by Naomi Klein
Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen. (The former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 percent over a period of ten years.) They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008. (Wealthy countries experienced about a 7 percent emissions drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise.) Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 percent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.
If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations.” Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).
So, what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.
In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows threw down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demanded of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:
. . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable,” whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging”—all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.
In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-pedaling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even blunter, writing that the boat on gradual change had sailed.
Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-) industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the “evolutionary change” afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony (emphasis theirs).
We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.”
But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favor of digging up more carbon have had to find ever-more-thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena.”
But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilizing life on Earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe, England; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (as Greenpeace has done); taking tar sands operators to court for violating Indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilization; the great climate campaigner and author Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever.”
It’s not a revolution yet, but it’s a start. And if it spreads, it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on a planet that is distinctly less f**ked.
CLIMATE TIME VS. THE CONSTANT NOW
The climate crisis was hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go 80s, the blast-off point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world.
APRIL 2014
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT bad timing.
One of the most distressing ways that climate change-fueled extinction is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or “mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.
The migration patterns of many songbird species, for instance, have evolved over millennia so that eggs hatch precisely when food sources such as caterpillars are at their most abundant, providing parents with ample nourishment for their hungry young. But because spring now often arrives early, the caterpillars are hatching earlier, too, which means that in some areas they are less plentiful when the chicks hatch, with a number of possible long-term impacts on survival.
Similarly, in West Greenland, caribou are arriving at their calving grounds only to find themselves out of sync with the forage plants they have relied on for thousands of years, now growing earlier thanks to rising temperatures. That is leaving female caribou with less energy for lactation and reproduction, a mismatch that has been linked to sharp decreases in calf births and survival rates.
Scientists are studying cases of climate-related mistiming among dozens of species, from Arctic terns to pied flycatchers. But there is one important species they are missing: us. Homo sapiens. We, too, are suffering from a terrible case of climate-related mistiming, albeit in a cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is that the climate crisis was hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go 80s, the blast-off point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action on a scale that humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.
This deeply unfortunate mistiming has created all sorts of barriers to our ability to respond effectively to this crisis. It has meant that corporate power was ascendant at the very moment when we needed to exert unp
recedented controls over corporate behavior in order to protect life on Earth. It has meant that regulation was a dirty word just when we needed those powers most. It has meant that we are ruled by a class of politicians who know only how to dismantle and starve public institutions just when they most need to be fortified and reimagined. And it has meant that we are saddled with an apparatus of “free-trade” deals that tie the hands of policymakers just when they need maximum flexibility to achieve a massive energy transition.
Confronting these various structural barriers to the next economy, and articulating a captivating vision for that postcarbon way of life, is the critical work of any serious climate movement. But it’s not the only task at hand. We also have to confront how the mismatch between climate change and market domination has created barriers within our very selves, making it harder for us to look at this most pressing of humanitarian crises with anything more than furtive, terrified glances. Because of the way our daily lives have been altered by both market and technological triumphalism, we lack many of the observational tools necessary to convince ourselves that climate change is indeed an emergency—let alone the confidence to believe that a different way of living is possible.
And little wonder: just when we needed to gather, our public sphere was disintegrating; just when we needed to consume less, consumerism took over virtually every aspect of our lives; just when we needed to slow down and notice, we sped up; and just when we needed longer time horizons, we were able to see only the immediate present, trapped in the forever now of our constantly refreshed social media feeds.
This is our climate change mismatch, and it affects not just our species but potentially every other species on the planet as well.
The good news is that unlike reindeer and songbirds, we humans are blessed with the capacity for advanced reasoning and therefore the ability to adapt more deliberately—to change old patterns of behavior with remarkable speed. If the ideas that rule our culture are stopping us from saving ourselves, then it is within our power to change those ideas. But before that can happen, we first need to understand the nature of our personal climate mismatch.
BEING CONSUMERS IS ALL WE KNOW
Climate change demands that we consume less, but being consumers is all we know. Climate change is not a problem that can be solved simply by changing what we buy—a hybrid instead of an SUV, some carbon offsets when we get on a plane. At its core, it is a crisis born of overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy, which means the world’s most manic consumers are going to have to consume less so that others can have enough to live.
The problem is not “human nature,” as we are so often told. We weren’t born having to shop this much, and we have, in our recent past, been just as happy (in many cases, happier) consuming significantly less. The problem is the inflated role that consumption has come to play in our particular era.
Late capitalism teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community, and express ourselves. Thus, telling people that they can’t shop as much as they want to because the planet’s support systems are overburdened can be understood as a kind of attack, akin to telling them that they cannot truly be themselves. This is likely why, of environmentalism’s original “three Rs” (reduce, reuse, recycle), only the third has ever gotten any traction, since it allows us to keep on shopping as long as we put the refuse in the right box.I The other two, which require that we consume less, were pretty much dead on arrival.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS SLOW, BUT WE ARE FAST
When you are racing through a rural landscape on a bullet train, it looks as if everything you are passing were standing still: people, tractors, cars on country roads. They aren’t, of course. They are moving, but at a speed so slow compared with the train that they appear static.
