That is the critique from the Left, at least—and it is, in its way, inarguably true. But by laundering all conflict and competition through the market, neoliberalism also proffered a new model of doing business, so to speak, on the world stage—one that didn’t emerge from, or point toward, endless nation-state rivalry.
One should not confuse correlation with causation, especially since there was so much tumult coming out of World War II that it is hard to isolate the single cause of just about anything. But the international cooperative order that has since presided, establishing or at least emerging in parallel with relative peace and abundant prosperity, is very neatly historically coincident with the reign of globalization and the empire of financial capital we now group together as neoliberalism. And if one were inclined to confuse correlation with causation, there is a quite intuitive and plausible theory connecting them. Markets may be problematic, shall we say, but they also value security and stability and, all else being equal, reliable economic growth. In the form of that growth, neoliberalism promised a reward for cooperation, effectively transforming, at least in theory, what had once been seen as zero-sum competitions into positive-sum collaborations.
Neoliberalism never made good on that bargain, as the financial crisis finally revealed. Which has left the rhetorical banner of an ever-expanding, ever-enriching society of affluence—and a political economy oriented toward the same goal—considerably tattered. Those continuing to hold it aloft are much wobblier at the knee than seemed credible to imagine just a decade or two ago, like athletes showing themselves suddenly far past their prime. Global warming promises another blow, possibly a lethal one. If Bangladesh floods and Russia profits, the result will not be good for the cause of neoliberalism—and arguably worse still for the cause of liberal internationalism, which has always been its aide-de-camp.
What kinds of politics are likely to evolve after the promise of growth recedes? A whole pantheon of possibilities floats before us, including that new trade deals are built on the moral infrastructure of climate change, with commerce contingent on emissions cuts and sanctions a punishment for squirrelly carbon behavior; or that a new global legal regime emerges, supplementing or perhaps even supplanting the central principle of human rights that has presided globally, at least in theory, since the end of World War II. But neoliberalism was sold on the proposition of positive-sum cooperation of all kinds, and the term itself suggests its natural successor regime: zero-sum politics. Today, we don’t even have to gaze into the future, or trust that it will be deformed by climate change, to see what that would look like. In the form of tribalism at home and nationalism abroad and terrorism flaming out from the tinder of failed states, that future is here, at least in preview, already. Now we just wait for the storms.
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If neoliberalism is the god that failed on climate change, what juvenile gods will it spawn? This is the question taken up by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright in Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, in which they repurpose Thomas Hobbes to sketch out what they see as the likeliest political form to evolve from the crisis of warming and the pummeling of its impacts.
In his Leviathan, Hobbes narrated a false history of political consent to illustrate what he saw as the fundamental bargain of state power: the people giving up their liberty for the protection offered by a king. Global warming suggests the same bargain to would-be authoritarians: in a newly dangerous world, citizens will trade liberties for security and stability and some insurance against climate deprivation, ushering into being, Mann and Wainwright say, a new form of sovereignty to do battle against the new threat from the natural world. This new sovereignty will be not national but planetary—the only power that could plausibly answer a planetary threat.
Mann and Wainwright are leftists, and their book is in part a call-to-arms, but the planetary sovereign the world is likeliest to turn to, they say with regret, is the one that sold us climate change in the first place—that is, neoliberalism. In fact, a neoliberalism beyond neoliberalism, a true world-state concerned close-to-exclusively with the flow of capital—a preoccupation that may poorly equip it to deal with the damages and degradations of climate change, but at no real cost to its authority. This is the “Climate Leviathan” of the title, though the authors do not believe its success is inevitable. In fact, they see three variations as also possible. Altogether, the four categories make up a climate-future matrix, plotted along the axes of relative faith in capitalism (on the one hand) and degree of support for nation-state sovereignty (on the other).
“Climate Leviathan” is the quadrant defined by a positive relationship to capitalism and a negative perspective on national sovereignty. Something like our current situation they call the “Climate Behemoth” outcome, defined by mutual support for capitalism and for the nation-state: capitalism overruns the world’s borders to address the planetary crisis while protecting its own interests.
The next they call “Climate Mao,” a system defined by putatively benevolent but authoritarian and anti-capitalist leaders, exercising their authority within the borders of nations as they exist today.
