The Abstraction of Pollution
Clearing the Smoke Screen around Climate Change
Dicaprio: “Why do you think this issue is so constantly overlooked?”
Bill Clinton: “I think it’s because it takes a long time for the climate to change in a way that people feel it. And because it seems sort of abstract now.”
(source: Before the Flood, at 16:40–55)
Bill Clinton may have inadvertently hit the nail on the head in 2000 while being interviewed by Leonardo Dicaprio. The problem is climate change; but the meta-problem is that it’s too abstract. The problem of abstraction is much deeper than simply being too difficult to understand though. The problem is abstract (complex), but it is also actively abstracted (obfuscated) to make it even more complicated. Note: I’m not just rhetorically fetishizing abstraction; I’m drawing on actual research that uses the word “abstract” in precisely this way.
In “Abstraction, Developmental Failures, and Financialization of Carbon Markets,” Paris Marx (2017) argues that the neoliberal financialization of carbon markets has failed to achieve its environmentalist purpose due to ‘abstraction,’ which compromises the emissions reduction scheme. “Abstract” is used as a verb, as in to obfuscate and obstruct the regulatory process; to mystify and make complicated the issue through the use of loopholes, propaganda, and technical jargon. Corporations and lobby groups strategically distort the problem in order to come out on top. Below is an excerpt that explicity describes the role of abstraction as such:
“The abstraction of emissions reduction
Major emitters pushed for the inclusion of market mechanisms in the Kyoto Accord in order to have more flexibility in how they reduce their carbon emissions. Had governments taken a regulatory approach, there would have been no way to escape the investments necessary for long-term emissions reduction or elimination because they typically involve the government mandating polluters to take specific actions. In contrast, setting a price on carbon allowed emitters to choose their own methods of emissions reduction — either through investments to eliminate fossil fuel dependence or by simply taking a number of smaller and less costly measures to lower emissions without fundamentally changing the nature of production. In addition, the use of emissions trading instead of a carbon tax made it even easier for emitters not to pursue real reductions as they were granted free emissions permits up to a business-as-usual level, could purchase additional credits at a fluctuating price, and could invest in offset projects in the South to get credit for purported emissions reductions thousands of kilometres away. This should already begin to paint a picture of how market mechanisms abstract the issue of emissions reduction, and make it easier for emitters to make it seem as though they are reducing emissions when they really do nothing of the sort.” — Marx (2017)
The author further argues that carbon markets (as opposed to a carbon tax) create an “equivalence” between different types of carbon reductions, which ends up disincentivizing renewable energy alternatives and perpetuating the status-quo. It is this equivalence that she is calling “abstraction,” which is in effect acting as a bureaucratic smoke screen for pollution. In other words, actions taken to mitigate climate change are being sabotaged at a very abstract level. Marx continues;
“Emissions reduction becomes difficult to achieve once this abstraction through equivalence has taken place, as it makes CO2 reductions appear far more expensive than reductions in compounds with higher GWPs [Global Warming Potential]… However, the use of these market mechanisms also allows business-as-usual to be presented as a carbon reduction, as is the case with emitters who increase emissions to game the system, and it ignores the possible negative impacts of offset projects because it is limited by its focus on what is measurable.” — Marx (2017)
Two similar concepts that are brought to mind are greenwashing (marketing spin that makes something seem environmentally friendly) and regulatory capture (co-opting government to create policies that actually help special interests). These are certainly major factors in the ‘abstraction’ of climate change. They are all forms of ‘stonewalling’ progressive discourse, hidden in processes of abstraction. The crime is that corporations use abstraction as a subversion against regulation, when things actually need to be simplified, not complexified.
“[T]he abstraction made possible through equivalence makes it easier for emitters to make it seem as though they are reducing emissions on paper, while in reality they do not.” — Marx (2017)
It’s worth mentioning the carbon is not the most dangerous greenhouse gas, methane is. Cow farts are literally a bigger driver of global warming than car emissions, which is why we should globally prioritize plant based diets. Carbon levels are still a huge problem for other reasons, but not the problem in itself. As scary as the above image is, it does not account for the whole issue of pollution and climate change. At any rate, the abstraction problem is our focus for now.
The operative word is not just abstraction, but the specific meaning of “equivalence.” The false equivalency of saying one policy is just as good as another in this case, when its not. The conscious equivalency or equivocation of words, concepts, laws, ideas, is a wasteful process, and simply shifts the costs on to other people or entities. It makes much of what would already be ‘lost in translation’ even more impossible to decode, and therefore we should be against it on principle.
Interestingly, this ‘abstraction as obfuscation’ parallels another process that I detailed in Vicious Abstraction and Systemic Racism, where from the 1960’s onward Republican strategists have consciously ‘abstracted’ racist factors out of the issues to make them more palatable to voters. The architects of the “Southern Strategy” sugarcoated and whitewashed the political discourse and their own policy agenda, which has obscured and amplified the devastating consequences for black communities and individuals.
