In other words, these are infrastructure projects of a scale so far from our experience, in the U.S. at least, that we hardly expect their existing corollaries to ever even be repaired anymore, instead learning to live with potholes and service delays. On top of which, unlike the internet or smartphones, the requisite technologies are not additive but substitutive, or should be, if we have the good sense to actually retire the dirty old varieties. Which means that all of the new alternatives have to face off with the resistance of entrenched corporate interests and the status-quo bias of consumers who are relatively happy with the lives they have today.
Thankfully, the green energy revolution is already, as they say, “under way.” In fact, of all the necessary components of this broader, zero-carbon revolution, clean energy is probably farthest along. How far along? In 2003, Ken Caldeira, now of the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that the world would need to add clean power sources equivalent to the full capacity of a nuclear plant every single day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. In 2018, MIT Technology Review surveyed our progress; with three decades left to go, the world was on track to complete the necessary energy revolution in four hundred years.
That gap yawns so wide it could swallow whole civilizations, and indeed threatens to. Into it has crawled that dream of carbon capture: if we can’t rebuild the entire infrastructure of the modern world in time to save it from self-destruction, perhaps we can at least buy ourselves some time by sucking some of its toxic fumes out of the air. Given the indomitable scale of the conventional approach, and given just how little time left we have to complete it, negative emissions may be, at present, a form of magical thinking for climate. They also seem like a last, best hope. And if they work, carbon capture plants will deliver industrial absolution for industrial sin—and initiate, as a result, a whole new theological romance with the power of machine.
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Threaded through the reverie for carbon capture is a fantasy of industrial absolution—that a technology could be almost dreamed into being that could purify the ecological legacy of modernity, even perhaps eliminate its footprint entirely.
The semi-subliminal sales pitch for wind and solar is not dissimilar—clean energy, natural energy, renewable and therefore sustainable energy, inexhaustible, even undiminishable energy, harnessed rather than harvested energy, abundant energy, free energy. Which all sounds quite a lot like nuclear power, at least as it was originally presented and received. Of course, that was back in the 1950s, and it has been decades now since nuclear was seen as a path to energy salvation rather than, as it invariably is today, through the specter of metaphysical contagion.
It was not always this way. In his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations, Dwight Eisenhower outlined the terms of a standing-offer arms trade that was also a moral bargain: as a reward to any nation disavowing the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and as a kind of penance for having developed the horrible technology in the first place, the United States would offer aid in the form of nuclear energy, which it would also be cultivating at home.
For a speech delivered by a president who was also a military man, it is a remarkably lyrical lament that is also a peacetime call-to-arms—in fact, it evokes in a modern reader quite beautifully the threat from climate change. After briefly describing the dramatic expansion of the capacity of the American nuclear fleet, which had in the eight years since the war grown twenty-five times more powerful and plainly terrified him, and then what it meant for the United States to have gained Soviet Russia as a nuclear rival, Eisenhower continues:
To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation. Could anyone wish his name to be coupled by history with such human degradation and destruction? Occasional pages of history do record the faces of the “great destroyers,” but the whole book of history reveals mankind’s never-ending quest for peace and mankind’s God-given capacity to build.
It has been at least a generation since Americans might have casually read “mankind’s God-given capacity to build” as a reference to nuclear power—a generation since the world stopped believing nuclear power was, in an environmental sense, “free,” and started thinking of it in terms of nuclear war, meltdown, mutation, and cancer. That we remember the names of power-plant disasters is a sign of just how scarred we feel by them: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
But the scars are almost phantom ones, given the casualty numbers. The death toll of the incident at Three Mile Island is in some dispute, as many activists believe the true impact of radiation was suppressed—perhaps a reasonable belief, since the official account insists on no adverse health impacts at all. But the most pedigreed research suggests the meltdown increased cancer risk, within a ten-mile radius, by less than one-tenth of 1 percent. For Chernobyl, the official death count is 47, though some estimates run higher—even as high as 4,000. For Fukushima, according to a United Nations report, “no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants.” Had none of the 100,000 living in the evacuation zone ever left, perhaps a few hundred might have ultimately died of cancers related to the radiation.
Any number of dead is a tragedy, but more than 10,000 people die each day, globally, from the small-particulate pollution produced by burning carbon. This is not even broaching the subject of warming and its impacts. A rule change to pollution standards for coal producers, proposed by Trump’s EPA in 2018, would kill an additional 1,400 Americans annually, the agency itself acknowledged; globally, pollution kills as many as nine million each year.
