This is part 25 of a series on writing climate change for fiction (and this is another long one!).
Last time we looked at the status quo’s vision for saving the world from climate change. That vision is failing.
Understanding why is a large undertaking.
I was going to jump directly into some uglier visions (like climate denial and eco-fascism), but we’ll get to that later. Here we’ll look at the structural forces that are involved. Without this grounding the details are like trying to read spaghetti.
Because...
Why is Vladimir Putin riding a horse topless? Is this relevant to climate change? Can you cook bacon using an assault rifle? Is this related to the horse? Are we doomed now? What is a Bugatti and what colour should mine be?
Without some grounding we won’t be able to comprehend:
where the blockages and crazy-making stuff is coming from,
why that status quo vision is failing so badly,
how it all connects,
and why our future may have little in common with anything anyone anywhere is predicting.
Without grounding we will be vulnerable to all kinds of paranoia and complacency, which is a big part of why so much thinking around climate change gets so outrageously bad.
This is going to be a lot of abstract stuff, over at least three parts.
To understand why climate action has largely failed, we need to understand much that applies to the world in general. After that we can dive into the swamp of characters and movements, and the relevance of a twelve year old boy screaming, “What colour is your Bugatti?”
THE SCALE OF THE CHALLENGE
Climate change poses the world with a core set of problems to solve. The answers the world has been giving so far do not work.
The End of the Fossil Fuel World
The use of fossil fuels must end at the fastest rate possible. This is the #1 challenge. Not complicated.
End of discussion.
Anyone who says fossil fuel use can continue long-term is bullshitting, or imagining some utopian geo-engineering scheme, which is to say, bullshitting.
All the real arguments are about practicalities. How do we end fossil fuels? How do we balance this against other priorities like food supply, poverty, or economic growth. How much risk are we willing to take.
These are legitimate hard questions. Even so, the core challenge remains.
A bunch of well recognized technical options are available. We know what to do. The question, again, is how do we implement and balance such things in practice.
As a quick taste, our technical options include things like the following.
Transport:
End car dependence. Replace car dependent suburban sprawl with high density urbanism. Favor public transport, walking, and cycling over cars.
Replace combustion vehicles with electric vehicles.
Shift from trucks and aeroplanes to trains and ships.
…
Industry, Construction & Energy Generation:
Electrify everything that currently uses fossil fuels.
Stop all new fossil fuel based infrastructure where viable alternatives exist.
Remove fossil fuels from energy generation.
Massively scale up renewable energy generation to make up for all that new electricity demand and the loses from removing fossil fuels.
Increase energy efficiency, resource efficiency, & recycling.
Favor organic materials like wood over things like concrete & steel.
...
Agriculture & Waste:
Reduce ruminant livestock production in favor of plants and non-ruminants.
Stop deforestation, loss of wetlands, & soil erosion.
Reduce nitrogen fertilizer use.
Reduce organic waste going to landfill.
...
Politics & Finance:
Have a clear political commitment to a transition, with support from a coordinated set of institutions and laws, and ensure the vision is clearly communicated to all sectors of society, and has gained broad social acceptance.
Invest huge amounts into this transition.
Invest huge amounts into new technology.
Balance emissions reduction against other social goals, including adapting to now unavoidable climate change.
...
Speed & Scale:
Do this fast. Indeed, so fast that all talk of “the last decade” or “Net Zero by 2050” has become essentially meaningless. Any serious target now requires the same speed of action. Everything now as fast as possible. Carbon emissions must follow a near vertical downwards trajectory beginning today. The longer we take the steeper that drop needs to be. Anything slower will blow past 1.5°C, hit 2°C, and risk shooting out beyond 3°C.
This transition must be achieved globally. National reductions are meaningless if global emissions go up. Massive international cooperation is required.
In purely technical terms, that’s a quick taste of what needs to happen.
Parts of this are happening. Compared to what needs to happen, what we are actually doing is an abysmal failure.
The remaining carbon budget for a 50 % likelihood to limit global warming to 1.5, 1.7, and 2 ∘C has reduced to 75 Gt C, 175 Gt C, and 315 Gt C, respectively, from the beginning of 2024, equivalent to around 7, 15, and 28 years, assuming 2023 emission levels.
The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 419.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2023, 51 % above pre-industrial levels.
...
