Ok, Doomer: What Vaclav Smil and the disinformation echo chamber get wrong about the climate crisis
After reading the fawning coverage of Vaclav Smil’s 41st, and hopefully final, book How the World Really Works (2022) — the latest edition of an old white dude mansplaining to future generations why a just, sustainable society is impossible — I got riled up and started to write a detailed rebuttal. There are so many problems with Smil’s book.. and the man himself.
A Professor Emeritus of Geography (retired) at the University of Manitoba, Smil is sort of the high priest of naysaying, who has a long history with the American Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank that has received millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests, including oil giant ExxonMobil. He is the master of a particular form of climate denial that I call climate action denial.
He doesn’t believe a world powered by 100% clean, renewable energy is feasible, and he has published literature sowing doubt about the significance of human-caused climate change. Unsurprisingly, he thinks fracking is awesome and that the public is far too worried about the risks posed by extractive industries. He characterized the idea of transitioning to electric vehicles as a “myth” and sustainability in general as a “laugh.”
Life got busy and I put this piece to the side. But as time passed, the arguments laid out by Smil starting falling by themselves, one by one:
- The intermittency of renewable energy is too expensive? 2022 saw record low prices for solar combined with grid storage, outcompeting natural gas.
- It doesn’t matter what we do because China is going the wrong direction? China single-handedly quadrupled global offshore wind capacity in a single year.
- We’ll never be able to decarbonize industry sectors like steel? The first manufacturing plant making steel using hydrogen got the green light.
We could go on and on.
As the months passed, I continued to hear the negative echo chamber growing louder, and I came to see that Smil is just one part of a much larger problem — a pervasive culture of doom. Certainly there has been enough bad news this year to make anyone depressed about climate change, from catastrophic flooding to raging fires to increasingly severe drought. But what I’m talking about is the gnawing sense that solving climate change is just too difficult, and that exceeding the 1.5°C limit in global temperature rise at this point is a foregone conclusion.
Now let’s ask ourselves, who would benefit from this narrative? Why of course, the fossil fuel industry and the institutional investors reaping record profits even in the midst of multiple global crises. Many climate activists of my generation will remember that this was all part of the grand plan.
Back in the mid-2000s, the industry devised a five-phased strategy to delay regulatory action on climate change. First, was to deny that climate change was even occurring at all.. remember “Climategate” in 2009? When climate impacts start becoming apparent to the general public, the next phase was to explain it away as part of a natural cycle, one that might even benefit our economy. Finally, when it’s become clear to everyone that climate change poses an imminent threat and that the fossil fuel industry is causing it, the final phase is to promote the idea that it’s just too expensive and/or too late to do anything about it.
This final phase has always worried me the most. There’s nothing like a sense of doom and perpetual anxiety to make people check out, and feeling hopeless about the future is the surest driver of inaction. So who’s to blame for this pervasive culture of doom? Of course much of the blame rests on the fossil fuel industry and its multi-pronged machine of climate disinformation, of which Smil’s ilk is just one cog. But the buck doesn’t stop there.
I believe there is sort of a mass dereliction of duty on the part of the international press corps. Time and again, I see mainstream headlines get it wrong, especially when it comes to newly published scientific research. For example..
- A recent study examining net emissions from tropical forests found that a surge in deforestation is causing some regions like the Amazon to become a net source of emissions. The headline: The Amazon rainforest is collapsing! Not true: standing forests in the Amazon, especially within Indigenous territories, are absorbing massive amounts of the carbon. The problem is deforestation and proximity to human development (though certainly above 1.5°C there is significant risk of forest die-back).
- A new paper examining all gases in the atmosphere found that even if we ceased burning fossil fuels today, we would still see a rise in global average temperatures (equivalent to about 0.2°C). The headline: It’s too late to avoid 1.5°C in global temperature rise! Not true: We’re currently at 1.15°C, so 1.15 + 0.2 = 1.35. (It is true that if we followed the medium-emissions trajectory (SSP2) we would have a likelihood of hitting 1.5°C by 2030).
- An important study by BloombergNEF estimated that we need a 1:4 ratio of fossil fuel to renewable investments in order to reach the Paris Agreement goal of cutting emissions in half within a decade (renewable funding has surged to $755 billion last year while fossil funding has leveled off at $838 billion). The headline: We need to quadruple funding for clean energy! Not true: We have to double renewable investments, while halving fossil investments.
These are just a few examples of the 24–7 doom machine that now seems to pervade our daily lives. With every click, scroll, or swipe, we seem to get more and more evidence of the inevitability of the apocalypse. And this is just as our corporate overloads desire.. they want climate-savvy readers like us to stick our heads in the sand.
It’s not all diabolical, of course. Many journalists are just not educated enough to understand the scientific literature in depth. Or maybe they’re just too busy, and the allure of easy clickbait is too great. So that’s why, finally, we must look to ourselves as partially to blame for the echo chamber of doom.
Just last month at Climate Week NYC, I was somewhat shocked to encounter so many incredibly smart people in the climate world spouting some of the incorrect headlines mentioned above. This is not good. These are people that influence other people, and if the smart climate people are giving up, where does that leave the rest of the world?
Anyone who’s job is somehow related to climate change (whether your path lies in mitigation or adaptation), should take a pause every time they see a new depressing headline. Think carefully before retweeting, and take the time to read the source material. We don’t have to rely on mainstream media outlets for their pre-digested versions of the truth. It’s almost certain they got something not entirely correct. And don’t think that to prove your intellectual worth you have to join Vaclav Smil’s army of doomcasters.
Lastly, I encourage everyone to arm themselves with constructive narratives about the transition that is already under way. We have the solutions now to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, and we’re about to reach a major inflection point. It is going to feel very, very hard over the next couple of years. We will almost certainly reach 1.35°C, and the news will continue to worsen as a result. But I think our responsibility is to platform evidence of the progress being made today, alongside a call to accelerate action as fast as humanly possible.
I collect evidence of the transition on my Twitter feed @greendig, and in the next piece, I’ll share 6 reasons why we can be (somewhat) optimistic about solving the climate crisis. Also check out the great NYT piece by the same title feature a new generation of anti-doomers on social media.
