Ideas for Catastrophe-Prone Times
What is America to do? The world is facing catastrophe on multiple fronts, and our leaders haven’t a clue for what to do about any of them. Few other nations are in notably better shape. It’s time for “ordinary Americans” — indeed, for extraordinary ordinary people everywhere — to step up. To develop ideas and arguments to support them. To think and, when and where we peacefully and beneficially can, to act.
Our multiple crises of climate chaos, extinction-threatening pollution, rampant social and economic inequity, and rising war risks are interlocking. As I see it, they also have the contours and proportions they do because of the pervasive belief that greed (the profit motive), limitless economic expansion (GDP growth), and exploitation and spoilation of people and the planet (business as usual) are positive organizing principles for society.
Those values aren’t positive. They’re the underlying cause of our multiple looming catastrophes. Tweaking the system without changing its values is not a solution.
This applies in particular to proposals to fully or partially dismantle the fossil-fuels foundation on which that system was built, without otherwise damaging or altering the structure — to simply replace huge coal-fired power plants and gasoline cars with huge solar installations and EVs by the millions. Or whatever technological fix may catch the eye of billionaires.
In fact, such tweaking won’t work and wouldn’t save the world if it did. It won’t work because we use too much energy already, and can’t build enough renewable generation capacity before we fry to both replace the old fossil-fuel gear and meet new energy demand resulting from perpetual growth. The world is heating too rapidly to think otherwise.
And even if greenhouse gases magically retreated into safe bounds, we would still have dying oceans, species extinction, pandemics, potential rebellions brought on by the grossness of inequality, and the threat of nuclear and other society-destroying forms of warfare. Things that sound pretty catastrophic.
Stuck in the Last Century
US leaders lack the imagination and willingness to move outside the framework of the late 20th Century geopolitical and economic order their predecessors created — a framework that has self-evidently failed. As I recently wrote: “Learning to share power and to live with a smaller role on the international stage is not yet part of the conversation at the upper reaches of American leadership.”
European leaders are, by and large, no more imaginative and no more capable of moving beyond the fundamental values and organizing principles that defined the colonial era — their era of global leadership.
What is to be done if our leaders won’t start the discussion? “It falls to the rest of us, those of us who are willing to sound foolish” to admit that the mode of perception — “the map” — we’ve applied to the world has failed and humanity is in for a shock before tenable alternatives emerge, writes British author Dougald Hine in his breakthrough book At Work in the Ruins, Finding Our Place in the time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics, and All the Other Emergencies.
At risk of sounding foolish, I’ll start with a few suggestions, put forward in a spirit of starting down a new path — not of defining the end goal:
* Geopolitics: The first thing the US needs to do is nothing. It’s to quit blocking efforts by others to remake the “architecture” of international relations to reflect the 21st Century world, rather than the world at the end of the Second World War. For example, support broader representation in international institutions, starting with opening the UN Security Council to the likes of India, Brazil, Nigeria and/or South Africa, Egypt and/or Turkey. Or maybe just ditch the Security Council altogether and shift such powers as it has over to the General Assembly. Or just let such powers go.
World conversation is good. World government is a crazy goal few of us would want if we took time to think how monstrous and unchallengeable such an institution would be, rather than imagining it as an end to war. Dropping world government as a notion we even play with as a concept would help people focus on what we might more constructively want to try and accomplish at a global level.
In the multipolar era many see looming, that may not be much. Things will be accomplished not globally, but rather by ad hoc, shifting groups of nations, sub-national regions, or other entities with particular interest in the problem at hand. Build on the model that came out of the Paris Agreement under the UN climate negotiation process, involving national, regional, city/town, and business commitments and pledges.
Don’t expect everybody to agree on much of anything, much less on everything that needs to be done in response to the multiple crises humanity faces at this point. And get over the notion that “sovereign” nation states with unchangeable borders — mostly drawn up by European powers in centuries past — are the end-all of large-scale human relations. Answers needn’t follow the one-size-fits-all prescription of the so-called “Westphalian” order.
That would be a good start, but we need to go further. We need to quit demanding that everybody does their share before anybody does anything. That’s a recipe for doing nothing that is premised on the assumption that changing life as it exists for people today is a sacrifice. Once we come to see that life can be happier and healthier with less fossil fuel consumption, less consumption generally, and more time and personal involvement with our own minds, other people, and non-human inhabitants and aspects of the planet, the demand for equal contributions falls away naturally. Seeing that can, I admit, be difficult.
* Finance and Development: The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are creatures of the era of US dominance that should be totally revamped or even dumped in favor of new institutions for the transfer of wealth, technology — and ways of living better rather than necessarily growing GDP.
Kenyan President William Ruto proposed creation of a global green bank in an interview with the Financial Times during a recent international confab on climate change-finance as it affects developing nations. Such an institution could take $1.5 trillion-$2 trillion per year in proceeds from taxes levied on financial transactions and fossil fuels and use it to transform the energy systems of low-income countries, he says. It would be totally separate from the World Bank and IMF, and not answerable to “a shareholder” or “subjected to the interests of any country.”
In addition, Ruto has suggested that African nations quit using the dollar for intra-African trade. He is no radical, though. He was described by the Financial Times as “generally friendly to the West,” and he is not proposing a wholesale write-off of “emerging market” sovereign debt, as some are doing.
While we’re on that subject, why not at least consider sovereign debt write-offs as an alternative to unfulfilled pledges by developed countries to pay $100 billion annually to help fund climate-change mitigation and adaptation in the Global South?
Throughout the 250 or so years since the industrial revolution, the primary function within the global system of what we have come to call the Global South has been to provide raw materials for the use of what we should come to call the Over-Developed World. Instead of accumulating wealth from this sale of “natural resources,” these countries by and large have accumulated huge debts and unconscionable pollution. Writing off those debts and letting these peoples find their own ways of living in the ruins seems like the least the Over-Developed World should do.
* Personal: At a personal level, we should all do what we can both to mitigate climate change, use fewer pollutants, and make do with less stuff — giving us more time and more ability to explore pathways to “reciprocity” with the Earth and all its other inhabitants, to use a phrase favored by scientist and indigenous thinker Robin Wall-Kimmerer.
The way things are going, it might also be good to learn to do things that will be needed if modern amenities disappear. Things that would help us keep ourselves and our communities going should climate or other catastrophes cut off modern services and/or limit access to electricity. As a doctor friend of mine who had just attended a Doctors Without Borders training course suggested, medical personnel could learn to treat injuries, deliver babies, and such like without sophisticated medical equipment — with just a flashlight. People might learn to prepare basic meals that use only a few local food items. Or figure out how to grow as much food as the space available to them allows.
These are just examples, and I’m not suggesting that we do without modern medical care or other genuine benefits of modern life at this stage. I’m suggesting that we develop the wherewithal to do some of these things just in case. That our communities start relearning how to take care of themselves in a pinch. That pinch could come sooner than we think.
Under the “bottom-up” approach I’m advocating, no one can say with precision or broad applicability what particular people and communities should do. They must figure that out for themselves. But sharing knowledge, understanding, and stories about what we are doing is key to how a bottom-up approach can “scale” without demanding uniformity or losing local creativity and adaptive strength.