The average growth in global fossil CO2 emissions peaked at nearly +3 % yr−1 during the 2000s, driven by the rapid growth in emissions in China. In the last decade, however, the global growth rate has slowly declined, reaching a low of +0.5 % yr−1 over 2013–2022. While this slowdown in global fossil CO2 emissions growth is welcome, global fossil CO2 emissions continue to grow and are far from the rapid emission decreases needed to be consistent with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
...
Globally, fossil CO2 emissions growth is slowing, and this is due in part to the emergence of climate policy (Eskander and Fankhauser, 2020; Le Quéré et al., 2019) and technological change, which are leading to a shift from coal to gas and growth in renewable energies, as well as reduced expansion of coal capacity.
Seven years to have a coin’s toss chance of staying below 1.5°C. That’s where we are at with challenge #1.
Sucking it Back Up
The #2 challenge of climate change is to get that carbon back out of the atmosphere. Again, not complicated.
The practical challenge however is immense.
We have added geological carbon into the biosphere. Leaving it up to nature would take geological time scales.
We have two big options.
1) Biological:
Trees, soils, wetlands. This fails to turn carbon back into a geological form, but at least it gets carbon out of the atmosphere. However, we mostly plant trees where we had previously cut them down. Also, we are still destroying more forests than we are planting.
2) Technological:
Insert you choice of newly developed tech here. Are these necessary. Yes. Do they work? Good question.
CDR not based on terrestrial vegetation currently relies on enhanced rock weathering and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) projects. The majority of this (58 %) derives from a single project: Climeworks' Orca DACCS plant based in Hellisheiði, Iceland. The remainder is generated by 13 small-scale projects...
...the atmosphere-to-geosphere flux of carbon resulting from carbon dioxide removal (CDR) activity is currently 0.003 Mt C yr−1, with 0.002 Mt C yr−1 of DACCS and 0.001 Mt C yr−1 of enhanced weathering projects. This is more than a million times smaller than current fossil CO2 emissions.
Adaptation
The #3 challenge of climate change is not dying.
This gets more complicated because we don’t know just how much warming we’re going to get. Even so, we know change is happening now. We know we need to consider things like:
Disaster & risk management
Human migration & resettlement
Social safety nets
Coastal defenses
Ecosystem management & conservation
Infrastructure resilience
Access to basic resources
...
Refusing to transition away from fossil fuels does not save us from needing a massive social transition. It just makes it much uglier and painful.
We are meeting this challenge at about the same rate we’re meeting the other challenges, if anything probably even slower.
Loss & Damage
The #4 challenge of climate change is how to deal with failing at #3.
Things will be destroyed.
Not everything can adapt.
This one is the murkiest of all. Avoid the issue and risk social unrest. Engage and take on massive unending costs and enter deep moral quagmires. Who is to blame? Who should compensate who? How much?
Of the four challenges, this is the one that can be avoided without physical consequences. The social consequences, however, are enormous – perhaps comparable to the legacy of colonialism on indigenous peoples. Riots start over stuff like this.
That then is the challenge:
1) End fossil fuels
2) Suck up that carbon
3) Adapt to what cannot be avoided
4) Assist those who have suffered loss
The first is the easiest. The latter challenges grow with the failure of the earlier ones. A positive outcome could be achieved in theory. We could have succeeded.
So...
Why are we failing?
IT’S COMPLICATED
Climate change is a gigantic mess. To use the jargon, climate change is a hyper-object. That fact is the first big problem underlying why the world is failing.
The Sensory Deprivation Tank in Which We All Hallucinate
Disagreement about climate change goes well beyond normal levels.
For example, arguments about abortion can get heated and politicized, but both sides are obviously coming from somewhere. No one denies the existence of babies.
Abortion is a simple concrete subject.
Pregnancy is a common experience. Ending a pregnancy is fairly easy to understand. The arguments arise from conflicting values and some inherently fuzzy moral questions. Simple.
Climate change is different.
People exist in alternative realities. In some realities climate change is a hoax. In others climate is a minor economic issue. In yet others humanity is doomed to extinction in the near future.
Climate change is an abstraction.
No one has ever seen “climate change”. You can’t. You can only experience this or that storm, infographic, or car exhaust. No one can learn everything there is to know. The subject is too vast and too deep. It includes the entire planet over geological epochs.
Therefore climate change exists in your head.
Therefore, you have significant freedom in how you choose to construct the abstraction that is “climate change”.
Therefore people live in alternative realities.
