Only a great potlatch of what we have can save us from a bonfire of the vanities on a planetary scale.
In the short term, a true Green New Deal would need to be more like a Green Shock Doctrine. As hurricanes, fires, and floods pile up, each one would provide the occasion to unhook more people from the fossil-fuel grid. At the scale Pollin envisions, it would be naive to assume that a switch from fossils to renewables could happen smoothly. There would be disruptions to almost every aspect of economic life, including food supplies, the power grid (even the internet!), and daily work rhythms and commutes. There would be black markets in banned fuels, and even some forms of violence, like the current populist French riots against Macron’s gasoline taxes. If even such small measures aimed at reducing carbon consumption result in such aggressive pushback, there is no reason to be moderate. Compared with what awaits us if we continue as we are, such shocks are as a rainstorm to a hurricane, or the 1977 blackout of New York City to the bombing of Dresden.
The economic costs of climate change can already be measured by toting up the losses incurred during every single hurricane, wildfire, drought, and war of the past ten years or longer. Because these costs have not yet been borne by any of the major stakeholders in the US or — really — the global economy, they are written off as the price of doing business. No sane group of investors or empowered body of citizens, however, would make these trade-offs to ensure a few more years of short-term profits when measured against the prospects of what would be the last and most profound crash in the history of capitalism.
In our age of Republican minority despotism, attempts to grapple with anthropogenic climate destruction have been warped to encourage several varieties of despair, rendered acute by the ticking-time-bomb nature of the problem. The losses suffered by Earth and its populations — plant and animal — are neither reversible nor remediable. There is no future filled with reparations. There is no long moral arc. Ten or fifteen years ago it was possible to think of the polar bear and the white rhinoceros as martyrs, dying off to shame us into better harmony with the natural world. Not ruined archaic torsos but videos of extinct creatures would say, “You must change your life.” The same hope held with respect to coral reefs, forests, and certain small Pacific Islands. A dark glimmer of progressive thinking (the “bargaining phase,” as it were) was discernible in the Kyoto Protocol and at the Paris conference, where the prime minister of Tuvalu’s call to impose a strict not-to-be-exceeded target of a 1.5-degree-Celsius rise in global temperature — the minimum required to save his people from a homeless future in a world hostile to refugees and immigrants — was dismissed in favor of pragmatic mitigating maneuvers intended to induce the cooperation of holdout nations such as the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.
At least now we can see things clearly — if only we could focus on the problem. Whatever they may say or tweet, the Trump Administration is not in denial about climate change. In fact, it has the perverse distinction of being the first US administration to address it head-on. In 2000, we had a presidential candidate who understood the perils facing us, even if he underplayed them to try to get elected. (By a margin of one United States Supreme Court justice, he was not elected.) Instead, the Bush Administration pretended climate change did not exist, though back then it was called global warming; “climate change” was a Bush/Rove term of obfuscation that eventually carried the day, even among scientists. President Obama spoke softly about the seriousness of human-driven climate change in public while his administration chipped away at automobile emissions and provided token green-energy incentives. These may have been the correct policies for a major, developed nation . . . in the early 1990s. But like much else after the financial crisis in 2008, the opportunity for a visionary shift in national focus — one that would have required investment at least equal to that being poured into the unwinnable war on terror — was bartered away to chase after an illusory political consensus with the terminally uncompromising opposition.By contrast, from its first days the Trump presidency brought a series of cabinet appointments and executive orders clustered around the single purpose of hastening ecological collapse: Bring back coal! Shackle and corrupt the EPA! Remove climate change information from government websites! Withdraw from the Paris Agreement! A candidate whose platform called for pushing carbon dioxide levels past the frontier of scientists’ most dire predictions could not have expressed that desire more swiftly or succinctly. It was almost as if that were the whole point. As indeed it was.
The other way, the path we’re on currently, is to concede that billions of people will see their economic and cultural lives ruined before dying off at a scale to make the casualties of World War II appear insignificant — and “gameplan” not to be among them. That’s what “winning” in the climate-changed future amounts to, and that’s the world the Republican Party has committed itself — and the rest of us — to endure: a social-Darwinist survival of the “fittest,” “wealthiest,” or most prepared, at least in the sense of stockpiling the most guns and canned food. It’s been painfully apparent since the term ecological refugee was popularized by a UN report in the mid-1980s that unthinkable numbers of people would be forced into migration in coming decades by climate change. Immigration, national borders, and food, water, and energy distribution will be the central issues facing all governments. From there it’s a short step, if it’s even a step at all, to a vehement resurgence of open racism and bigotry among those with the good fortune to inhabit the least immediately vulnerable areas, be they the highlands of Burma, the fertile Pannonian plain of Hungary, or the plunder-enriched sprawl of the United States.
