Between Doom and Denial

The dangers of extreme views on climate change

It gets exhausting, really, listening to all this shit.

People love a bias confirmed, and the internet algorithms reward a good hornswoggle with amplification. Armed with our links to articles and studies, we battle on for our respective teams. The latest bifurcation du jour: doomers versus optimists.

I’ve certainly joined in the fray.

This has been a journey, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’m learning, I’ve been open to intelligent persuasion, I’ve gone through the various moods and emotions associated with coping with climate change.

But a larger picture is becoming clearer to me all the time.

The extremes are dangerous. The “nothing-can-be-done” nihilism of doom has effects in common with the rosiest techno-optimism and even the ignorance of denial.

Let’s start with doom, and the frequent claims of the doomsaying lot.

I agree with almost all of them.

— Climate change is a symptom of ecological overshoot.

Most definitely.

— Climate change is not only driven by fossil fuel use.

No, it’s not.

— There are tipping points to consider.

Indeed.

— And exponential growth.

Yep, like the algae in the pond.

— Dealing with climate change can create other, unforeseen consequences, like reducing sun-reflective, cooling aerosols.

Sadly, 100% correct.

— Even if we deal effectively with climate change (and more on what that means in a minute), we’re left with myriad other problems.

Absolutely. This is sometimes referred to as the poly-crisis or meta-crisis.

Let’s take this last claim first.

In “Who is Moloch and What is the Meta-Crisis?” YouTuber Prometheus cites the work of Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens, and others to explore the consequences of the super-organism. (The video reminds me a lot of the writings of indi.ca here on Medium.) We’re sort of helplessly enslaved to this super-organism, which is us, but also the system of global industrial consumer capitalism we’ve created.

“Moloch,” says Prometheus, is our inability to solve these many problems we have.

I would posit that a large piece of Moloch is our mass communication itself. We have a social media business model that amplifies dubious information, often elevating it above veracious information. Social media breeds conspiracy theories like salt marshes breed cordgrass. Soon the cordgrass is everywhere, and in come the reptiles.

We’ve built an ecosystem of “alternative media” that’s both good and bad. “Do your own research” can be useful and edifying at the same time destructive to our epistemology: We’re losing faith in expertise and consensus and truth in this Wild West frontier of saloon-like social networks and bad incentives and misinformation and disinformation proliferate.

And don’t even get me started about AI.

So we have this additional challenge — how we communicate about climate change, about our many problems in general — creating the “meta” part of the meta- or poly-crisis.

The rest of it — from digital power concentration and AI, to social injustice, to aging populations and future pandemics — rounds out a mind-boggling Hydra of issues that easily overwhelm. But mass movements can withstand issues with multiple fronts, as Eric Hoffer writes in The True Believer: “It is rare of a mass movement to be wholly of one character. Usually, it displays some facets of other types of movement, and sometimes it is two or three movements in one.”

So, we can do this.

Next, a few claims at once:

— Climate change is not only driven by fossil fuels. It is a symptom of ecological overshoot, there are tipping points in the offing and exponential growth to consider.

All the things the doomers say, I get. And I’ve said them, too.

Rather than take them on one at a time, let me just get to the point, because I’ll conclude the same about each one:

None of this means “do nothing.”

The doomer argument seems to rest its case, time and again, on the idea that renewables can’t “solve” climate change, and that nothing can “solve” climate change. That even if we were able to somehow switch to 100% clean energy tomorrow, we’d still have all the baked-in effects (C02 sticks around for 1,000 years) and all the other problems of the poly-crisis, etc etc.

Yes.

But that doesn’t fucking mean do NOTHING.

There is a reckless fallacy in the idea that, without a panacea, nothing matters, because nothing can “solve” climate change.

But saying so and leaving the situation behind is just an escape hatch.

Apathy is the same in effect as “hopium,” and nihilism is the same as blind optimism. It all lets us get away, off the hook.

It’s no different, in this way, than denialism.

I recently read a commenter on someone’s article saying that they lived in Phoenix, Arizona where things couldn’t be better. They cited all the reasons why life was good, from semi-retirement / working remotely to abundant food in the grocery stores and generally low taxes (which is pretty much why everyone flees southern California for boiling hot Arizona). It was all anecdotal evidence to the commentator that climate change was a hoax. (Along with a misunderstood bit of information about Greenland’s ice core that’s been floating around the internet since 2010).

Will this person change their habits, attempt to influence anyone else, or join any activist group, in the name of climate change? Of course not.

How is that effectively any different than someone who thinks there is no solution to climate change? Or the person who believes there’s only one narrow solution to climate change, and nothing else will suffice?

What about the person who believes everything’s going to be just fine — other people are working on the problem, so there’s nothing for them to do?

Maybe there’s a difference in who each one of these people is voting for, or what kind of car they drive, and that matters, but otherwise there’s too much in common there for any of us to feel comfortable.

When I was dooming hard last year (not hard enough for some, but still pretty hard) I was in a place where surrounding my everyday life, no one seemed concerned with climate change or was doing jack shit about it, even in their own lives. While I stockpiled low-moisture food in my basement, taught my kids how to garden and forage, and read everything I could get my hands on about global warming, coastal flooding, mass migration, and food and water shortage, life continued blissfully on all around me, with people going to work and school, having BBQs, taking trips, making more babies.

