Living with the apocalypse

Is it time to recognize that we are politically incapable of dealing with global warming? Is the gap between what is politically acceptable and what is scientifically necessary too great? American novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen thinks so. In an intriguing article in the New Yorker, entitled "What If We Stopped Pretending?" he insists "The climate apocalypse is coming ... and to prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it."

I confess my thoughts are increasingly drifting in that direction. The evidence grows stronger and stronger that we have created a crisis, actually a series of crises, that are simply beyond our abilities to solve. Consider a few unpleasant facts:

• The most important country in dealing with the threat, the United States, has an administration that is systematically undoing all the environmental progress that country has achieved over the past 50 years. The president opposes efforts to deal with climate change not only within the federal jurisdiction but at the state level as well and internationally.
• The largest country in South America, Brazil, has a government of climate change deniers, including a foreign minister who has declared it a "Marxist conspiracy."
• Russia isn't about to de-carbonize. Remove oil and gas from its economy and the cupboard is bare.
• The world's largest county, China, has been more progressive on the issue but is heavily dependent on coal and continues apace to build plants. It also feels, justifiably, that being behind Western countries in both development and in creating the problem, it deserves some slack in catching up.
• The three major greenhouse gas emitting peoples in the industrial world—Americans, Australians and Canadians—remain heavily invested in fossil fuels and display little interest in taking the cure.
• Despite the science being clear for decades, we have emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past 30 years as we did in the previous two centuries.
• At this late date, fossil fuels still provide 80 per cent of the world's energy, and the production of oil and gas rises every year. The efficiencies gained by renewable energy continue to be offset by consumer demand.
• Carbon taxes, promoted by most of the world's economists as the best instrument for dealing with global warming, are often met with fierce resistance by the masses.

The list goes on and on. Good things happen, too, of course: the Greta Thunberg phenomenon, American cities bypassing Washington to take a direct role in climate talks, plant-based products to replace meat, electric cars, and so on. But there is a staggering amount to do if we are to make the transition to a low carbon economy and time is running out. Room for optimism is shrinking rapidly. We may be faced with the inconvenient truth that human nature precludes us rising to the challenge.

Despite his pessimistic prediction, "If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth," Franzen remains surprisingly upbeat. He insists that, despite the destabilization "there’s still a strong practical and ethical case for reducing carbon emissions." At the very least, reducing emissions will lessen the severity of the immediate effects and delay the point of no return. And he points out there is much we can do to make our societies more just and equitable as well as sparing other species from our rapacity. He suggests it's important to maintain functioning democracies and communities in order to minimize the inevitable reversion to tribalism and violence as resources become scarcer and people more frightened. He sees strengthening local communities and reliance on local production offering hope as large scale systems break down.

I admit I find his positive attitude difficult to share. It doesn't take all that much destabilization for people to turn conservative, then fascist, and then violent against the internal and external scapegoats provided by their demagogic masters. But maybe he's right. Perhaps small scale, self-reliant societies could survive the apocalypse.

I'm not going to be around either way, so I'll leave all that to future generations. Homo sapiens has no intrinsic right to its current prosperity and domination, or even to survival. Millions of species have gone extinct, many by our hand, and so might ours. I admit to being fond of our turbulent species and would like us to prosper for many generations into the future, but I'm forced to recognize that if we went extinct almost every other species on Earth would be better off. The dinosaurs dominated the Earth for over 500 times longer than we've been around, but their time finally came. Perhaps ours has as well.