Less-Traveled Paths Beyond Climate Disaffection
“Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light… “
T.S. Eliot, Four Quarters: Burnt Norton
In Eliot’s poetry “here” also means “now.” And now, disaffection is everywhere. Disaffection is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “the quality of no longer supporting or being satisfied with a system, organization, or idea.” Alienation and estrangement are favored synonyms.
A friend recently explained why he had decided to quit reading philosophy. The weather has gone berserk, he said, but people go on doing what they’ve always done, unfazed. ESG (environmental, social, and governance criteria) investing has been dumped. Oil companies are rolling in money and spending it to drill for more oil. What’s the point in reading philosophy? Humanity is hopeless. He’ll just do what he can do in his own garden, grafting fruit trees and trying to create livable and diverse habitats for nearly-lost species like the American chestnut.
It’s hard to argue with that. I try, but I’m not sure I’m right.
Part of the problem is the “dim light” on past and future that Eliot also evokes. The contradictions and confusion in play at this point in human and Earthly affairs are mind-boggling. We don’t understand the present, much less how we got to this disaffected place, or where we should go next. Actors of all sorts in the human climate drama seem frozen, like deer in the headlights. That goes for actors from oil companies, as well as for the youthful activists who so inspired and heartened us in 2019.
There are the heat, fires, floods, and mudslides of an intensity few of us had expected to see in our lifetime, following directly on a pandemic and ongoing, high-profile European war. Adding to the fog are trade wars that risk morphing into shooting wars. Inflation of uncertain source and duration and central bank responses reminiscent of the monetarist era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. These troubling trends are countered to an uncertain degree by many people’s diminished appetite for unremitting work and workers’ heightened willingness to challenge employers. Who knows what it all means?
One thing I do know about is oil, and I can say with confidence that things aren’t as good as they look for the oil industry. True, Big Oil has moved from backroom manipulation of information on the impact of fossil-fuel use to the head of the table at UN climate talks, which will be held this autumn at ground zero of global oil, the Mideast Gulf.
But just because the oil industry’s cash coffers are overflowing after last year’s Ukraine war-fueled price spike, and just because Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan al-Jaber will chair the UN’s COP28 this November in the UAE, doesn’t mean the industry has useful — or notably dangerous — ideas for saving itself. The Western majors like Exxon, Shell, and BP are in disarray over their climate strategies, and Mideast oil exporting states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia have no plans for extending reliance on oil and gas that don’t depend on impractical and unaffordable carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
In contrast, the last two years have seen solar and onshore wind generation, battery backup, and electric vehicles all pass the point on rapid growth curve where they become affordable even without subsidies. The money being handed out in these sectors by Western governments is to help their own companies compete with Chinese renewable energy equipment manufacturers. Renewables don’t need help any longer to compete with natural gas and coal.
Yet the Western oil majors say they have lost interest in renewable power investing. These technologies don’t make enough money to justify their investment, these companies explain. The Yogi Berra saying comes to mind: Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.
CCS is such an absurd idea that few of the oil companies who tout it are putting much of their own money into it, despite strong financial enticements from Washington to do so. The oil industry has been using CCS for decades to boost oil production rates and for other more marginal purposes. Governments have been offering financing for CCS for years. But it’s still treated as a “next-generation” technology, while solar, wind, battery storage, and EVs are “mature.”
Meanwhile, even as climate chaos intensifies, investment funds are, indeed, hesitating to advocate ESG investment. Last year’s oil price runup made it profitable for them to do more short-term investing in oil shares, even as right-wing US states threatened retribution against funds that avoided oil and gas company shares. But again, there’s a back story. Giant funds like Black Rock and Vanguard and other investors are still extracting a very high price for their highly provisional stock-market support of Big Oil — a price high enough that it will constrain US oil production more effectively than insincere talk of ESG would ever have done.
Recent financial results make clear that, at this summer’s mid-range oil price levels, the Western oil majors have to pay out their entire cash earnings in dividends and share buybacks just to keep their share prices from collapsing. At $80 per barrel crude oil, which equates to just over $3 per gallon US gasoline, Big Oil has no “free cashflow” left to plow back into its main business of producing and refining oil and gas, or to shift into CCS or some more practical business that might help companies outlive the energy transition. At last year’s war-related prices of over $100/bbl, the majors made serious money, but below $70, they’ll have to borrow or cut back.
Now, even with the Saudis and other cutting production to prop prices up to levels around $80, the Western majors merely pay their bills for ongoing operations and “return” everything else to big banks, funds, and other Wall Street hangers on, who appear to view the Exxons and Shells of this world as cash cows, to be milked for all they’re worth and then discarded.
It’s insane that the huge windfall still available from oil is going to Big Finance and the shareholder class while Rome and many other cities burn, instead of going into funding the transition or feeding climate refugees. But at least the windfall isn’t going back into producing more fossil fuels.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
The unfortunate (an understatement) flip side of that cheerfully downbeat prognosis for Big Oil is another thing about which I’m confident: Even if everything Big Finance is doing to limit [its own exposure to] carbon emissions works, it won’t be nearly enough to save the planet. Even if carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions slow and eventually stop, and humanity develops enough carbon-free energy to keep things going as they are for a while longer, the Earth can’t and won’t tolerate the abuse for much longer.
This is the compelling argument for degrowth. We must jump off the bandwagon of industrial capitalism that’s not only creating climate chaos but also rampaging the Earth and its oceans, killing off plant and animal specifies in numbers only the crassest of criminals would be expected to condone, and turning the planet into a toxic waste dump. The bandwagon is going to crash, and if we don’t jump off, we will all die or be hopelessly maimed.
Dougald Hine, a long-time climate activist and co-author with Paul Kingsnorth of the 2009 Dark Mountain Manifesto, decided in 2021 that conversations starting with climate change can no longer “lead us to the larger questions about where we find ourselves” as the global financial and political leadership inherited from neoliberalism — the “adults in the room,” as they see themselves — pile into “taking climate change seriously.”
Hine talks in his book At Work in the Ruins about seeing “a fork in the road ahead, beyond which lie two paths: one big, the other small and branching.” The big path is peopled by the many who are striving to preserve the world of consumption-driven economic growth minus only greenhouse gas emissions — those who think a little science and a lot of money can fix any problem. Those who think that only big, top-down cures are meaningful.
The other, small and splintered path requires giving up on the consumptive world. It requires living more simply. Imagining and implementing numerous, varied experiments in living in cooperation with the non-human of our planet and with each other. It requires mourning and accepting loss. But amid the emphasis on loss, there’s much in Hine’s work that I find encouraging and reinforcing.
I also see grounds for hope closer than he does. There are signs the human economy, of its own accord, is moving away from growth, as I’ve written. Not because Big Everything wants that, but because the resources — human, non-human, and energy producing — aren’t there to do otherwise. There are signs people know the old ways have failed and want something new, even if they don’t know what the new could be and disagree on what it should be, as I’ve also written.
But I may be wrong. The only thing I’m confident about on this foundational level is that our so-called leaders won’t fix the problem for us. To think that is much more naïve than to think that lots of small people following lots of scattered paths might one day find a better place beyond the ruins. Some of those paths surely involve learning to graft fruit trees and trying to create diverse habitats for nearly-lost species. Some may also involve philosophy and poetry.