The implicit message of Marx’s article is that we need to stop cutting these bad deals in policy work; we must not tolerate these kinds of abstraction to maximize profits at the expense of everything else. She argues that carbon taxes restrict opportunities for abstraction much more than carbon markets do, forcing polluters to comply while making positive long-term investments. Although not much space is given to this process of abstraction itself, abstraction is a central part of the meta-problem here.
Via abstraction there is a suppression of environmental science. It is abstracted through politicized science and manufactured ignorance, as revealed through agnotology. The book Agnotology has a chapter dedicated to this: Challenging Knowledge: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War, although unfortunately they don’t use the word “abstract.”
Paris Marx’s article is also from the journal Mapping Politics, no less, which is interesting because I’ve called for us to use and explore ‘abstraction as mapping’ based on the work of at least two prominent authors; Jordan Peterson and Benjamin Bratton. So, this particular journal is mapping politics via abstraction, while also discovering another type of abstraction to be the problem in itself. This kind of double-meaning is a theme throughout The Abs-Tract Organization blog. Abstraction as mapping allows us to understand an navigate complex relationships across the political landscape, and hopefully to better understand abstraction itself.
The abstract methodologies we are seeing vary between subjects and cases. There is no definition of “abstraction” or reference to any other kinds in Marx’s article, and I find this to be problematic, but also an opportunity. It is our job then to situate abstraction in a wider context and explore the intersectionality of abstraction.
Case in point, I published The Abstraction of Water a month prior to this, which refers to abstraction in an entirely different sense — “abstraction” as as the physical extraction of water from the ground and other sources. Yet, they both relate to the cause of environmentalism. The Abstraction of Water shows us that illegal abstraction accounts for up to half of all water abstraction in developing countries. And the cases of both water and pollution abstraction, we can likely find many instances of abstraction as obfuscation or politicization as well.
This research always bring us back to the generic meaning of abstraction; abstraction as a thinking process and epistemology. And in turn, this is necessary to strengthen how we conceptualize pollution, climate change, and environmental justice. In this way, abstraction is reflexive and auto-critical, leading to better understanding of the other problematic side of abstraction. That the problem is ‘abstract’ is certainly a common shorthand for dealing with complexity, but abstraction is also a critical tool kit for understanding and fixing the problem. Some foundational articles for understanding basic abstraction, and differentiating “good” from “bad” are Introduction to Abs-Traction, Abstraction Will Make You Smarter, and Abstraction Will Make You More Politically Moderate.
Now, aside from this specific claim that pollution is “abstracted” — mystified by special interests — pollution in itself is very abstract! We pump smoke into the air and it dissipates, we throw plastic into the ocean and it disappears, and we bury garbage in landfills. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is the mantra of indifference to environmentalism, but the problem is never truly gone. The effects are simply downstream, which is the definition of “negative externality.”
To return to Clinton’s comment at the top, the problem is just too “abstract.” Clinton feels the exact same way about politics, and expressed it in exact terms that resonate with this article, as well as The Abstraction of Water, Vicious Abstraction and Systemic Racism, and especially my most recent piece Social Paradoxes and Meta-Problems. According to Bill, here’s how we make all our problems worse by voting against our own interests, due to bad abstraction:
“One of the things that’s wrong with America today, that bothers me more than anything else about our future… we get news in silos… and [the truth is] diverse groups make better decisions than homogenous ones… everybody knows that, but they almost can’t help themselves, cuz when you get to national elections, it gets more abstracted, and we all vote for the gridlock we say we hate.” — Bill Clinton
In The US Policy Environment and Political Climate Change, I outline the deeper consequences of this culture of denial, and argue that “political climate change” is a prequisite for solving the ecological collapse that is in motion. Ironically, I think Bill would agree, but he’s too entrenched in the neoliberal system he helped build, too blinded by his own abstraction, and that of his peers like George Soros (which I discuss in The Abstract Empire of Global Capital), not to mention the man sitting next to him. Nevertheless, I am grateful for his explicit acknowledgment of abstraction; it brings us that much closer to the acute aspect of the meta-problem.
The problem of climate change is thus abstract in its sheer complexity, and its removal from daily life and immediate concerns. It is also ‘abstracted’ to be made more complicated as part of misinformation campaigns. The real ‘global-warming hoax’ is not that liberal elites try to brainwash everyone to be environmentalists, but that conservatives would have you believe such a conspiracy-theory in the first place.
The most ironic thing is that whether the climate change we are experiencing is anthropogenic or not (it is) should be irrelevant, because a global environmental policy is the only thing that will stave off and prepare for natural disasters, which are as destructive as wars. Global agreement in this way is the only thing that can convert our militant energies into peaceful purposes. The environment (our home) and billions of human lives are at stake, and every vicious abstraction spreads invisible blood on the hands of us all.
Make no mistake about it; everything the Trump administration is doing against environmental protections is ‘abstracting’ this problem more, making it more impossible to solve, and accelerating the damage we are doing. Instead of blowing more smoke up each others asses, we should be clearing the smoke around climate change and abstraction.
The Abs-Tract Organization is a boutique research and media think tank, centered around the broad concept of “abstraction”; highlighting the utility of abstraction as a critical perspective and knowledge representation framework, among other things.
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