The four reasons we won’t fix climate change
Is it time to start prepping?
If you’re a smoker, you don’t smoke a lifetime of cigarettes all at once. You smoke one cigarette at a time.
This creates an illusion of innocuousness. Each time you light up, you’re not sparking the entirety of all the cigarettes you’ll ever smoke and getting the lung cancer likely to result. It’s just the one.
We make decisions like this everyday. Maybe we’re trying to lose weight, but it’s just one little slice of cake. Maybe we’re trying to quit meat and dairy, but it’s just one slice of pizza. One day we skip the gym, the AA meeting . . .
This is climate change. It’s been shown that, for instance, holiday shopping adds to global warming, yet most of us still do it every year. We know climate change is linked to animal agriculture, yet 95% of us still eat meat and dairy. Nearly 30 million people took a cruise last year, despite cruise lines planning to increase carbon emissions.
Is any of this a problem of ignorance? Denial? Financial incentive? Yes — all of the above.
But maybe it’s really that, of the people who know better, no one really thinks their individual activity is going to break the bank. My friends and I still use jet planes for vacations, visit Disney World or the Grand Canyon. We buy more clothes than we need, acquire all kinds of plastic, go out for steaks, and burn fossil fuels. Just yesterday, I attended an Ironman event, where thousands of well-meaning people travelled from all over the world, gobbling up untold resources — all in order to have a race.
And that’s just one event, in one town, on one day. Consider thousands of races like these every year, and every rock concert, every football game. Every restaurant and grocery store throwing out tons of uneaten food, every air conditioning unit rattling away, every truck belching carbon monoxide, every ship crossing the Atlantic so we can have our new shoes.
The things we do — the way we consume and live that aggravates climate change — are too numerous to list. They’re like a lifetime of cigarettes. But with each thing, we tell ourselves it’s an exception. Or it’s not that bad. We’re very good at justifying. “Hey, at least I’m not as bad as so-and-so!” We compare ourselves to industries, corporations, the wealthy. “They are the REAL culprits.” And they are. Yet our choices, in aggregate, matter too.
So if our consumption choices matter, does that mean our sustainability choices matter, too? Does every tin can we recycle, every BLT-hold-the-B — do these have an effect in the opposite direction? Will incrementalism be the key to our future?
No.
While the collective activity of We the People — particularly over the past 100 years — has caused the predicament we’re in, changing that behavior can’t get us out of it. For one thing, it can’t be gradual; there’s just not enough time. For another, there are those industries, corporations, and the wealthy to consider. While some outlier companies are trying to do the right thing, the vast majority aren’t.
We can’t undo a hundred more more years of damage by a few more years of the middle class practicing “reduce and reuse.” Who are we trying to fool? It’s like that cartoon, the one showing two choices at the movies, An Inconvenient Truth or A Reassuring Lie, with everyone lined up for the latter. We want to think that if we change to that energy-saving lightbulb, things will work out fine.
To be fair, the average privileged consumer in the West might’ve made some bigger changes over the past few years. Maybe he or she bought a hybrid, or put some solar panels on the roof. Maybe “zero sort” made it easier to recycle those cans.
Unfortunately, these changes are still negligible compared to the absolute revolution we would need. And they’re not catching on nearly fast enough to counteract or mitigate the exponentially increasing climate calamity anyway.
It took the entire world sitting nearly completely still for two months in early 2020 to observe a slight rebounding of nature, a slight clearing of the pollution.
Life had to pretty much shut down globally before we saw even the most modest of environmental gains.
Maybe that will happen again, you might think. And you’d have good reason. Studies predict we’re going to have more pandemics, and worse. So maybe the “solution” to the climate change and ecological devastation we’re now facing is our own forced de-growth.
We’re also quite likely at the start of de-globalization, according to geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan, which means, among many other things, less likely cooperation on climate change strategies and implementation.
Depopulation, changes in demographics, are also occurring. Most of the world’s developed countries have plunging birth rates. The U.S., for instance, has been below replacement rate* for over a decade. (*The number of children required per woman to keep the population the same.) We now have an aging population among all the world’s superpowers.
But that’s a good thing! you might think. And, in some ways, you’ve got a point. But we have no economic plan for an aging population. As the pyramid grows on top with more old people and longer lives, and shrinks at bottom with fewer young people in the workforce, we lose innovation and productivity. And when GDP goes down, there are far-ranging geopolitical consequences, and it’s happening in China, the country that just happens to be the global leader in green tech.
Look, even if Thanos showed up and cut the population in half tomorrow, it still wouldn’t stop what’s coming. So sitting back and letting population decline solve the problem won’t work, period.
But what about governments? Can we expect our elected leaders to solve the problem?
Probably not when the U.S., instead of being a global leader in climate change, is the country with the most income inequality of the G7 economies and is riven with identity politics. We’re too polarized and focused on our culture war, and driven mad by social media, to come together on climate action, and it’s only getting worse. Plus, even in countries where there is political will, there’s raging debate over whether solar and wind or nuclear is the panacea.