Much of what turns up in climate change discussions is a projection of people’s pre-existing ideas, filtered through their psychology. If your head contains the Biblical Apocalypse narrative, climate change is the apocalypse. If your head contains rabid anti-Communism, climate change is a Communist plot.
All things to all people.
Arguments over climate change become a projector screen displaying every argument humanity has ever had about anything, plus a lot of weird psychology we’ll get to later. No one is immune.
And that is why climate change politics plays out like a surrealist street fight choreographed by Salvador Dali.
Reality melting in the rising sun.
Climatization & Schrodinger’s Climate Action Plan
As a hyperobject climate change touches on large parts of the biosphere, geology, technology, and society. However, only some things are truly relevant – mostly involving fossil fuels and weather.
Climate change is not literally about everything. But it comes close, and therefore climate literally has become about everything.
Welcome to climatization.
Climate has become a central organizing issue for anyone who wants to discuss any issue whatsoever. The logic of climate politics has gone universal. What was merely complicated, is now entangled with every debate in existence.
No one can agree on literally everything.
No one can make a plan for literally everything.
Moreover, if climate change is literally everything, and we all live in alternative realities, then you can make literally any plan you like. Welcome to Schrodinger’s Climate Action Plan.
All humanly possible actions are both climate plans and not climate plans simultaneously. Decreasing fossil gas is climate action. Increasing fossil gas is climate action. Maximizing human wealth is climate action. Ending civilization is climate action. Ignoring everything is climate action. Self-immolation is climate action.
Any action can be justified.
The world is a superimposition of climate success and climate failure because everything is anything, everyone is hallucinating, and we don’t know if the planet will be alive or dead until the next IPCC report comes out to tell us we’re all f@#%ed.
Are you feeling confused yet?
We Are Confused at an Historical Scale
Medieval maps have a beautiful symmetry to them. Jerusalem is in the middle. The sun goes around the Earth. Everything makes perfect sense. Everyone has arguments about how many angels can dance on a pin, and those arguments take place firmly within the bounds of that beautiful map.
Which lacks the Americas. Hello Columbus!
And hello climate change.
The world’s major religions, philosophies, and ideologies mostly originated in a time when climate change was conceptually unthinkable. Climate change doesn’t fit on the map.
We do not know how to speak, think, or act clearly about such a subject. None of our traditions have a ready-made answer about what to do.
Instead people are doing one of three things:
Scrambling to come up with an answer consistent with their tradition. The results are mixed.
Actively blocking action because climate change exists too far outside their vision of reality.
Trying to find new answers, but struggling because this is all new to history.
Climate change is one sign of a major historical breakpoint. New questions are arising. They as yet have no clear answers. Our ideas are out of date. We don’t know what to do.
We don’t even know that we don’t know.
Columbus discovered India, right? India’s on the map. What else can it be? If you want to talk to the locals, learn Hindi? Good plan?
It’s Pretty Simple Actually
Thankfully climate change is actually very simple…
…if you live in one of those realities where climate change is actually very simple.
This simple problem can simply be solved with a simple solution. Right? A carbon trading scheme will align market forces, create incentives for technology, and we’re done. Problem solved.
The world has been fixated on small numbers of simple technical solutions like this for a long time. Especially carbon pricing. Gigantic amounts of political effort have gone into arguing over carbon pricing, while neglecting to do much of anything else.
Weirdly enough, this approach has not worked.
The Challenge of Structural Transformation
Those technical solutions require or will trigger deep structural changes to global society. Where do people live? How is food grown? Who is rich and poor? Who has power? Who lives? Who dies?
All aspects of global society are interconnected. Large abrupt changes cause chaos. We saw this with pandemic lockdowns.
Climate action requires rapid transformation of the global energy system, the fundamental basis of civilization. We are doing this stop a rapid transformation of the global carbon cycle, the fundamental basis of life on Earth.
That’s a big challenge.
Even at the best of times.
INERTIA
Whatever plan you have - naive, confused, or otherwise - it still has to move faster than climate physics.
Change takes time.
We don’t have time. When speed is required, a slow success is defeat.
Ideological & Cultural Inertia
"Science progresses one funeral at a time"
– Planck’s Principle
While people can and do change their minds, a certain amount of intellectual turnover is needed to get change at a collective level. Old ideas stick around. Prominent people build their entire careers around certain ideas. Entire institutions get built around certain ideas. Even if reality disproves those ideas, they aren’t just going to go away.
