Interregnum, Part 2: Inaction
Why is humanity running heedlessly toward a cliff that everyone knows is very close and that has no identified bottom?
The cliff is Climate Catastrophe.
Our proximity to the cliff was just posted as a “red alert” by the head of the World Meteorological Organization. Last year was not just the hottest year on record by air temperature. “Unprecedented ocean warmth and sea level rise, glacier retreat and Antarctic sea ice loss, are also part of the grim picture,” the WMO State of the Global Climate 2023 states, and “changes are speeding up.” In case you didn’t get the point, the UN Secretary General added: “Sirens are blaring across all major indicators.”’
How bad a fall over the cliff might be gets clearer with each scientific finding that some part of one or another of the Earth’s ice structures is melting so fast that it could, all on its own, add several feet to the ocean rise that threatens to submerge large parts of many of the world’s largest cities within a few decades. Not just Bangkok and New Orleans, but New York, Shanghai, and Tokyo. The 2023 finding of most note involved melting of Antarctic Sea glaciers that could raise the oceans by 10 feet (3 meters).
Why Aren’t We Doing Anything?
Yet life goes on normally for most, on the surface anyhow. The editors and algorithms who make such decisions barely found room on news sites to cover the WMO report. There were too many other crises to write about: Wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and other parts of Africa. Street gangs in Haiti. “Critical” Federal Reserve Board decisions on the timing of interest rate rises. Initial public offerings (IPO) for social media platforms. And whatever sports events or famous-person activities filtered to the top of the stack.
Anxiety lurks below the surface calm. But why isn’t there open panic at the evident fact that the climate is going berserk while the energy transition slows in the carbon-heavy West. How to explain such willful inaction on a global disaster visibly lapping at our ankles?
Are we caught in the headlights like the proverbial deer? Climate stability unraveled so quickly. What we were told would take decades happened in a few brief years. We might still come to our senses and act to prevent climate change from turning into Climate Catastrophe.
Or do so many of us urbanized humans live in such detachment from the Earth that we don’t perceive how wacky the weather is? Is the real world of weather, soil and seas so abstract to people in their everyday heated, air-conditioned, tech-enthralled lives that they don’t take in the reality of a deteriorating, angry planet? They perceive “nature” only on screens, not on their skin. Where I live, many take a sunny, warm day in March — a day that shouldn’t arrive until May — as a gift rather than a “red alert.”
Or perhaps people aren’t responding because so many corporate, financial, and media interests are so dedicated to keeping the old system going — and remain so effective at imposing a false narrative of the potential for a return to normalcy on an anxiety-ridden public.
There Is No Alternative
The absence of clearly defined alternatives to the existing order, laid out in Interregnum, Part 1: Collapse, is surely one reason for people’s inaction on climate change and also on multiple other threats resulting from humanity’s abuse of the Earth. Most people fear and avoid change. Getting them to walk wide-eyed into a new way of living may require that they be offered alternatives in advance that they can believe in, at both a group and a personal level.
In China, where intense planning for manufacturing and adoption of renewable electricity and road transport has been proceeding for 15 years or more, these technologies are now taking off at a breakneck pace. They represent a comprehensible part of a fix to the circumscribed problem of climate change, and people are going for it. It’s not just the government building car factories and putting thousands of solar panels in the Gobi Desert. It’s individuals and households buying EVs and putting solar panels on their homes or businesses.
In the US, the transition hasn’t gotten nearly that far. Climate-change denial may be largely extinct, but Americans haven’t come to grips with the need to do much of anything to limit its impact. Fighting climate change involves either remaining dependent on China for a while longer — maybe enough longer that China’s economy would be declared larger than that of the US, representing a major loss of face for an already ego-endangered America. Or the fight becomes expensive, and “nobody wants to pay for it,” to quote Exxon Chief Executive Darren Woods in what is, apparently and unfortunately, a correct observation.
If you look at the broader, even deeper social crises gripping the world, though, the Chinese are no more clued into a solution than anybody else. At some point, economic growth is incompatible with preserving an Earth that is livable not just for thousands of endangered plant and non-human animal species, but for humans themselves. That’s the more expansive view of the cliff we are approaching.
Into The Unknown
To take the question one step further, why is there such a gaping absence of answers to that most critical of all questions? It’s not as if we just found out that humanity has a problem with greenhouse gases and with limits to growth. The first United Nations conference on climate change was held more than a quarter century ago, in Kyoto. The Limits to Growth study was published in 1972.
In fact, many of us are quite capable of imagining alternatives to globalized capitalism. Some of the alternatives, stretching back to Soviet-style Communism, adopted a model from capitalism that is equally contingent on economic growth, resource exploitation, and ignorance of planetary limits. And Soviet Communism failed to “compete” on those grounds. But not all the imagined alternatives retain capitalism’s devotion to growth and exploitation.
People have developed stories of happier worlds, where humans work less, consume less, and listen more to nature and to each other. I have done so myself. They aren’t dystopian. The dystopian images picture what it’s like to fall off that cliff, not what it’s like to avoid it. Degrowth is slowly gaining a following, but to most people, it remains merely a word without a compelling belief structure behind it. And the expansive exploitation goes on.
People still don’t have a story they can believe in, so they’re still paralyzed by fear of the unknown.
Do you run into the fog of a future that’s hugely different from today but otherwise ill-defined? Dreamers tell you it will be enjoyable, but the outlines are vague, and they’re just guessing.
Or do you keep your head down and pretend you don’t know you’re running over a cliff in broad daylight?
Feeding the Fear
Mainstream political parties, from Democrats in the US to center-right and center-left in Europe, have opted to avoid foundational change at all costs, up to and including Climate Catastrophe. And they feed fear of change with talk of an impending “end to democracy” and other terrors to be perpetrated by populists. They feed the propensity to stick with “the devil you know” rather than try the unknown, regardless of how bad the “known” may be.
You don’t like Joe Biden or whatever candidate the tired and frightened political system may turn up in your country? Think about Donald Trump, or the boogeyman in your particular place, who would certainly be worse, they say. They are probably correct at one level. Right-wing populists generally are worse in the moment than the same ole, same ole centrists. But in the meantime, people’s willingness to opt for a still foggy, low-carbon, degrowth future is undermined.
The political right has somehow gotten the better of the left in breaking down the barriers constructed by centrists to new ideas and new blood in the system. New blood that, if it flowed in from the Left, might tackle the challenge of defining a future that’s Earth friendlier and more egalitarian.
In part, this may be because, in the US Republican and other center-right parties, there was a bigger gap between the conservative rural and small-town folks with less education who traditionally provided the bulk of the votes, and the entrenched commercial and industrial interests who got the bulk of the benefits. When powerful populists came along and pointed out in rude but resonate terms that the little guys were being screwed, there was no defensive center strong enough to protect traditional party bosses.
The US Democrats and their center-left lookalikes elsewhere have a stronger defensive center, notably in the “liberal professions” and in the media. The New York Times may not understand middle-American voters well enough to defeat Trump, but it surely understands enough about the ways of coastal urban liberals to severely weaken Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and even Bernie Sanders.
It may be grasping at “worse-is-better” straws. But one possibly good thing you can say about it all is that the populist right may speed up the process of disruption already evident at so many levels. And maybe that will wake the left out of its slumber in time to avoid species suicide. We can only hope — and believe there’s more good in people than has been evident of late.
See Interregnum, Part 1: Collapse
Interregnum, Part 2: Inaction
Interregnum, Part 3: Hope
Interregnum, Part 4: Stuff
