The IPCC report is clear: nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe
Patrick Valance (UK government chief scientific adviser), the Guardian
The IPCC has absolutely nothing to do with “socialism”; in fact, it is a product of capitalism. The IPCC is made up of representatives of capital-controlled governments, capital-dependent scientists, and reviewers that are frequently direct representatives for capital. Global capitalism — which Republicans think is socialism — is actually a movement to free capital from the confines of nation states and democracy. When you see an IPCC report, what you are seeing is a conservative, watered-down version of the facts because the IPCC is run by capitalists (who are center-right) and has a standing policy of not being scary.
In fact, all climate scientists have a long-standing policy of not being “alarmist” because they believe fear will drive people to inaction. That sounds nice in theory, but remaining calm hasn’t motivated people significantly, either. When climate scientists provide us with what is possible for the future, they assume that people — and governments, in particular — will actually take action. The punchline after every IPCC report and every official announcement from climate scientists is that everyone assumes their best possible future will happen if we all do nothing.
That probably has something to do with why America chose to elect Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden as President. As with other neoliberal trash that has served as President of the United States, Biden has gone with the “build back better” mode of thinking, which is all about growing the economy with renewable energy. The problem with that is that fossil fuels are not removed from the economy under that strategy — we continue to use more fossil fuels every year even though the percentage of renewables as an energy source continues to increase. Were it possible for economic growth to continue infinitely on a finite planet, this could go on forever — fossil fuel use always increasing in absolute terms, yet always diminishing as a percentage of energy consumed.
We did have a chance to vote for a candidate for President that was onboard with fundamental change. During the 2016 election, I believed Democrats when they said that they just didn’t believe Bernie Sanders could win. By the 2020 election, I had figured out that they were lying; in fact, they simply are conservatives who are afraid of change. We say that Republicans don’t believe in climate science, but Democrats don’t, either. The quality of their disbelief is different, but they definitely don’t believe the facts.
I encourage you to read the article from the Guardian that I linked to above. The fun thing about that article is that the headline text (“nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe” — which is completely accurate) is not at all reflected in the text of the article. The article itself just talks about how it is too late to avert some catastrophe, how things will inevitably get worse; it implies that we have to do something to avoid our own extinction, and then it talks about technology. Throwing money at new tech is the opposite of “transforming society” — it is, instead, nothing fundamentally changing while the nerds solve the problem for us.
When people choose to find a technological solution for a behavioral problem, I don’t blame the scientists and engineers for the outcome, but we should all understand that this approach does not solve the problem. Rather, it just makes the problem more complicated. The best example of this was the solution to international conflict after World War II — specifically, the inability of western capitalists and Soviet communists to work things out. The technological solution to that was a global nuclear arms race. Technological solutions to behavioral problems are inferior to solving the behavioral problem and come with serious complications and unintended bad side effects.
Moreover, technological solutions are not inevitable. There are innumerable problems in our world that people seem to believe will inevitably be solved with technology, but they have not. The best example of this in my mind is the problem of death. For example, rich ding dongs went through a phase where they were freezing their bodies — or in some cases, just their heads — because they believed there would be a magical future where death had been defeated by tech, and they’d wake up cured of mortality.
Republicans aren’t the only ones getting high off bizarre fictions — Democrats are doing it, too. Is it possible that 51% of Americans will be able to focus on reality for long enough to solve this problem via electoral politics? Using the past 6 years as evidence, I would say that is so unlikely as to be laughable. How else might the human specie survive? If the United States and Britain collapse, would the rest of the world be able to move forward? I don’t know; maybe. If nothing fundamentally changes, humanity will end.
Related: Climate change: IPCC report is ‘code red for humanity’ by Matt McGrath (contains better detail about the contents of the latest IPCC report)