So — government?
When we all stop giggling at the question, I’ll move on to the next one.
What about the major contributors to pollution, the massive companies in animal agriculture, in fossil fuels — you know, the ones that just skirt their way around EPA restrictions, when the supreme court isn’t doing that for them anyway?
Again, I’ll give you time to collect yourself. Here’s a tissue to wipe the laughing tears.
While there are a few companies trying to make a difference, most say so and don’t follow through. Some companies knew about climate change years ago and did nothing.
Okay, then what about SCIENCE? What about smart people just getting together and making it happen? MIT thinks maybe if we wrap the globe in a kind of plastic shell, we can ease the global warming. Some Canadians want to dump iron dust into the Pacific to bring back the phytoplankton, coral reefs, and general aquatic life to our dying, overfished, plastic-polluted oceans.
Will these efforts save us?
Well, even altruism needs funding, needs infrastructure. Without government support and deep investment, even the brainiest of ideas might never see the light of day. They might even get distorted and suppressed.
I’m not holding my breath.
Since I was a young man, I felt like something was wrong with the world. Trying to figure it all out, I dabbled in religion. Maybe we’re all sinners? Maybe humanity is just meant to screw up, but if we’re a good person and do “religious thing X,” we’ll get into heaven or some version of an afterlife?
That sort of kick-the-can-down-the-road didn’t work for me for very long. Instead, I saw how our system was flawed. Infinite growth can’t work on a finite planet… Financial incentives tend to be at cross-purposes with real human and environmental needs.
In other words, capitalism scales poorly.
But capitalism isn’t going anywhere. And while capitalism scales poorly, so does central management. So any attempt at big solutions to the problems of capitalism that require government (you’ve got to get everyone to stop smoking those proverbial cigarettes) will be met with immense pushback.
Just look at how people reacted to the 2016 World Economic Forum, decontextualizing and distorting what was said about anticipating 2030. That “they” (the elites) are going to come and “take everything from us.”
It’s possible that people are more afraid of “the gubment” coming to take all their stuff (guns, land, American-flag bathing suits) than they are of the worsening effects of climate change.
There’s just no way to control things at a global level without inviting global revolution.
So just give up and start prepping?
Well, kind of. I still have chosen to stop eating meat, and I do what I can to curb my consumption, just like you. I just don’t pretend it’s enough. I consider it appropriate behavior, like wearing black to a funeral.
And while I’d never considered myself a “prepper” before this past year, I’m now getting into it; developing long-term food storage, teaching myself how to grow vegetables in the colder seasons, raising a bit of livestock. And so on.
Which is its own problem. Think about what happened a couple of years ago with toilet paper. If suddenly everyone gets the idea to be a prepper? We’ll start running out of things faster as everyone rushes to stockpile and fortify, which will cause people to panic and buy more stuff for the doomsday pantry, and it will be a sort of exponential, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yay!
To sum up, here are the four reasons we won’t fix climate change:
- Incrementalism won’t work and we’re never going to make big enough change without being forced because we’re just too far gone, brainwashed into being dependent consumers. And even for those who know better, climate transgressions are just one more cigarette each time.
- The government can’t force us to change, not in any meaningful way, due to fears of strong central authority. The stronger the push, the stronger will be the pushback. We’ll have civil wars all over the place.
- The corporations and industries that sell us the oil and the beef and the holiday extravagances will never stop on their own, and/or they’ll promise “green” solutions they’ll never follow through on. Cradle-to-grave tech, repeat consumers — its all just too damn profitable, and capitalism isn’t going away.
- By the time prepping becomes mainstream, it’s truly all over anyway — it will be chaos.
Live your life. Love your kids, your spouse, your friends. Do your job, practice kindness. Stay in shape.
Big environmental changes are coming. They are, in fact, already here. Utah’s Great Salt Lake is the lowest it’s ever been. Lake Mead is vanishing. California is the country’s bread basket and its running out of water. Speaking of giant lakes: Lake Tuz, in Turkey —all 643 square miles of it — has fully receded as of October last year.
The situation in Ukraine is fuelling a new global food crisis. Capitalism’s big claim was (nearly) eradicating poverty; poverty is now on the rise.
Storms are getting worse, certain types of floods, and droughts. The sixth mass extinction event is underway. There are additional holes in the ozone layer. Melting permafrost. Everything is going to happen exponentially faster and faster. We don’t have much time.
Breathe. Meditate. Practice as much self-reliance as you can. Learn how to compost — composting is everything. Learn to grow food with that compost. It doesn’t mean you have to own a farm. You can grow food on a roof. Get creative.
And don’t plan to hole up somewhere with your shotgun poking out. The best and most important thing for us to do in the coming years is to love one another. To help one another.
Maybe it is a religious thing, after all. The way to counteract sin, so to speak?
Love your neighbor as yourself.
For further reading:
Philosophy for the End of Growth / new ways of thinking for a time after capitalism, by B.
