A bit of hope for the future
The informed few are angry, not because we face an existential threat that can't be solved - but because we already have a solution
By Peter Beattie
Ignorance is at the root of the ecological crisis that threatens our survival as a species.
A pioneer of political comedy, Bill Hicks, first tried out his political material in comedy clubs in the US. It didn’t land. Standing in front of a befuddled audience, he said it felt like being stared at by a dog that had just been shown a card trick. A dog doesn’t have the contextual knowledge that makes card tricks seem magical. Nor did US comedy club audiences have the political knowledge to make this material hilarious.
Because the US media system is such an abject failure, regularly devoting more attention to trivialities than an existential threat to all, most people don’t realize that we face a danger so grave it jeopardizes human civilization itself… in this century.
Part of the problem is that climate scientists focus on first-order threats: hotter heat waves, a rising sea level, shifting weather patterns that cause longer droughts or more powerful floods, more damaging storms, etc. To the extent that the media bothers to inform people about these first-order threats, people who watch TV news or read newspapers may start to worry a bit. But their worries will be limited to hotter summer days (dangerous for older people), beachfront houses being destroyed, and scarier, more destructive hurricanes. A few might even contemplate second-order problems: if droughts and floods become more common, then that will affect food production, causing prices to rise…
But that is merely the tip of the (melting) iceberg. First-order effects of climate change are bad enough. Cities in the tropics will become uninhabitable, coastal cities will flood, biodiversity will shrink even further. But what should worry us even more are the second-order effects. Longer, more intense heatwaves, droughts, and flooding can wipe out agricultural production in a region. What if that region is the breadbasket of Pakistan? Or India? With food prices skyrocketing, and millions of people starving, migrating across borders, or directing their anger toward their governments - are these nuclear-armed regimes going to survive? With less snow and ice on mountains in India and China to feed rivers providing water for agriculture, tensions between India and China are likely to rise. (And this in the context of the US foreign policy establishment seeking to turn India into its cat’s paw to stymie China’s development.) We’ve already seen a tiny preview of what these sorts of second-order effects can cause, in the Syrian civil war.
Knowledge about the first- and second-order effects of climate change is essential. And it would be common knowledge in any country with a democracy-appropriate media system.
But it isn’t the only sort of knowledge that is essential. A democratic electorate also needs knowledge about solutions. Otherwise, it is easy to fall into an impotent pessimism or nihilism: the problem is so massive, and efforts to solve the problem thus far have been so inconsequential. If the only solution is to convince the world’s richest billion or so people to go vegan, stop flying, and use cloth shopping bags - well, that hasn’t worked so far, why would it begin to work now? Or take the Planet of the Humans argument: if the past couple decades’ worth of feeble capitalist investments in renewable energy haven’t transformed the capitalist political economy already, why should we expect a different result in the future?
The good news is that there is another solution. If we forget the idea of moral suasion transforming the world in this decade, and we give up our experiment of using our old political-economic system to produce radically different results, there is another option. This option will face opposition from those enjoying a position at the top of the current global system. But the biggest impediment is simple ignorance: if majorities of the populations of the US and EU were aware that their choice is between a descent into civilizational collapse and a society-wide mobilization to prevent collapse, the many will sacrifice the privileges of the few to achieve it.
One group of scientists created detailed roadmaps for 139 countries to transform their energy systems to use 100% renewable energy by 2050 (and this study even got a bit of mass media attention). But this isn’t just one effort by an outlier scientist (and 26 co-authors). This review analyzes 180 articles laying out similar plans for 100% renewable energy systems around the world.
Of course, none of these plans will be implemented through a global, competitive, for-profit investment free-for-all. It will require state-led investment, government planning, and inter-governmental cooperation.
During the neoliberal era, we have been taught that state-led investment and government planning do not “work”. Only The Market, with its god-like epistemic properties, can “efficiently” allocate resources for investment, production, and distribution. Well, if the current mess we’re in is the result of The Market’s god-like omniscience and perfectly efficient planning, let’s give some “inefficient” government planning a shot.
The historical record, which neoliberals are remarkably ignorant of, is clear: government economic planning can work quite well. All currently industrialized, rich countries used forms of government planning to develop. Especially in the case of poor countries needing to catch up in heavy industry and infrastructure, state-led development has no competition. And when already developed countries entered wartime, and needed to rapidly transform their economic systems to produce entirely different products, it wasn’t the invisible hand that did the job. There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there aren’t any capitalist free marketeers either.
State-led investment and government planning have a proven track record; international coordination is the only new piece of the puzzle. But it isn’t hard to imagine a future in which the US, EU, and China cooperate closely on the necessary transformation of the global economic system. Existential necessity can be an effective motivator. Since mainstream economists are so enamored of incentives, how about this one: avoiding a hellish life for one’s children?
And for anyone dissatisfied with the current system, this existential necessity provides a perfect opening. Is your main focus structural racism? Patriarchy? Economic inequality? Imperialism? Conservation? Animal rights? No matter what your political focus is, if you want to change the current system, the existentially necessary restructuring of the global political-economic system is the best opening you’ll ever have.
And the biggest impediment to that opening? Ignorance.