I was left with a bad taste in my mouth whenever I hear anyone proclaiming any sort of “good news” about climate change. It was my time in the doom tank, and when I read someone talking about how prices of renewables were coming down, or how new weather and climate-independent food systems were springing up, or how the last COP was lovely and hopeful, all I could think was::DANGER:::DANGER:: Complacency alert! People read this and set down their burdens! (Or, they just keep going on ignoring or denying the problem like usual!) They need DOOM to wake them up!

Eventually, though, the more I swung over to the doom side, the more problems I found there, too. And that’s because both “sides” in this debate seem to be guilty of the panacea, or nirvana fallacy: Unless it’s a 100% fix for all our problems, it’s a non-starter.

I see “optimistic” writers who pooh-pooh meat and dairy reduction because it’s not a big enough slice of the problem, in their opinion. Writers who condemn carbon footprint calculations as too unreliable to matter. Others think putting the onus on consumers is off the table; we can only hold the big companies and governments responsible (though as Alex Mell-Taylor points out, it’s quite challenging to parse who’s really to blame for exactly what).

Going through all of this, my response grew into “So what?” Why seek one single solution? Why not throw everything at this problem we possibly can? It’s about companies and consumers. It’s about fossil fuels and industrial animal agriculture. It’s de-growth and renewables.

These things are not mutually exclusive, people. Even if incentives for internet divisiveness have taught you they are — they aren’t.

Because here’s the thing about any of these extremes: saying there’s nothing that can be done to solve it, or the only thing that can be done is X, or that it doesn’t exist in the first place, all condemn millions — perhaps billions — to worse suffering.

For instance, doomers: even if fossil fuel emissions aren’t ENTIRELY to blame, they’re still a big damn chunk of the problem, and the more we curb emissions, the better off we’ll be.

Here’s NASA, Duke, and Columbia University on that very point:

Or, renewables-proponent: even if animal agriculture isn’t the whole ball of wax, reducing meat and dairy will STILL have an impact.

At this stage in our collective experience of these cascading, interacting crises on planet Earth, we’re still in the speculation phase, most of us, especially in privileged countries. We lucky first-worlders are sitting somewhere comfortable and cozy, tapping away at our keyboards, looking at numbers on a screen — 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels by 2050? Or 2.5? Or even 2.25? Does it matter?

Yes. Yes, you smarmy screen warrior, it most certainly fucking does.

Anything that seems like it has a net gain, no matter how slim, is worth doing. Anything that could potentially buy a little time, and take an edge off, is worth doing. It’s called mitigation. It leads to and can create space for adaptation.

Here are just some ideas.

Perpetrators of the panacea fallacy love to point out possible negative consequences. I’ve done it myself. “Well, geoengineering could just lead to a whole raft of other unforeseen consequences…” Maybe. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Nothing is perfect.

Is there a problem with cleaning up the air counterproductively adding more warming? Christ, it certainly seems so. We’ve upset the atmospheric equilibrium on earth and have already been “geoengineering” it by our suffusion of chemicals like sulfur dioxide, transport fuels, and road and coal dust.

YET experts agree reducing aerosols should remain a priority.

Why? Because in the short-term they kill more people than climate change, “With particularly damaging impacts on poorer and non-White groups,” according to Natalie Mahowald, a professor at Cornell University.

Do you want to be the one who says, Eh, too bad for them? I don’t. I don’t want to be the one to say that about anybody. I want people healthy and ready to deal with climate change. I want to be able to say I did everything I thought was right to do in order to reduce suffering in the world and try to make things better. Especially if it meant modifying something in my own life that I could modify.

And what is that, you might ask? Well, I’m getting solar panels. And before you laugh, I don’t think it’s the fix for everything; it’s a drop in the ocean. But I’m going to do it because WHY WOULD I NOT?

If I am in a position to do it, if there’s a chance of a net gain, if there is no perfect solution, WHY WOULD I NOT?

Otherwise, we have two big gardens and a hoop house and grew enough food this summer to have extra stuff to put out on a roadside stand for the neighbors. When we occasionally eat meat, we get it from two local farms. When we need a new vehicle in the near future, it will be electric. Yes, there are problems with cobalt mines and fossil fuels still embedded (which is why we’re waiting until we need a new car, to get all the use out of the one we have), but we’re looking for that net gain. Even if it’s hard to calculate for sure; already we have neighbors talking about getting their own solar panels now that they’ve heard about ours, and we’re eyeing the same type of hybrid car our friend has, because that’s how people tend to do things. We’re social animals who want to fit in and we generally trust word of mouth.

Can this stuff we’re doing apply to everyone?

Can this definitely be implemented at scale?

Nope and probably nope. We’re doing what we can, for where we live, based on our means. That’s all you can ask of anyone.

Just DO WHAT YOU CAN.

Shit.

How any person can take a look at climate change, or the meta-crisis, and lay back and say, “Well, nothing can be done, I guess I’ll just enjoy life however I want” is completely beyond me. I literally can’t comprehend it.

No one person, or even one super-predictive computer model, can know exactly how this is all going to shake out. Yes, yes yes yes yes it’s going to get bad. It’s going to get really fucking bad.

So we just sit around and wait for that?

Not me, brother.

Not me.

So come on.

I see you.

Not you either.