The looming prospect of a panoply of belligerent, Blut und Boden regimes has always been one of the scariest potential political outcomes of widespread ecological collapse. Through a series of accidents and “influences,” we got our version early in the United States. We can and should get rid of it, but the paranoid energies that enabled its triumph are durable and already have pervaded much of the world. Trumpism is our first national response to climate change, and it’s a brutal, fearful, vengeful, and gloating response — one that predicts and invites warfare on a global scale. For all the terrible statistical projections, alarming models, and buried reports, what’s most immediately terrifying to the human imagination about climate change is the revelation of how large numbers of our species behave under conditions of perceived threat, scarcity, and danger. (...)
Truly, we have fucked it up in so many ways! Yet while climate change increasingly feels like an inescapable doom upon humanity, our only means of recourse remains political. Even under the heavy weather of present and near-future conditions, there’s an imperative to imagine that we aren’t facing the death of everyone, or the end of existence. No matter what the worst-case models using the most advanced forecasting of feedback loops may predict, we have to act as if we can assume some degree of human continuity. What happens in the next decades is instead, as the climate reporter Kate Aronoff has said, about who gets to live in the 21st century. And the question of who gets to live, and how, has always been the realm of politics.
The most radical and hopeful response to climate change shouldn’t be, What do we give up? It should remain the same one that plenty of ordinary and limited humans ask themselves each day: How do we collectively improve our overall quality of life? It is a welfare question, one that has less to do with consumer choices — like changing light bulbs — than with the spending of trillions and trillions of still-available dollars on decoupling economic growth and wealth from carbon-based fuels and carbon-intensive products, including plastics.
The economist Robert Pollin makes a convincing case that only massive investment in and commitment to alternative energy sources stands any chance of lowering emissions to acceptable levels. All other solutions, from “degrowth” to population control, will fall well short of intended targets while causing greater societal pain and instability. To achieve a fairly modest 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions within twenty years, Pollin suggests in a recent New Left Review essay, we would have to invest, per year, “1–1.5 per cent of global GDP — about $1 trillion at the current global GDP of $80 trillion,” and continually increase that investment, “rising in step with global growth thereafter.” Whether we call this a Manhattan Project for renewable, sustainable energy or a Green New Deal, as Pollin and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have named it, the point is to change the political discourse around climate change from either mindless futurism of the kind that proposes large scale “geoengineering” projects or fruitless cap-and-trade negotiations at the mercy of obstructionists. Only a great potlatch of what we have can save us from a bonfire of the vanities on a planetary scale.
In the short term, a true Green New Deal would need to be more like a Green Shock Doctrine. As hurricanes, fires, and floods pile up, each one would provide the occasion to unhook more people from the fossil-fuel grid. At the scale Pollin envisions, it would be naive to assume that a switch from fossils to renewables could happen smoothly. There would be disruptions to almost every aspect of economic life, including food supplies, the power grid (even the internet!), and daily work rhythms and commutes. There would be black markets in banned fuels, and even some forms of violence, like the current populist French riots against Macron’s gasoline taxes. If even such small measures aimed at reducing carbon consumption result in such aggressive pushback, there is no reason to be moderate. Compared with what awaits us if we continue as we are, such shocks are as a rainstorm to a hurricane, or the 1977 blackout of New York City to the bombing of Dresden.
The economic costs of climate change can already be measured by toting up the losses incurred during every single hurricane, wildfire, drought, and war of the past ten years or longer. Because these costs have not yet been borne by any of the major stakeholders in the US or — really — the global economy, they are written off as the price of doing business. No sane group of investors or empowered body of citizens, however, would make these trade-offs to ensure a few more years of short-term profits when measured against the prospects of what would be the last and most profound crash in the history of capitalism.
by The Editors, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Amanda Means, Light Bulb 00BY1. 2007
