Guest post: The problem is incremental
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Never going back.
I have been thinking a lot about intellectually compelling problems vs. emotionally compelling problems lately: Considering that climate change – along with the strongly interlinked problem of ocean acidification, the mass-extinction of species, and the general toll the human economy is taking on ecosystems and the natural world – is the most dire existential emergency our species has ever faced, many have struggled to explain why – despite constant claims of “alarmism” and “hysteria” – there isn’t more alarm and public outrage around the issue.
The most obvious answer, and usually the first one that comes to mind – is that tackling the problem puts you on a direct collision course with powerful vested interests. The fossil fuel industry is the richest, most profitable industry in history, and is thus able to spend practically unlimited resources financing disinformation campaigns, lobbying buying politicians etc. But there’s more to it than that. Even if only a relatively small percentage of the population get their income directly from the fossil fuel industry, we are all invested in the modern, high-tech, consumerist life-style, and while I don’t think there’s much evidence that consumerism ever made us any happier (I’m strongly inclined to suspect the opposite is true!), it’s certainly addictive as hell, very much like heroin or alcohol in this respect. You can learn pretty much everything there is to know about human self-deception, rationalization, compartmentalization etc. by studying addicts alone, and we’re all addicts when it comes to fossil fuel.
Another common explanation is that the issue has become so heavily politicized that many also have an ideological stake in denying the problem, especially in the U.S. where it’s become just another proxy issue in the ongoing Culture War between Democrats and Republicans for the soul of the nation. In reality, of course, neither Democrats nor Republicans have any real interest in doing anything about the problem that has any chance of actually working. But since Democrats at the very least tend to accept the problem as real and pay lip-service to doing something about it, even acknowledging that the problem exists has come to be seen as a “liberal” or “leftist” position and hence a proxy for everything people dislike about taxes and regulations, immigration, abortion, gun control, political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism, secularism etc. Thus rejecting it out of hand becomes about group identity (“My kind of people don’t believe things like that!”), tribal loyalty, rooting for your team, booing the other team, etc. The actual facts of the matter hardly enter into your considerations at all.
But this still doesn’t quite explain why even people who accept all the facts, understand what’s happening on an intellectual level, and are able accurately assess the danger, are mostly not motivated to do anything about it. Of course there is a game-theory aspect to it: Why should I give up the benefit (in the short term) of fossil fuels if others won’t and the world gets screwed anyway? And of course the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies is only too obvious.
But I also think there’s a lot of truth in what people like Daniel Kahneman have said about apathy and indifference to climate change and human psychology. The human brain evolved to react strongly to a sudden danger or threat. It did not evolve to react to a gradual worsening of conditions over time. We’re all familiar with the (probably apocryphal, but never mind) claim about frogs in hot water: If you put a frog directly into scolding hot water, so the story goes, it will instantly jump out and save its own life. If you put the same frog in lukewarm water and gradually heat it to that exact same temperature, it will look in vain for the “line” where the temperature changes from acceptable to unacceptable and hence remain passive and indecisive while it’s slowly boiled to death. The claim doesn’t have to be literally true (after all, the topic at hand wasn’t frogs anyway) to be instructive.
The human brain also evolved to react strongly to a threat from a clearly identifiable and hostile external agent (a predator, a rivaling tribe etc.). Climate change offers none of these psychological triggers. The problem is incremental rather than binary (i.e. all or nothing), and while wildfires and extreme weather events can be both sudden and dramatic when they occur, it’s not like they never happened in the past. Rather than a sharp line we’re once again looking at a gradual increase in the statistical frequency and intensity of such events. Nor is there a clearly identifiable external enemy. Blaming politicians or even the fossil fuel industry doesn’t quite do it justice since ultimately we’re the ones who keep electing those politicians and paying those companies to fuel our cars, heat our homes etc. As someone once put it, the elephant in the room is all of us. And so even if you understand the problem on an intellectual level, it doesn’t trigger the kind of instinctive, visceral fear reaction required to motivate action. In other words, it may be an intellectually compelling problem but it’s not an emotionally compelling problem, and only emotions can generate motivation.
Compare it to, say, the threat of Islamist terrorism. If you’re an average citizen in the West and you look at the most statistically probable causes of death for people within your demographic, Islamist terrorism should rank very low on your list of concerns – certainly orders of magnitude lower than climate change. But here we have almost the opposite dynamic going on: It may not be an intellectually compelling problem, but it sure is emotionally compelling. Terrorist attacks are usually sudden and dramatic when they occur and conjure up images of dangerous fanatics shouting violent slogans who hate us and want to destroy us. It ticks all the right boxes and pushes all the right buttons.
Bottom line, visceral fear – and hence motivation to act – often has very little to do with any objective assessment of risk, and so people burn enormous amounts of calories worrying about vanishingly improbable dangers and act accordingly while the greatest existential threat to our collective survival is treated with about as much urgency as a bad haircut. Well… Not quite that much…
I am a climate change skeptic. Not w/r/t denying the reality. Skeptical that something CAN let alone will be done. There are 8bulliob humans. A billion live the consumerist lifestyle. But even the other seven exist because of modern technology and fossil fuel. 8 billion. It would take complete crash of the economy under a brutal totalitarian state that would make Chinese Covid lockdowns seem mild. And a good percentage of the population would…no MUST die. We can’t go back to the long term sustainable lifestyle of hunting and gathering. One can argue the Big Mistake, memorialized in Fall of Man/Eviction from Eden stories was agriculture. And green technology cannot be scaled up on the needed global scale. Dr. Hanson of San Diego State had a blog years ago looking at the realities. Right wing religious nuts are not the only people engaged to n magical thinking. (See trans!)