For example, a political party might get stuck implementing ideas their leadership learnt during their youth in the 1980s and haven’t let go of (despite the Global Financial Crisis). Those ideas were in turn versions of ideas from the 1880s, which people in the 1930s hadn’t been able to let go of (despite the Great Depression) and therefore made sure got transmitted to the generation of the 1980s.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Raise this inertia up to the scale of all society. People’s values, aspirations, expectations, habits, preferences, even their language. Big cultural shifts take time.
Update Inertia
Something being widely known does not mean that knowledge has been integrated into actual practice.
Chances are people will continue to operate out of habit until someone does the work of unpacking the implications of that knowledge, and then designs new ways of operating. Huge sectors of society have yet to catch up with implications of things they do in fact already know.
Society also has built in time lags. That integration cannot move any faster than those lags. A US judge to the supreme court can serve anywhere from 1 to 30 years. Electoral cycles have a set length. Planning, communicating, and implementing can only happen so fast.
When history moves fast, everyone is out of date.
Physical Infrastructure Inertia
Roads, skyscrapers, ports, vehicles, oil rigs and more all have life-spans of decades. All of them were built under the assumptions of a fossil fuel economy.
Major new infrastructure projects take years. Retrofitting and redesigning cities takes years. New technologies to take years. Shifting the material basis of human civilization will take years.
After decades of pressure for an urgent transition we are only now seeing the first glimmers of even the possibility of a turn.
SOCIAL CHANGE IS COMPLICATED
Everyone hopes for instant revolutions. All problems solved in an instant, like the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
That’s never how it works.
Change takes time, therefore change happens by a process of evolution, not revolution.
Every attempt at climate action takes place in a flow of other forces. What is aimed for is seldom what is achieved.
Every player has a chance to influence and be influenced by every other player. Allies co-create each other. Revolutions create counter-revolutions. Ancient and modern mingle. The results are new to history. The unexpected is to be expected.
No one can predict the outcome.
Unintended Consequences
All those simple technical solutions, when implemented in the real world, have set off cascades of unpredictable consequences.
Some are good. Others are concerning, like sparking a colonial-style land rush in Africa. Others, like Jevons paradox, directly cancel out everything they were trying to achieve.
Adaptation
Everyone needs to survive.
What dies does not exist and has no power.
Survival routinely involves making compromises. If you want a job in climate-focused business, then you better believe in eco-modernism and carbon markets. Even if you don’t.
Do you want to be heard? Do you want power? Do you want to stay alive? Then you must adapt to the world as it exists.
Counter-revolution
A Green New Deal aims to replicated the original New Deal. It’s worth remembering that the New Deal was immediately followed by McCarthyism. Communism would not be tolerated.
Attack and counter-attack.
The New Deal economists adapted to McCarthyism. They survived. They gave us a form of economics which led to a world of bullshit jobs and climate change.
Whatever plan gets implemented for climate change, the outcome will not be the result of the plan itself, but the war fought over that plan. Right now that means everything gets watered down, while politics on the fringes grow increasingly extreme.
Syncretism
For a new vision to truly take power even its opponents must become its champions. Discard the bad and keep the good. The result is a hybrid.
Almost everything we looked at last time was some kind of hybrid. The Catholic Church embracing Integral Ecology. Green Capitalism. Sustainable Development. Each is an attempt to take the environmental critique and absorb it into themselves.
Therefore much of what has caused climate change remains embedded within our attempts to combat climate change.
Co-optation
Sometimes that hybridisation simply becomes one side dismantling the other side, then using the bits and pieces as tools to fulfill their original aims.
For example, we have oil companies picking and choosing the bits of environmentalism that serve their purposes, and injecting their own visions back into the environmental movement.
Do you know your carbon footprint?
Reversion to the Baseline
Radical changes must shift the accumulated weight of millennia.
No revolution has ever wiped the slate clean. Gulags and guillotines can never spill enough blood to wash away history. Instead that vast weight exerts a constant pressure, pushing things back to where they once were.
Enormous pressure exists to prevent environmentalism from ever fundamentally changing anything. Hence why climate efforts have been mostly limited things like carbon pricing – the efforts which change the status quo the least.
Path dependence
Sometimes you can’t get there from here.
For climate change the biggest case of path dependence is our locked in past failures. We cannot limit climate change to 1°C anymore. We are unlikely to keep below 1.5°C, and 2°C is looking difficult. We are stuck with our past.
