Climate change (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #04)
Good day, readers!
I’m Chris Krycho, and this is Across the Sundering Seas, a weekly newsletter about the things I have been reading and studying lately—from the politics of open source software to theological anthropology to volumes of poetry. (No poetry this week! But another week, perhaps.) You can find every back issue here or opt out here. Thanks for reading along with me!
One other note: there are links to books in this post. They’re affiliate links, so if you buy a book from a link here, I’ll get some tiny amount of money for the purchase. Whether you do or no, happy reading!
This week, a look at a long-form essay about climate change that came across my radar a few months ago: After Climate Despair, by Matt Frost, at The New Atlantis. (A quick aside here: The New Atlantis is one of my favorite online publications. Ever since discovering them back when Alan Jacobs ran a blog there, I’ve found the site a consistent home for provocative, careful, thoughtful work on all sorts of subjects. I commend it to you!)
Frost argues, quite provocatively, that despair is not and cannot be the answer to the climate change situation confronting us—that the counsels of doom are failures, unable to move the needle on the problem which confronts us. Not because it is not warranted, but because it is pointless.
Frost hammers home both points. He is exceedingly clear that things are very bad:
We will not stop global warming, at least in our lifetimes. This realization forces us to ask instead what would count as limiting warming enough to sustain our lives and our civilization through the disruption.
And again:
A 2018 study in the journal Nature Climate Change that considered [avoiding overshoot without technological advances] found that it would require sweeping transformations to all aspects of human life. These changes would include the universal adoption of a low-meat diet; producing most meat, eggs, and other animal proteins artificially, through in vitro cell cultures; reducing appliances to two per household, with tumble dryers eliminated entirely; a full transition to electric cars by 2030; and limiting global population to 8.4 billion by 2050, declining to 6.9 billion by 2100.
Overshoot is inevitable.
He is equally blunt, though, about the reality of our inability to move all of human civilization onto a radically new path just by shouting louder about the problem—
It is time to acknowledge that catastrophism has failed to bring about the global political breakthrough the climate establishment dreams of, and will not succeed in time to avert serious warming. Instead of despairing over a forever-deferred dream of austerity, our resources would be better spent now on investing in potential technological breakthroughs to reduce atmospheric carbon, and our political imagination better put toward preparing for a future of ever more abundant energy.
This is, suffice it to say, not the normal take from any “side” of the political spectrum. On the one hand you have the counsels of austerity—or of despair—and on the other hand what we might best describe as la la la I can’t hear you: denial that there is any problem at all.
Both of these approaches have frustrated me for years. Having come up in a conservative milieu, I was predisposed to the nothing to see here perspective, and indeed held it for a few years. The more time I spent reading up, though, the less that held water. The evidence that the climate is changing, and is changing in major part because of human actions, was too strong. The same thing happened for a lot of people over the last two decades, I think.
(There are, sometimes, reasons to doubt even claims that have the scientific consensus. For many reasons, I do not think that the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is apt to be overturned by a Kuhnian paradigm shift, though.)
Even as I changed my mind on the question, though, I found most of the loudest voices on the other side of the argument to be confused in their own ways. Yes, we have a serious problem on our hands. Yes, we need to take responsibility for the mess we have made. Yes, we need to return to sustainable ways of agriculture. Yes, we need to think about ways to solve this problem and make sure that we leave to our offspring a world they can live in.
But no to so many of the specific ideas that so often got smuggled in along with those things. No to an anti-natalist framing that sees children as a curse and a burden instead of as a blessing and a gift. No to catastrophisms that want to tear down the world we have with no idea what comes after. No to any kind of utopianism that thinks that you can make people change in the ways that so many of these proposals have. Especially no to measures that aim to stop the economic development of parts of the world outside the West!
More: I disagree with those all on a principled level, but they’re also doomed to fail in a practical sense. As Frost notes:
Severe penitential labors have occasionally appealed to small groups of religiously inclined people, but not to populations of increasingly individualistic and affluent modern societies. Predictions of collapse have successfully instilled pessimism — but not productive, coordinated transformation at a global scale. Human beings have a poor record of responding to existential threats by making sudden ameliorative changes to their behavior, or by “leveling up” to superior ethical frameworks.
Any proposal that starts out with the entire human race has to radically change in ways without precedent in all of history is… just dumb.