Do you want to be a subsistence farming peasant? A !Kung tribesman? A roving Hun warrior? Do you even have the skills, the community? Narrowing our focus 300 million Americans could not live like the Unibomber even if we wanted to. So who here will volunteer to be part of the 90% that need to disappear?
Sadly, solar panels and Prius cars won’t save us either. The embedded carbon in a high end electric car battery means one would have to drive 400,000 miles in a conventional car before one is carbon neutral. Are you going to take the bus everywhere? Covid is still around I won’t get in an incubator tube myself.
Not all problems can be solved by government policies or well meaning personal actions. Look what happened in Sri Lanka when the tyrannical and corrupt state mandated green agriculture. They are starving basically.
And no… I don’t have an answer. The answers are all puttering around the edges of the problem.
I blame the smear campaign against nuclear power for making the problem worse than it would otherwise be. (I would be *really* surprised if that wasn’t largely funded by the coal & oil companies.)
We can at least replace fossil fuels with nuclear for electricity generation.
Go to https://electricitymaps.com/ click on the ‘live map’ then compare France with Germany or Ontario with Alberta.
It would be hard to use nuclear electricity for all our energy needs, but we could have replaced a significant fraction of fossil fuel use with it.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, we are 100% fucked. Hopelessly and utterly screwed. Gone beyond the event horizon and already in the process of spaghettification.
Still, there is nothing I know* that suggests it wouldn’t have made a difference if we had taken the problem seriously when scientists started sounding the alarm back in the early 90s. It would have required, as others have put it, not so much a “silver bullet” as a “silver buckshot”. Renewables were never going to solve the problem. Nuclear energy was never going to solve the problem. Energy conservation was never going to solve the problem. More efficient technologies were never going to solve the problem. Reforestation was never going to solve the problem. Reversing population growth was never going to solve the problem etc. etc. Only through a combination of all the above, might we have stood a chance of – if not “solving” the problem, then at least limiting the damage enough to keep the planet somewhat habitable. And yes, life style changes would have to be a part of it as well. Any proposed “solution” based on the premise that we were going to continue living exactly as before only without the carbon emissions (changing to a different car but not driving less etc.) was always a false solution.
* My education is in renewable energy, which doesn’t make me any kind of expert, but it’s not exactly nothing either.
There is a theory, supported by some evidence, that Margaret Thatcher was the one who did most to bring Global Warming as it was then called to the front of the mind.
Thatcher, the theory goes, was a woman amongst men and would struggle to get her voice heard. Thatcher, however, was the only scientist (BSc in Chemistry) among global leaders of her time. Her advisors told her she needed to talk science, where she would be the only one with a decent understanding. Pushing the theory that coal was heating the planet suited her agenda of destroying the power of the Coal Miners’ Union. She succeeded, coal mines closed, thousands turned out to the Dole to never work again, and nuclear to the ascendancy.
Of course, after achieving her twin goals of destroying coal miners’ unions and being taken seriously as a leader, her use for global warming passed its use by date as she looked for other aspects of civil society to destroy. Her use of global warming worked for her, but as other world leaders saw how she had used it for a political end it was all too easy for them to dismiss it as a hoax, unscientific, and something they could ignore.
Of course, that’s “just a theory”, as they say.
Except for the vanishingly small number of people living in truly self-sustaining societies within the ecological limits imposed by local resources, we are born enmeshed in this web of short-sighted, toxic, suicidally extractive exploitation we call civilization. By the time we come to realize this, we are dependent on it, if not complicit with it. There is very little left outside of it to which people can meaningfully turn, let alone in numbers that would make a difference. There is no escape, no way out. Not for everyone. For whoever survives, perhaps. “Alternative lifestyles” are no longer an alternative, because they will not support 8 billion humans. The truth of the matter is never going to be part of a winning election platform.
Evolution plays for keeps. Our species is caught in a long game, handicapped with a short attention span. We are practically blind and unresponsive to threats that are not immediate and personal. We are victims of our own success. Agriculture was a pretty good trick with a long, slow fuse. That changed the ecological balance of power in our favour, but the real trouble didn’t come until later. Several thousand years later.
It’s possible, had we been limited to the speed and power of muscle, water, and wind, that we would not be in this particular combination of crises. Maybe it would have slowed our march to omnicide. Maybe not. But we stumbled upon “free” power in the ground, and we were off and running, unleashing the equivalent of massive armies of uncomplaining, chemical, conscript labour. This unexpected, addictive, magical force-multiplier soon became indespensible, and our use of it set us on the fast track to disaster. And so here we are. We’ve squandered the one-use-only gift of fossil fuels, made accessible by a fortuitous combination of biology, geology, and technology, in a brief, two century drunken weekend of excess and recklessness. It’s the morning after the night before, and the world is on fire.
Earth cannot sustain our numbers. Earth will not sustain our numbers. Whatever we do, whatever we choose, billions will die. It’s now simply a matter of timing. We’ve pushed our luck and exceeded our limits, thinking there were none. Our parochialism and short-sightedness has proved to be fatal. We are a costly experiment that has gone badly wrong. We’re like a colony of bacteria, which, even before it has consumed its sole portion of petrochemical growth medium, has started to choke on its own poisons. Evolution will, sooner or later, shut it down, clean up the laboratory glassware, and look elsewhere for likely prospects for advancement amongst the remaining materials and equipment.