Long term Trends
We are often blind to just how much is changing and how powerless we are to stop those changes.
We are caught up in a series of gigantic historical mega-trends which are all reaching a climax simultaneously. Climate change is one symptom.
These are huge processes which we cannot simply step outside of. They will continue to unfold according to their own internal logic regardless of whatever climate action plans anyone comes up with.
These trends include:
The scientific and industrial revolutions’ dramatic enhancement of human powers. Approx. 300 years.
The unification of the planet into a single cultural and economic unit. Approx. 500 years.
The development of the world’s major religions and cultures. Approx. 3000 years.
The transformation of the biosphere to meet human needs. Approx. 10,000 years.
Every one of these developments is relevant for understanding why climate change exists, how people are responding to it, and where it will all go.
Waves
A lot of small scale change is just cyclical. Economic recessions come and go. In a two party system Left and Right swap places every few years.
Protests come in waves. A movement arises, seems to achieve nothing, vanishes, then arises in a new form. This has happened with the climate movement.
People can become dispirited, missing the fact that periods of lull and regression can sometimes mask major underlying trends. The problem for us is we won’t know if there is a trend for a long time. We might just be spinning in circles.
Abrupt Change
The status quo can seem eternal, only to shift overnight. At a point of such transition, all that accumulated weight that forever causes a reversion to baseline starts to give way.
The lack of climate action so far could be followed by dramatic action in the near future. We just don’t know.
Here’s a very quick overview of how that might look.
Episodic Change:
We tend to divide history into eras for a reason. The Classical, Medieval, and Modern eras each have vast differences that emerged fairly suddenly (historically speaking). Stuff like climate change represents the possible beginnings of a new historical epoch.
Paradigm Shifts:
An old orthodoxy can no longer handle reality, collapses and is replaced by a new orthodoxy. We could be living through a major cultural and intellectual paradigm shift. Climate change is one of the things breaking reality for the old orthodoxy.
Shocks and Crisis:
When something big happens and no one knows what to do, new ideas often have a chance to take power. Climate change will impose a near continuous series of shocks for decades. Change in this context is unavoidable.
Maxed Out Trends:
Long-term trends eventually max out, then transform. For example, 500 years of colonial empires conquered the whole world. With nothing left to conquer except each other, those empires permanently incinerated themselves in two world wars. Likewise, climate change represents humanity maxing out all of those historical mega-trends at the same time. The world will now change.
Multiple Stable and Unstable Equilibrium:
The usual analogy is a marble in a bowl. At the bottom of the bowl the marble is at a stable equilibrium. You can flick the marble, but it will roll back down. Flick that marble hard enough and it might for a moment balance on the bowl’s rim (an unstable equilibrium), or land in any number of other bowls.
Society might also work like this. The world could look stable, but we could actually be balanced on a rim, poised to roll down into any number of new states. Forces like climate change are exactly the kind of force powerful enough to push all of global society up onto the rim of the bowl.
Chaos (aka the Butterfly effect):
Major historical changes have often hinged on the slightest of moments. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and WW1. Our multiple near misses with nuclear war. An autistic schoolgirl deciding to skip school on Fridays. When society is balanced on the rim of the bowl, the outcome might be decided by the slightest breeze.
We won’t know until after it’s happened.
CONCLUSION
At first glance the challenge of climate change can appear simple. A list of technical solutions need to be implemented. The sooner the better. Most of them are in theory achievable. New technology has a reasonable chance of filling any gaps.
We might compare it to the Ozone hole.
We’ll sign an international agreement. We’ll swap out old technology for new. The problem will be solved.
This clearly has not happened.
The deeper you get into climate change, the more you see that people’s minds are melting. This is no ordinary subject. Climate is too big, too complicated, and has too many challenges at too fundamental a level. The debate is not merely vexed, it’s insane.
The world has lost its mind.
And so the Powers That Be are implementing, in bits and pieces, their plan to save the world. This plan is grinding against the unfathomable inertia of an entire planet. Slow shifts are happening. Slowly. Slowly. This plan is setting off cascades of unexpected effects. Now succeeding. Now failing. Now a friend to all. Now it’s very own enemy.
And it’s not working.
And the world is getting crazier by the day.
And time is running out.
The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.
Next time we’ll get into institutional, economic, and political failure as we continue exploring why the world really isn’t doing great on climate.
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