Climate Fight Club
The first rule of climate fight club is you do not talk about climate fight club. The second rule…well you get it. I’m going to break these cardinal rules. Wait for it.
I’ve been thinking about climate change for a while, trying to figure out how to make difference, where to focus our efforts, why we as a species are not acting on the information available, and what are our chances. It is bleak. As a father of young children, heartwrenchingly bleak. After spending years agonizing about why we as a species and even more so as a nation are not responding to the clear and present danger of climate change I’ve come to a startling conclusion. We are responding. We are responding in the way you’d expect (relatively) hairless apes evolved to work together to use their brains to seek sweets, status, pleasure, and propagation.
As humans, our brief history of modern society and briefer industrial and information ages is dwarfed by the time we spent scratching out an existence as small bands of hunter gatherers and then subsistence farmers. Thus, for example, while our recent experience with social media has greatly impacted our culture it has not evolutionarily pushed the needle on our brains’ chemical pathways, rather we have designed our technologies to push our ancient chemical reward buttons, honed over the ages. For all our toys, tech, fashion, fast food and other wonders of modernity, we are wired the same as our ancestors who used flint tools and weapons to defend and seize territory and resources for our tribe. Which isn’t to say that we aren’t more knowledgeable than our ancestors. On the contrary. We have built an incredible body of knowledge of how the world around us and how we ourselves work. Witness the international space station, the iPhone, targeted marketing and the hyper-palatable marvel of Doritos.
For many of us, myself until recently included, the actions of our leaders and societies at large regarding climate change are mystifying. With such a clear existential crisis approaching, why are we not banding together and solving the problem? As individuals we desire to be useful, we can see a problem and respond with an altruistic desire to fix it and so with climate change. However, I contend that our collective history and collective tribal and societal wisdom knows that universal cooperation is impossible and even undesirable as such confederations are steamrolled by less altruistic forces. Uplifting fantasies like Independence Day aside. So what our national leaders know, or perhaps more accurately what they are made uncomfortably aware of upon attaining leadership is that universal cooperation is impossible. Sort of a standing on the shoulders of giants combined with a sobering, bucket-of-cold-water-in-the-face, following Morpheus down the rabbit hole briefing that says forget about everyone else, focus on our nation, our tribe, ours.
Because the situation is bleak and has been bleak since before we built our first campfire. This world is finite and humanity has no ability to live within such limits. Technology has just sped up the clock on our destruction of our world. Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair. The best we can hope for is for our nation, our tribe, our group, our family to survive longer than the rest. Rapa Nui writ large. A descending, crumbling hierarchy of loyalty. Running a consumerist, resource-wasting, deficit-spending, brutally militaristic nation like the USA in the face of impending ecological disaster is part of the plan, perfectly rational. Hanlon’s Razor be damned. What we don’t use, someone else will, and any reduction in carbon output, any decrease in our quality of life gives someone else the opportunity. Climate fight club. The longer we can keep from talking about climate fight club the better for keeping our plan under the radar, the longer we in the USA can stay on top, gobbling the world’s resources at the expense of everyone else. Throwing crumbs to our allies, worthless paper debt to our trade partners and bombs on anyone too poor, hapless or powerless to stop us. Ultimately preparing for the inevitable war over the diminishing Earth and maximizing our chances for domination of it. Unfortunately there is no tapping out in climate fight club.