The last quadrant: capitalistic nations conduct haphazard climate diplomacy—an international system negatively disposed toward both capitalism and the sovereignty of nation-states. This system would define itself as a guarantor of stability and security—ensuring at least a subsistence-level distribution of resources, protecting against the ravages of extreme climate events, and policing the inevitable outbreaks of conflict over the now-more-precious commodities of food, water, land. It would also wipe out entirely the borders between nations, recognizing only its own sovereignty and power. They call this possibility “Climate X,” and express great hope for it: a global alliance operating in the name of a common humanity, rather than in the interests of capital or nations. But there is a dark version as well—it is how you might get a planetary dictator in the shape of a mafia boss, and global governance not on the do-gooder model but as a straight-up protection racket.
In theory, at least. Already, it’s fair to say, we have at least two Climate Mao leaders out there, and both are imperfect avatars of the archetype: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, neither of whom is anti-capitalist so much as state capitalist. They also hold very different perspectives on the climate future and how to reckon with it, which suggests another variable, beyond form of government: climate ideology. This is how Angela Merkel and Donald Trump, both operating within the “Climate Behemoth” system, can nevertheless seem so many worlds apart—though Germany’s slow walk on coal suggests there may not be full solar systems between them.
With China and Russia, the ideological contrast is clearer. Putin, the commandant of a petro-state that also happens to be, given its geography, one of the few nations on Earth likely to benefit from continued warming, sees basically no benefit to constraining carbon emissions or greening the economy—Russia’s or the world’s. Xi, now the leader-for-life of the planet’s rising superpower, seems to feel mutual obligations to the country’s growing prosperity and to the health and security of its people—of whom, it’s worth remembering, it has so many.
In the wake of Trump, China has become a much more emphatic—or at least louder—green energy leader. But the incentives do not necessarily suggest it will make good on that rhetoric. In 2018, an illuminating study was published comparing how much a country was likely to be burdened by the economic impacts of climate change to its responsibility for global warming, measured by carbon emissions. The fate of India showcased the moral logic of climate change at its most grotesque: expected to be, by far, the world’s most hard-hit country, shouldering nearly twice as much of the burden as the next nation, India’s share of climate burden was four times as high as its share of climate guilt. China is in the opposite situation, its share of guilt four times as high as its share of the burden. Which, unfortunately, means it may be tempted to s
low-walk its green energy revolution. The United States, the study found, presented a case of eerie karmic balance: its expected climate damages matching almost precisely its share of global carbon emissions. Not to say either share is small; in fact, of all the nations in the world, the U.S. was predicted to be hit second hardest.
For decades, the rise of China has been an anxious prophecy invoked so regularly, and so prematurely, that Westerners, Americans especially, could be forgiven for thinking it was a case of the empire who cried wolf—an expression of Western self-doubt, more a premonition of collapse than a well-founded prediction of what new power might arise, and when. But on the matter of climate change, China does hold nearly all the cards. To the extent the world as a whole needs a stable climate to endure or thrive, its fate will be determined much more by the carbon trajectories of the developing world than by the course of the United States and Europe, where emissions have already flattened out and will likely begin their decline soon—though how dramatic a decline, and how soon, is very much up in the air. And although what’s called “carbon outsourcing” means that a large slice of China’s emissions is produced manufacturing goods to be consumed by Americans and Europeans. Whose responsibility are those gigatons of carbon? It may not much longer be merely a rhetorical question, if the Paris accords yield to a more rigorous global carbon governance structure, as they were intended to, and add, along the way, a proper enforcement mechanism, military or otherwise.
How and how fast China manages its own transition from industrial to postindustrial economy, how and how fast it “greens” the industry that remains, how and how fast it remodels agricultural practices and diet, how and how fast it steers the consumer preferences of its booming middle and upper classes away from carbon intensity—these are not the only things that will determine the climate shape of the twenty-first century. The courses taken by India and the rest of South Asia, Nigeria and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, matter enormously. But China is, at present, the largest of those nations, and by far the wealthiest and most powerful. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, the country has already positioned itself as a major provider, in some cases the major provider, of the infrastructure of industry, energy, and transportation in much of the rest of the developing world. And it is relatively easy to imagine, at the end of a Chinese century, an intuitive global consensus solidifying—that the country with the world’s largest economy (therefore most responsible for the energy output of the planet) and the most people (therefore most responsible for the public health and well-being of humanity) should have something more than narrowly national powers over the climate policy of the rest of the “community of nations,” who would fall into line behind it.
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All of these scenarios, even the bleakest, presume some new political equilibrium. There is also, of course, the possibility of disequilibrium—or what you would normally call “disorder” and “conflict.” This is the analysis put forward by Harald Welzer, in Climate Wars, which predicts a “renaissance” of violent conflict in the decades to come. His evocative subtitle is What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century.
