Magical solutions
Auden Schendler is the senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen One and the author of the forthcoming book Terrible Beauty: Reckoning With Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul. He wrote about the futile “magical solutions floating out of Dubai” in the Times:
I have spent my career working on climate change — not theoretically but in the trenches, crawling under trailers to insulate them under a federal government program to help low-income families conserve energy, building solar farms, capturing methane from coal mines, bolstering the climate movement through various nonprofit boards and crafting policy at the state and municipal levels. I served as a state regulator and an elected town councilman.
I have also spent 25 years in the field of corporate sustainability, trying to figure out how business might become a meaningful part of the climate solution. Over time, I came to understand that the ethic being applied — the idea that free markets can solve societal problems and that even a monstrosity like climate change can be fixed without regulation — was a ruse that I had bought into, realizing that fraud only late in the game.
Free markets probably can solve some societal problems, but all of them? Hardly. This one? Oh hell no.
As the global climate summit in Dubai has unspooled, I’ve read inexplicably cheerful social media posts from colleagues and friends, climate leaders I admire and total unknowns at COP28, the Conference of the Parties — which I’ve come to call the party at the end of the world. These “Look, Ma!” posts strike me as forced, naïve at best, trending toward willful blindness and delusion.
One “breakthrough” being lauded includes a purely voluntary commitment by fossil fuel companies to better capture methane, a potent greenhouse gas we absolutely must contain.
Well you see if it’s not purely voluntary it’s not the free market, and then where would we be?
For fossil fuel companies, committing to containing methane leaking from their pipelines and wellheads is a way for those businesses to appear beneficent while continuing to traffic in oil and gas. It is that very trafficking that causes the leakage that must be regulated, even as scientists tell us the essential action required to control warming is to stop burning coal, oil and gas.
Aw come on. They say they’ll fix the leaks. Surely that ought to be enough for you people??
At the same time, there were glimmers of hope. As the climate conference began, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced comprehensive new rules to regulate methane in the United States, at least. There are also plans to create a fund to help vulnerable nations hit by climate disasters, and to set a goal of tripling the amount of renewable power worldwide by 2030 (if high interest rates don’t derail that objective). There were also calls for a full fossil fuel phaseout.
But that proposed phaseout rattled the conference hosts in Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading oil producers. It is ramping up oil production. The idea was quickly scuttled. The head of the OPEC cartel called on its members to reject any plan that would threaten the production and sale of oil, gas and coal. And it was no idle threat: All 198 participating nations must consent to any agreement.
You don’t see the cruise industry phasing itself out either.
It’s not going to happen.
It’s interesting his notation about sustainability and corporations. I realized quite a long time ago that most sustainability coordinators/directors/whatever, are very much on track with corporate free market agendas, and the only solutions I’ve ever heard have been very business friendly, and very climate hostile, while singing the praises of green this and green that.
I suspect the rise of the sustainability coordinator is less a signal of corporate commitment to fighting climate change and more a commitment to doing nothing. Any time Congress started rattling the swords of possible regulations, the businesses could point to their sustainability department and crow about their free market commitment to sustainability, helping to stave off any new regulations so they could keep doing business as usual but with a nice coat of greenwashing.
Congress would have no trouble accepting that, because most of the representatives and senators are more than happy to deregulate or not impose new regulations. Voters can be swayed by an opponent pointing to new regulations, saying “this cost taxpayers [fill in astronomically large price] for what? Something that won’t feed you or put clothes on your back or gas in your car.” Then voters go to the polls, misinformed…or maybe half informed, but most regulations do not cost what the anti-regulation propaganda says it will, and often does more than they say it will. The problem is, most of what it does is unseen by the average voter, so it looks like wasting money to them
So they put in sustainability coordinators, sign agreements with bodies made up of corporations to show their commitment, and change nothing. And Congress (Parliament, etc…fill in legislating body of your preference) is happy to believe them.
[…] a comment by iknklast on Magical […]
It all depends on what one is trying to “sustain.” I once went to a meeting, long ago, where the speaker contrasted the concept of “sustainable development” with “sustainable life. The former is trying to keep development going, with the point being to extract as much as possible without destroying the “resource.” The latter would emphasize with extracting as little as possible so that life can continue without being so precariously balanced on the edge of extinction.
Well, the world of tomorrow will be short of food, clothing, and cars will be cursed relics from a reckless, wasteful golden age.
In an argument on another blog with a Kenyan architect who is…anarchy adjacent*. I kept trying to get him to see how nonfunctional his anarchist society would be in the context of multimillion person nation states. Although hell, even hunting and gathering bands had rather strict rules and elders in their completely different context.
This second quote was a far better riposte to his rather infuriating FREEDOM theme xm, actually!
*one can understand his dislike for statism given he lives in a tribal kleptocracy. But he engages in magical thinking sometimes. Despite being an avowed atheist