Frost takes a substantially different tack. How can we deal with climate change in a way that leans into the surety of humans desiring better lives, and working hard—even, if history is any guide, outright warring—to get those beter lives? Frost proposes that we should explore possible futures outside the constraints of the IPCC’s scenarios, and embrace new plans accordingly.
Perhaps most interesting in his proposal is his argument against a moralizing approach:
[We] will no more agree on some single new ethics than we will on the “correct” amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide.… The first step past our political impasse must be to reduce the moral content of our climate mitigation efforts, wherever possible replacing it with engineering challenges. Moralizing climate change, like in NBC News’s recent call for anonymous “climate confessions,” makes little sense outside of the Western cultural context. But a next-generation solar panel or nuclear reactor can be implemented anywhere.
Further, Frost proposes adopting a framework predicated on abundance of energy rather than scarcity, and therefore of growth and flourishing rather than austerity. He gets extra points from me for extending that to a profoundly positive framing of procreation:
We can’t know the economic return on any dollar we invest today in stabilizing the future climate, but we can model it as a function of, among other things, the number of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. Our climate approach should presuppose that we are the benefactors of a burgeoning future population, not the progenitors of an ascetic cult formed to dole out a dwindling stock of resources.
The mechanic he proposes to achieve a finally-good outcome in our wrestling with the ends is technological investment, underpinned by a set of critical reframings of the problems ahead of us. A prime example is his re-characterization of carbon not merely as a symptom of too-high human consumption but as a matter of waste. Investing in waste management would drive technological innovation which would enable more humans to enjoy the fruits of abundant energy—both because the waste generated would be dealt with more effectively, and because reductions in waste generation in the first place would increasingly be valued in their own right.
Speaking frankly: these kinds of technological investments seem far more likely to work that getting people to just stop wanting better lives. To put a finely political point on it: if the Green New Deal were decoupled from the moralizing and climate hysteria that has largely accompanied it—and especially from its bent toward population control—I suspect it would be much more amenable to many conservatives. No illusions here: in America’s current political climate anything proposed by one party is apt to be hated by members of the other, and when a proposal comes from a figure as polarizing as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that goes double. But the point stands: a version of the proposal that was couched in Frost’s terms would have a much better shot at getting somewhere. We should all hope for just such a turn of events.
I fully admit that this kind of proposal is tailor-made to appeal to me. I’m deeply attracted to third-way proposals by nature, and I have spent a fair amount of time over the last couple years thinking about how to charter a better course for technological ethics. So what might be the problems in the approach Frost outlines?
The first is a return to a drum I’ve beaten since launching the newsletter: the importance of coming to our technological decisions with an ethical frame. I’m inclined to agree with much of Frost’s critique of the moralizing content of most environmentalists, but not for the pragmatist reasons he offers. It is not, in my view, that those ideas are merely misguided or unhelpful—but that they are fundamentally wrong. This should be no surprise: I’m a theologically conservative Christian whose idea of confession differs rather sharply from the sort of thing alluded to in that post. Whether Frost is correct on the pragmatics or not, we dare not divorce our work in this area (nor any other!) from our ethics.
That leads to my second major reservation. Frost is right that proclaiming our doom is unlikely to produce any meaningful change. It will certainly not lead people to reorganize the entire mode of human life. But that does not mean that things are fine, that we should embrace consumption as a good. To the contrary: it is essential that we learn again not to be merely consumers, and the impact of consumption on climate change is not the only reason. The human being as a consumer is a terrible basis for a society, and plenty of things in our daily lives make that clear.
Thus, when Frost argues that “Instead of prohibiting [carbon’s] generation, we should apply ourselves to mandating and facilitating its disposal,” he is only half right. We should not be prohibiting carbon generation. We should be mandating and facilitating its disposal. But that does not mean it should run free, either. We can and should regulate it. (Look! A third option! I told you I’m prone to preferring these.) Regulation has been profoundly effective in cleaning up the air of American cities over the past half-century, with corresponding very significant health and quality of life benefits that everyone likes. The answer for carbon emission specifically cannot merely be more innovation and markets further unshackled, any more than it can be an end to markets. It must shape the market in the right direction, instead: but “right” here necessarily includes moral reasoning.
This in turn suggests how we should think about the climate change problem in general: we should be both investing in the kinds of technological innovation that will help us undo the problems we have created and also working on the deeper problem of changing our societies. We must build technological systems which emit less carbon and which capture the carbon emitted… and we must also build ways of life that are less captive to the technological system.