Already, in local spheres, political collapse is a quite common outcome of climate crisis—we just call it “civil war.” And we tend to analyze it ideologically—as we did in Darfur, in Syria, in Yemen. Those kinds of collapses are likely to remain technically “local” rather than truly “global,” though in a time of climate crisis they would have an easier time metastasizing beyond old borders than they have in the recent past. In other words, a completely Mad Max world is not around the bend, since even catastrophic climate change won’t undermine all political power—in fact, it will produce some winners, relatively speaking. Some of them with quite large armies and rapidly expanding surveillance states—China now pulls criminals out of pop concerts with facial recognition software and deploys domestic-spy drones indistinguishable from birds. This is not an aspiring empire likely to tolerate no-man’s-lands within its sphere.
Mad Max regions elsewhere are another matter. In certain ways they are already here, where “here” is parts of Somalia or Iraq or South Sudan at various points in the last decade, including points when the planet’s geopolitics seemed, at a glance from Los Angeles or London, stable. The idea of a “global order” has always been something of a fiction, or at least an aspiration, even as the joined forces of liberal internationalism, globalization, and American hegemony inched us toward it over the last century. Very probably, over the next century, climate change will reverse that course.
History After Progress
That history is a story that moves in one direction is among the most unshakable creeds of the modern West—having survived, often only slightly modified, the counterarguments made over centuries by genocides and gulags, famines and epidemics and global conflagrations, producing death tolls in the tens of millions. The grip of this narrative is so tight on political imaginations that grotesque injustices and inequities, racial and otherwise, are often invoked not as reasons to doubt the arc of history but to be reminded of its shape—perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so agitated about such problems, in other words, since history is “moving in the right direction” and the forces of progress are, to indulge the mixed metaphor, “on the right side of history.” On what side is climate change?
Its own side—its own tide. There is no good thing in the world that will be made more abundant, or spread more widely, by global warming. The list of the bad things that will proliferate is innumerable. And already, in this age of nascent ecological crisis, you can read a whole new literature of deep skepticism—proposing not only that history can move in reverse, but that the entire project of human settlement and civilization, which we know as “history” and which has given us climate change, has been, in fact, a jet stream backward. As climate horrors accumulate, this anti-progressive perspective is sure to blossom.
Some Cassandras are already here. In Sapiens, his alien’s-eye-view account of the rise of human civilization, the historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that this rise is best understood as a succession of myths, beginning with the one that the invention of farming, in what is often called the Neolithic Revolution, amounted to progress (“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us,” as he pithily put it). In Against the Grain, the political scientist and anthropologist of anarchy James C. Scott gives a more pointed critique of the same period: wheat cultivation, he argues, is responsible for the arrival of what we now understand as state power, and, with it, bureaucracy and oppression and inequality. These are no longer outlier accounts of what you may have learned about in middle school as the Agricultural Revolution, which you probably were taught marked the real beginning of history. Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, but farming for only about 12,000—an innovation that ended hunting and gathering, bringing about cities and political structures, and with them what we now think of as “civilization.” But even Jared Diamond—whose Guns, Germs, and Steel gave an ecological and geographical account of the rise of the industrial West, and whose Collapse is a kind of forerunner text for this recent wave of reconsiderations—has called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
The argument does not even rely on anything that followed later: industrialization, fossil fuels, or the damage they now threaten to unleash on the planet and the fragile civilization briefly erected on its slippery surface. Instead, the case against civilization, this new class of skeptics says, can be made much more directly as a case against farming: the sedentary life agriculture produced eventually led to denser settlements, but populations didn’t expand for millennia afterward, the potential growth from farming offset by new levels of disease and warfare. This was not a brief, painful interlude, through which humans passed into a new time of abundance, but a story of strife that continued for a very long time, indeed to this day. We are still, now, in much of the world, short
er, sicker, and dying younger than our hunter-gatherer forebears, who were also, by the way, much better custodians of the planet on which we all live. And they watched over it for much longer—nearly all of those 200,000 years. That epic era once derided as “prehistory” accounts for about 95 percent of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark. Which makes the history of mark-making—the entire history of civilization, the entire history we know as history—look less like an inevitable crescendo than like an anomaly, or blip. And makes industrialization and economic growth, the two forces that really gave the modern world the hurtling sensation of material progress, a blip inside a blip. A blip inside a blip that has brought us to the brink of a never-ending climate catastrophe.
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