The Solution to Industrial Warming Needs to Be as Radical as Its Inception
If you look at the historical climate record (as discussed in a spate of recent articles like this one), one thing strikes you: how quickly we humans went from a minor signal in the climate system to an exponential one. 200 years is all it took for Europeanized humans to wreck the planet’s homeostasis. Against that radical departure from the norm, any solution needs to be equally radical, if it is to have any hope of being able to overcome the problem we’ve created.
Spoiler alert: carbon offsets and electric cars aren’t going to get us there. We need a more fundamental — and sweeping — change in human behavior.
Humans’ success as a species has been greatly enabled by avarice. Avarice is a very effective strategy. Secure your survival first. Consume the resource before any other creature does. If we hadn’t evolved to be avaricious, the dominant species might be super-smart tigers. Sorry, tiger — we won.
You can’t get carried away, though — if you exceed the carrying capacity, your population crashes, like some bird species that gorges on its one insect prey until a few lean years suck the wind from beneath their wings. Humans have been very adept at riding that line and extending on a short-term, local basis. We clearly suck at it on a long-term, global basis, because we haven’t found a way to correlate individual levels of consumption to planetary limits.
We are exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity by a massive margin, and we just don’t realize it. More accurately, we’re intentionally deceiving ourselves into believing we’re not exceeding it. Here’s where I’ll acknowledge that it’s scary to get by with less. We’re programmed to fear scarcity. We deeply fear being without, and so we hoard and we stockpile stuff we don’t need, never mind the cost.
That is the impulse we have to overturn. The 10-minute shower, the ten pound bag of frozen chicken from Costco that we wind up throwing out after it spends five years in the spare chest freezer in our basement, the outsized baby stroller and mountains of plastic diapers we haul in our bus-sized SUV — all this is emblematic of the flawed impulse that causes human consumption to scale exponentially, aided and abetted by a false economy of subsidized waste.
It doesn’t matter how you change the way all that trash is manufactured and delivered to your door — as long as we keep consuming more, more, more, there will be a cost somewhere in the system. Most likely there will still be a cost in the climate system — I don’t know that you can ever fully electrify the kind of tornado of trash that is our global economy.
Humans need to embrace intentional scarcity. We need to fall in love with using as little as possible in the same way we’ve fallen in love with gorging ourselves until our pancreases give out.
The number one obstacle to getting there is not technological, but emotional. It comes down to just one little word.
Trust.
That’s it. That’s the cornerstone to heading off impending doom.
Trust’s inverse twin star is fear. Fear of doing without drives avarice and consumption. Look at what happened during COVID. Fear of not having toilet paper led to hoarding, which led, paradoxically, to shortages, which necessitated more hoarding. If people could have trusted each other to buy a responsible amount and trusted that the supply chain would cough up enough to meet that reasonable demand, we might have all been fine and less stressed; but we didn’t trust each other. We fell back on our old ways: grab as much as you can as soon as you can. Secure your survival first.
The global supply system is so strong, we don’t need to act like scared cavemen. Look how long it has been since Europeanized economies faced shortages of any kind. You have to go back to the gas lines of the 1970’s. It’s been that long.
Yet trust is still the one scarcity we can’t shake. Look again at the response to COVID prevention. Our system produced a vaccine in record time. Our epidemiologists figured out decently quickly that the virus was airborne. All we had to do was follow the advice we were given, and yet people questioned it as if doctors and scientists were foreign spies here to trick us into…staying healthy? People want to mistrust. They want to be angry, and there are people all too willing to take advantage of that impulse. There is an entire political party whose stock and trade has been undermining confidence in government — the institution created for the express purpose of providing guidance for our collective actions, the expression of the will of the people.
Trust is a fragile thing. It takes years to cultivate and just a short time to uproot. If we’re going to act in concert to consume less, we need it more than ever. We need institutions whose authority is recognized and respected; but at this critical juncture, trust in all institutions is failing. Every single effort by the government to create collective action against COVID was met with hostility and lawsuits, rather than a willingness to do the helpful thing.
We find ourselves up against it now. Life is becoming increasingly subject to chaos. Where we rely on rivers, the rivers are running dry. Where we rely on relatively solid ground, torrents of water are washing it away. Soon, we who love progress so much we sacrifice almost anything to pursue it, will spend all our time running in circles, repairing roads and rebuilding homes we already just built. We need an authority with enough legitimacy and reach that it can set rational individual limits on how much we buy and throw away at a scale large enough to bring us into balance with the finite natural system we exist within. Individual, uncoordinated action won’t cut it.
Is there any such authority left that we trust? The answer appears to be no, and with the next two elections in the US, odds are that the wreckers will be back in the very halls of power that they want to tear down.
They will play off our fear, and enough of us will give in to forestall any progress. That is where the real frontline in the climate battle is drawn.