We live with that pollution, and with those death tolls, and hardly notice them; the curving concrete towers of nuclear plants, by contrast, stand astride the horizon like Chekhov’s proverbial gun. Today, despite a variety of projects aimed at producing cheap nuclear energy, the price of new plants remains high enough that it is hard to make a persuasive argument that more “green” investment be directed toward them rather than installations of wind and solar. But the case for decommissioning and dismantling existing plants is considerably weaker, and yet that is exactly what is happening—from the United States, where both Three Mile Island and Indian Point are being closed down, to Germany, where so much nuclear power has recently been retired that the country is growing its carbon emissions despite a state-of-the-world green energy program. For this, Angela Merkel has been called the “Climate Chancellor.”
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The contaminationist view of nuclear power is a misguided climate parable, arising nevertheless from a perceptive environmentalist perspective—that the healthy, clean natural world is made toxic by the intrusions and interventions of human industry. But the main lesson from the church of technology runs in the other direction, instructing us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to regard the world beyond our phones as less real, less urgent, and less meaningful than the worlds made available to us through those screens, which happen to be worlds protected from climate devastation. As Andreas Malm has wondered, “How many will play augmented reality games on a planet that is six degrees warmer?” The poet and musician Kate Tempest puts it more brinily: “Staring into the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.”
Presumably, you can already feel this transformation underfoot, in your own life—scrolling through photos of your baby when your actual baby is right in front of you, reading trivial Twitter threads while your spouse is speaking. In Silicon Valley, even tech critics tend to see the problem as a form of addiction; but, like all addictions, it expresses
a value judgment, if one that makes the unaddicted uncomfortable—in this case, that we find the world of our screens more rewarding, or safer, in ways so hard to justify and explain that there isn’t really a word for it other than “preferable.” This preference is much more likely to grow than shrink, which may seem like cultural devolution, perhaps especially to temperamental declinists. It could conceivably also be a psychologically useful coping mechanism for living, still within the consumptive bourgeois tradition, in a dramatically degraded natural world. A generation from now, god help us, tech addiction may even look “adaptive.”
Politics of Consumption
Just before dawn on April 14, 2018, a Saturday, a sixty-year-old man walked into Prospect Park in Brooklyn, gave himself a shower of gasoline, and lit himself on fire. Beside the body, near a circular patch of grass blackened by the flames, lay a note, handwritten: “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide,” it read. “I apologize to you for the mess.” It was a small mess; he had arranged a ring of soil to prevent the fire from spreading too far.
In a longer letter, typed, which he had also sent to the city’s newspapers, Buckel elaborated. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves….Pollution ravages our planet,” he wrote. “Our present grows more desperate, our future needs more than what we’ve been doing.”
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Americans know political suicide by self-immolation from the Vietnam era, when Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk repurposing a spiritual tradition of self-purification for contemporary protest, burned himself to death in Saigon. A few years later, the thirty-one-year-old Quaker Norman Morrison was inspired to do the same, outside the Pentagon, his one-year-old daughter beside him. One week after that, twenty-two-year-old Roger Allen LaPorte, a former seminarian and Catholic Worker, lit himself aflame outside the United Nations. We don’t like to think about it, but the tradition continues. In the United States, there have been six protests by self-immolation since 2014; in China, the gesture is even more common, particularly by opponents of the country’s Tibet policy, with twelve in the last three months of 2011 and twenty in the first three months of 2012 alone. And of course the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor ignited the Arab Spring.
Buckel was a later-life environmental activist. He’d spent most of his career as a prominent gay-rights litigator, and his notes expressed two clear convictions: that the natural world had been made sick by industrial activity, and that much more than the average passersby in Prospect Park could appreciate must be done to halt, and ideally reverse, the damage. In the days after his suicide, it was the first of these which attracted the most attention—his death treated as an alarm, or a bellwether, marking some amorphous shift, perhaps in the health of the planet but certainly in the average Brooklynite’s perception of it. The second insight is more challenging—that the climate crisis demands political commitment well beyond the easy engagement of rhetorical sympathies, comfortable partisan tribalism, and ethical consumption.
It is a common charge against liberal environmentalists that they live hypocritically—eating meat, flying, and voting liberal without yet having purchased Teslas. But among the woke Left the inverted charge is just as often true: we navigate by a North Star of politics through our diets, our friendships, even our consumption of pop culture, but rarely make meaningful political noise about those causes that run against our own self-interest or sense of self as special—indeed enlightened. And so, in the coming years, divestment is likely to be just the first salvo in a moral arms race between universities, municipalities, and nations. Cities will compete to be the first to ban cars, to paint every single roof white, to produce all the agriculture eaten by residents in vertical farms that don’t require post-harvest transportation by automobile, railroad, or airplane. But liberal NIMBYism will still strut, too, as it did in 2018, when American voters in deep-blue Washington state rejected a carbon tax at the ballot box, and the worst French protests since the quasi-revolution of 1968 raged against a proposed gasoline tax. On perhaps no issue more than climate is that liberal posture of well-off enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.
