As I drift into the “victory lap” years of impending eldership, I have taken a rather jaded view of international efforts and the politics surrounding Climate Change.
I wrote the core of this essay as a response to a rather stark, but realistic, post at John Michael Greer’s, The Archdruid Report.
“It won’t be a single event, over and done with in a few weeks or months or years. Every year for decades or centuries to come, more ice and meltwater will go sluicing into the oceans, more coastal cities and regions will face that one seawater surge too many, more costs will have to be met out of what’s left of a global economy that’s running out of functioning deepwater ports among many other things. The result… will be the disintegration of everything that counts as business as usual…”
— Too Little, Too Late, John Michael Greer, 23 December 2015
The mere fact that the ongoing process has been re-christened the more politically palatable “Climate Change” from the more challenging, but accurate “Global Warming” tells you exactly how ready the general political and business world is prepared to face this issue. But it is clear that the powers that be will never, EVER, let go of Economic Growth as a universal good. But anyone with any sort of grounding in any kind of reality-based science is well aware that infinite growth within a closed system is flatly impossible. And the Earth and her ecosystem is absolutely a closed system. The only thing coming in is micrometeorites and sunlight; and in all irony, sunlight is now a problem, since we’ve ignored and fouled up the delicate inter-connected balancing systems of the ecosystem.
In a previous KOS Essay, I had asked, “Why is it so hard to accept the idea of Climate Change?”
“I think it’s an, “if this, then that,” problem. If anthropogenic climate change is real, then the disturbing implications are that we’d have to, as a species, make sweeping and unpleasant changes of our global lifestyles. The most dislocation would be experienced by those in the industrialized nations, Americans most acutely. Developing nations are also swiftly adopting fossil intensive economies. If the peoples and governments of the world took on the tasks of significant carbon emission reductions, it would require our entire species to change literally how we go about just about everything.
“It’s also damn scary. Some of the scenarios of planetary devastation and species extinction being put forth in the scientific community are positively terrifying. We just don’t want to believe, it’s too much to contemplate. This can’t be happening, it’s just too horrible to be true! So, it’s not, dammit!”
— Climate Change is so HARD, SamuraiArtGuy, Daily Kos, 21 January 2013
But issues of sustainability — resource depletion, environmental degradation, economic instability and inequality, and overpopulation are already poised to bring down “business as usual.” Climate Change makes all of the above WORSE with likely accelerating catastrophic outcomes. Bear in mind that the United States, with our refined political dysfunction and societal privilege, has been the only nation on earth that has chosen to view Climate Change as a political issue, rather than a scientific issue, especially in our corporate dominated media. Through our position of economic and military leadersh– … um… sorry, dominance, this has set the tone for all debate on this civilization ending threat.
So I did not have much in the way of expectations for COP21. I was actually impressed that there was as much agreement hammered together as there was. But that consensus seems to be based on the stripping out of the proposed resolutions anything binding, actual accountability, any kind of enforcement, or any responsibility of either developed or rapidly developing nations for the plight of the planet. So even though it is significant that there was an agreement at all, it amounts to “we all think it would be nice if we did something about this.” The fact that heads are not exploding on the Right wing in American politics — of course they oppose it — as they have all the President’s efforts on practically any topic. The going-thought-the-motions level of the opposition suggests that they are well aware the agreement is pretty empty, as there are no real political consequences beyond bad PR, to utterly ignoring it’s mild and modest provisions. People with more of a basis in reality have been shouting everything from “to little too late,” to “It won’t be enough,” to “bulls**t” but the media is largely glossing them over with coverage of ministers and their media flacks backslapping and congratulating each other.
Our Right wing politics still are treating Climate Change as a Left wing hoax, or if they admit to it, do not accept human responsibility. And then they argue that attempting to Do anything about it is unacceptably harmful to the Great God Growth. The possibility that investing in green efforts and technology, and climate mitigation infrastructure efforts would create entirely new economic sectors and job markets. They trot out the trump card, “jobs” in hushed or inflammatory tones to polarize a fearful, misinformed and disenfranchised working class.
But all else being (un)equal, I will take the word of scientists, over that of politicians. The scientific community, despite some troubling ethical issues, generally has a disposition to pursue the truth and ferret out how things actually work. In the world politics, where truthfulness and integrity are apparently entirely optional, having informed positions is not relevant, and facility at lying, dissembling, manipulation, misrepresentation, and distortion appear to be required job skills.
- A version of this essay appears on Medium