The Atlantic published an article by Ed Yong entitled America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral (about the US COVID-19 failure) and I was struck by how much each of the conceptual errors he mentions also describe how the US failed to address climate change in time. While it certainly is never too late to mitigate climate disaster (lessen the devastation), our opportunity to prevent climate disaster passed quite a while ago — certainly before this year, but probably further back than that. Now, we have to move the goalposts from “stop climate disaster” to less comfortable options, like “prevent human extinction”. If we are going to do that, we can’t keep making the same mental mistakes we’ve been making since the 1970’s.
Serial Monogamy of Solutions
As with COVID-19, the US has only been able to focus on one possible approach to climate change at a time, which is unfortunate, because what is required is a massive, systemic approach addressing every aspect of the problem in a way that fits with the science. Instead, we have hyperfocused on specific things (like renewable energy, reducing use of fossil fuels, or electric cars) without bringing all the factors together. In my example, electric cars are not meaningful unless they are charged using renewable energy, and that renewable energy isn’t meaningful unless the same energy value of fossil fuels stays in the ground.
False Dichotomies
As with COVID-19, Americans have severely lacked imagination and nuance when it comes to solutions. The biggest problem is that most Americans think they’re making a choice between democracy with fossil fuels, and totalitarianism without fossil fuels. Perhaps it is because we have such a narrow view of what is good, or because we don’t understand the intricacies of climate change, or maybe it is just because so many of us have been brainwashed into believing that the only viable way to run the world is to feed our individual and collective selfishness. In fact, ignoring climate change — and continuing to increase our use of fossil fuels — has made the poverty and authoritarianism that Americans feared much more likely. And though the population of this planet is going to drop, this isn’t going to be some quick die-off like in a superhero movie, but rather a slow, dull, grinding collapse where most of the population drop comes from people choosing not to have children.
The Comfort of Theatricality
Americans love a sticker that tells them everything is fine, whether that is a starburst on a food package that says, “All Natural!”, a label on the door that says, “Sanitized!”, or something telling us that this particular approach is safer for the climate. It allows us to relax and just stop thinking about that bad thing — which means no longer taking personal responsibility for it. The latest example of this for climate was a startup that was going to build some robots that would go out into the ocean and clean up the plastic. This was a nice idea, and they received a lot of investment money, but ultimate, there’s no profit to be made from cleaning up an area that no one owns, so the startup is no more. But more importantly, while plastic cleanup is a good idea, it had absolutely no effect on climate change, which is the existential threat we should be worrying about. Amazon has a commercial in rotation on broadcast TV right now talking about how they’re going to become a net zero producer of atmospheric carbon — the problem is that they don’t let you know that they will do this with “carbon credits”. Carbon credits means that the carbon still gets produced — it’s an elaborate shell game.
Personal Blame Over Systemic Fixes
Climate is a global problem, and it will take a global, collective approach to mitigate it. If you stop buying gasoline, for example, that won’t lead to less gasoline being burned; rather, it infinitesimally drives down the cost of gasoline, and someone else will just drive a little bit more. The market sees the energy you didn’t burn, and takes it to use it for growth. Speaking of Amazon, there are people living out in the Amazon rain forest, living carbon neutral lives, and they will be destroyed before most Americans
The Normality Trap
People like to blame conservatives for climate change, but there’s no group of people who cling to normalcy more than Democratic party voters. We’ve been heavily dependent on fossil fuels for an extremely long time, so freeing ourselves from them necessarily means getting away from what is normal, and that’s going to be uncomfortable. If our collective response to this challenge is to just give up because we can’t stand the thought of varying from what we now see as normal, then that will likely mean human extinction.
Magical Thinking
Climate change mitigation requires us to somehow achieve negative carbon emissions. Given that we haven’t even figured out how to achieve anywhere close to zero carbon emissions, the suggestion that we’ll will inevitably achieve negative emissions seems insane, but that’s exactly what Americans are assuming. The difference between science fiction and fantasy is that science fiction pretends it is possible in some distant future — which is why science fiction without a concrete plan using workable technology is really just a fantasy. The fantasy that people are clinging to is called “carbon sequestration” but we still don’t have any system of carbon sequestration that scales up enough to achieve net zero global carbon emissions — and remember, we have to achieve significantly negative carbon emissions. We have to start accepting that because we failed so dramatically, we must make hard choices and following through with them.
The Complacency of Inexperience
In all of human history, we’ve never come this close to completely killing ourselves via a climate process with a 30-year lag. So, as with COVID-19 in the US, we really don’t feel the urgency required to take action now. We’re still looking around waiting to see what happens so we can decide what to do. If we’d lived through this before, we’d know how serious the problem is and likely would have already done everything required.
The Reactive Rut
COVID-19 takes weeks to show itself in a population, so by the time you react to an uptick in cases, it’s already too late. Climate change is the same, but instead of a 2-week lag, it takes 30 years to see the results of the mistakes you made today. Yet, here we are waiting to see what happens next so we can all decide what to do about it instead of listening to the climate experts who have been warning us about this since the 1970’s.
Habituation to Horror
You’ve heard the metaphor about the frog who gets boiled because they don’t notice that the water they’re in is being slowly heated to boiling. In real life, a frog reaches a temperature threshold, and then jumps out. Humans on the other hand are so incredibly adaptive that we’re the ones who will end up being boiled to death. (OK, it’s true that all the amphibians will be killed by our recklessness first.) We’ve already habituated to a ridiculous amount of horror. I suppose it will be interesting to see if we ever notice how destructive we are and jump out of the proverbial pan. (The pan is capitalism.)