Vaclav Smil, the great environmental theorist, tells us that natural growth taking place on the Earth is always limited. Our planet has a finite amounts of elements, processes a finite amount of energy; and it can only support a finite amount of human interventions. Most of us know this by now. Yet, as a species, we seem unwilling to accept that there is no unlimited growth. Even dematerialization - doing more with less - cannot remove this constraint.
Horace wrote two millennia ago in his Satires: “There is a mean in things, there are lastly certain limits on either side of which right cannot be found”. Today, this is not merely a moral exhortation. The long-term survival of our global civilization cannot be assured without setting limits on a planetary scale. This inversion of everything we have come to know represents an evolutionary challenge; the likes of which has never been seen, precisely because it’s global.
It’s better understood as a human problem. Partially, there is ‘hope’ in the sense that some nations are aging out. Essentially every affluent country has now started to fall below the replacement level of reproduction i.e. 2 children/couple. Once reproduction falls to 1.3 children/couple, there’s no more chance that it could ever recover. That is reason for hope is that, years from now, they will not be consuming because there will be nobody there in those countries.
The Global North doesn’t matter anymore. It talks about global problems; as if its problems are also the Global South’s problems. Lowered expectations have to result in improvements though. But, of course, it cannot be done without wrenchingly centring the global economy. How much change would it take? The real cost of food and energy should reflect the cost of all our societal waste; and the real cost is so much higher than what we pay now.
So, we are in a new age defined by climate change and the strange, inadequate, and often self-deluding ways we process its transformations. Climate change is such a vast thing. It can be approached in thousands of ways. But, in a sense, this is the real challenge that it poses: “How do you give voice to the non-human?” An interesting thing about our imagination is that nature becomes science. As if we can only ventriloquize nature through the scientists.
We wish we could be animist, but can’t bring ourselves to cross that line. It’s ultimately a story about human behavior, in the sense that we have kicked off these cascading changes. When we wake a sleeping lion, we’ve woken him. We haven’t created him. The lion has its agency and it’s going to come after us. With climate change we spurred something into motion, which is now violently striking back at us.
We can both see the total inadequacy of our existing elite in addressing and reckoning with this problem, and also have a really hard time seeing that elite being toppled any time soon. They’re much more prepared than their adversaries. The idea that the elites deny climate change, is just a complete red herring. Billionaires quietly buying boltholes in New Zealand doesn’t mean they can’t work out climate change.
There’s too much wealth involved in this, so let other people suffer is the attitude. What the elite will say right away is, “Let them give up their cars if they care so much.” Well, this may be a perfectly defensible position morally. But, it was not Gandhi’s position. He was able to say that, he would rather that his country be poor than it destroy the world. Today such a position would be untenable. Any politician with such a position would be hounded.
This is partly why we have a conceptual lag. We think of decarbonization as being a burden - a moral obligation. But, decarbonizing is actually the only way to survive the 21st century. It is also the best thing that ever happened to us in so far as modernizing civilization. The second conceptual lag is about the fact that there’s a strong case for climate- over human rights, because with human-rights violations there’s no material effect on people living elsewhere.
Furthermore, we have a certain vision of rationality. And that vision, which goes back to Descartes, is that being rational is the opposite of being emotional. However, when we reason the emotional centers of our brains are involved as well. And when people’s emotional centers are damaged, they make bad decisions. This is why when we believe we have to put emotions aside, giant red flags should go up. If we can’t show emotion now, when can we?
So, what is an inappropriate emotional response? The whole climate crisis is apparently ambiguous. Rationally, we should be panicked really. We should be panicked, angry, upset, despairing - all of those things. But, of course, we all know none of those are really productive. If the house is really on fire, you stay calm, you pull the fire alarm, you call the fire department, you get out of the house, and then you figure out how to rebuild the house.
With climate change, the key thing that we have to try to figure out is, what the rebuilding is. What it should look like; and where we should start. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs may just be such a starting point, with one caveat though - we need to invert the pyramid. It would change the game a lot in a lot of different countries.
Our chances are slim, but also anything big we do is significant. It’s not a case of either we do it all, or we just give up and drink ourselves to death. It all matters because every quarter-degree Celsius of global warming is hundreds of millions of lives, if not more.
And the centrality of marrying climate action to building a more humane society is all the more important if we don’t do it. In the sense that, if we aim to become a society that doesn’t let people drown in the ocean, or die in the desert. When we actually do our best to save lives and believe that people have a right to health care by right of being alive; and open up our borders in the face of a massive humanitarian crisis - then we become a society based on valuing and cherishing all of life.
That will serve us very well if it turns out we were pretty far off the mark in emissions reduction. The rockier the future is, the more important it is that we become a decent society, which we’re not right now. And that means we have to prioritize our self-actualization; and then work towards our physiological needs. It will allow each person on this planet to make their own unique contribution to our evolution as a species. Ideally, such a future will result in:
• Using resources, including labour, in a way that benefits all life.
• Changing ownership so that power returns to the hands of the people.
• Creating an accountable, transparent money system that serves everyone.
• Refocusing education so that it gives skills to deal with rapid change.
• Creating technology to enhance the well-being of people and the planet.
• Creating cooperative, bio-regional communities linking rural and urban.
• The human population achieving a healthy balance with other species.
It’s usually at this juncture that the charge of practicing ‘disaster socialism’ rears its ugly head i.e. seeking to use the climate threat to vastly expand the role of government and quash corporate influence. The truth of it is that climate change cannot be effectively addressed without a simultaneous deep reckoning with our society’s other ills; of wealth and income inequality, racial discrimination and crumbling infrastructure. In short, climate justice.
That means our collective future is radical. The present is pretty radical too. The idea that there is some sort of gradual, incremental, let’s-split-the-difference pathway to respond to this crisis is just plain silly at this point. Humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix a global model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Evolution demands nothing less from us.
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