But when critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypocritical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits the disparity but feeds and profits from it—this is what Thomas Piketty calls the “apparatus of justification.” And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We won’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes. In an age of personal politics, hypocrisy can look like a cardinal sin; but it can also articulate a public aspiration. Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier. And a perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political commitment gives us only “wellness.”
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It can be hard to take wellness seriously as a movement, at first, which may be why it has been the subject of so much derision over the past few years—SoulCycle, Goop, Moon Juice. But however manipulated by marketing consultants, and however dubious its claims to healthfulness, wellness also gives a clear name and shape to a growing perception even, or especially, among those wealthy enough to be insulated from the early assaults of climate change: that the contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification.
What has been called the “new New Age” arises from a similar intuition—that meditation, ayahuasca trips, crystals and Burning Man and microdosed LSD are all pathways to a world beckoning as purer, cleaner, more sustaining, and perhaps above all else, more whole. This purity arena is likely to expand, perhaps dramatically, as the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation—and consumers respond by trying to extract themselves from the sludge of the world however they can. It should not be a surprise to discover, in next year’s supermarket aisles, alongside labels for “organic” and “free range,” some food described as “carbon-free.” GMOs aren’t a sign of a sick planet but a possible partial solution to the coming crisis of agriculture; nuclear power the same for energy. But both have already become nearly as off-putting as carcinogens to the purity-minded, who are growing in number and channeling more and more ecological anxiety along the way.
That anxiety is coherent, even rational, at a time when it has been revealed that many American brand-name foods made from oats, including Cheerios and Quaker Oats, contain the pesticide Roundup, which has been linked with cancer, and when the National Weather Service issues elaborate guidance about which commonly available face masks can, and which cannot, protect you against the wildfire smoke engulfing nearly all of North America. It is only intuitive, in other words, that impulses toward purity represent growth areas of our culture, destined to distend further inward from the cultural periphery as apocalyptic ecological anxiety grows, too.
But conscious consumption and wellness are both cop-outs, arising from that basic promise extended by neoliberalism: that consumer choices can be a substitute for political action, advertising not just political identity but political virtue; that the mutual end-goal of market and political forces should be the effective retirement of contentious politics at the hand of market consensus, which would displace ideological dispute; and that, in the meantime, in the supermarket aisle or department store, one can do good for the w
orld simply by buying well.
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The term “neoliberalism” has been a swear word, on the Left, only since the Great Recession. Before then it was, most of the time, mere description: of the growing power of markets, particularly financial markets, in the liberal democracies of the West over the second half of the twentieth century; and of the hardening centrist consensus within those countries committed to spreading that power, in the form of privatization, deregulation, corporate-friendly tax policy, and the promotion of free trade.
This program was sold, for fifty years, on the promise of growth—and not just growth for some. In this way, it was a sort of total political philosophy, extending a single, simple ideological tarpaulin so far and wide that it enclosed the earth like a rubbery blanket of greenhouse gas.
It was total in other ways as well, unable to adjust to meaningfully discriminate between experiences as divergent as post-crash England and post-Maria Puerto Rico, or to concede its own shortcomings and paradoxes and blind spots, proposing instead only more neoliberalism. This is how the forces that unleashed climate change—namely, “the unchecked wisdom of the market”—were nevertheless presented as the forces that would save the planet from its ravages. It is how “philanthrocapitalism,” which seeks profits alongside human benefits, has replaced the loss-leader model of moral philanthropy among the very rich; how the winners of our increasingly winner-take-all tournament economy use philanthropy to buttress their own status; how “effective altruism,” which measures even not-for-profit charity by metrics of return borrowed from finance, has transformed the culture of giving well beyond the billionaire class; and how the “moral economy,” a rhetorical wedge that once expressed a radical critique of capitalism, became the calling card of do-gooder capitalists like Bill Gates. It is also, on the other end of the pecking order, how struggling citizens are asked to be entrepreneurs, indeed to demonstrate their value as citizens with the hard work of entrepreneurship, in an exhausting social system defined above all else by relentless competition.
The Uninhabitable Earth Page 19