So it is with climate change. Our culture, powered by fossil fuels, is that bullet train, hurtling forward toward the next quarterly report, the next election cycle, the next bit of diversion or piece of personal validation via our smartphones and tablets. Our changing climate is like the landscape outside the window: from our racy vantage point it can appear static, but it is moving, its slow progress measured in receding ice sheets, swelling waters, and incremental temperature rises. If left unchecked, climate change will most certainly speed up enough to capture our fractured attention—island nations wiped off the map and city-drowning superstorms tend to do that. But, by then, it may be too late for our actions to make a difference because the era of tipping points will likely have begun.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS PLACE-BASED, BUT WE ARE EVERYWHERE AT ONCE
The problem is not just that we are moving too quickly. It is also that the terrain on which climate changes are taking place is intensely local: an early blooming of a particular flower, an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake, sap failing to flow in a maple tree, the late arrival of a migratory bird. Noticing those kinds of subtle changes requires an intimate connection to a specific ecosystem. That kind of communion happens only when we know a place deeply, not just as scenery but also as sustenance, and when local knowledge is passed on with a sense of sacred duty from one generation to the next.
But that is increasingly rare in the urbanized, industrialized world. Few of us live where our ancestors are buried. Many of us abandon our homes lightly—for a new job, a new school, a new love. And as we do so, we are severed from whatever knowledge of place we managed to accumulate at the previous stop, and from the knowledge amassed by our ancestors (who, in my case like that of so many others, migrated repeatedly themselves).
Even for those of us who manage to stay put, daily existence is increasingly disconnected from the physical places where we reside. We live much of our lives through the portals of screens and navigate the physical world not with our senses but with miniature maps on our phones.
Shielded from the elements as we are in our climate-controlled homes, workplaces, and cars, we can find the changes unfolding in the natural world passing us by. We might have no idea that a historic drought is destroying the crops on the farms that surround our urban homes, given that the supermarkets still display miniature mountains of imported produce, with more coming in by truck all day. It takes something huge—a hurricane that passes all previous high-water marks, or a flood destroying thousands of homes—for us to notice that something is truly amiss. And even then, we have trouble holding on to that knowledge for long, as we are quickly ushered along to the next crisis before these truths have a chance to sink in.II
Climate change, meanwhile, is busily adding to the ranks of the rootless every day, as natural disasters, failed crops, starving livestock, and climate-fueled ethnic conflicts force more and more people to leave their ancestral homes. And with every human migration, more crucial connections to specific places are lost, leaving yet fewer people with the tools to listen closely to the land.
OUT OF SIGHT IS OUT OF OUR MINDS
Climate pollutants are invisible, and many of us have stopped believing in what we cannot see. When former BP chief executive Tony Hayward told reporters that we shouldn’t worry much about the oil and chemical dispersants gushing into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster because it “is a very big ocean,” he was merely voicing one of our culture’s most cherished beliefs: that what we can’t see won’t hurt us and, indeed, barely exists.
So much of our economy relies on the assumption that there is always an “away” into which we can throw our waste. There’s the away where our garbage goes when it is taken from the curb, and the away where our waste goes when it is flushed down the drain. There’s the away where the minerals and metals that make up our goods are extracted, and the away where those raw materials are turned into finished products. But the lesson of the BP spill, in the words of ecological theorist Timothy Morton, is that ours is “a world in which there is no ‘away.’ ”
When I published No Logo at the turn of this century, readers were shocked to discover the abus
ive conditions under which their clothing and gadgets were manufactured. But most of us have since learned to live with it—not to condone it, exactly, but to be in a state of constant forgetfulness about the real-world costs of our consumption. The “aways” of those factories has largely faded back into oblivion.
This is one of the ironies of being told that we live in a time of unprecedented connection. It is true that we can and do communicate across vast geographies with an ease and speed that were unimaginable only a generation ago. But in the midst of this global web of chatter, we somehow manage to be less connected to the people with whom we are most intimately enmeshed: the young women in Bangladesh’s firetrap factories who make the clothes on our bodies, or the children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo whose lungs are filled with dust from mining cobalt for the phones that have become extensions of our arms. Ours is an economy of ghosts, of deliberate blindness.
Air is the ultimate unseen, and the greenhouse gases that warm it are our most elusive ghosts of all. Philosopher David Abram points out that for most of human history, it was precisely this unseen quality that gave the air its power and commanded our respect. “Called Sila, the wind-mind of the world, by the Inuit; Nilch’i, or Holy Wind, by the Navajo; Ruach, or rushing-spirit, by the ancient Hebrews,” the atmosphere was “the most mysterious and sacred dimension of life.”