Emergency Mode
When will we stop passively observing global heating?
Global heating threatens our families, lifestyles, and property—everyone cares deeply about these things independent of what they believe politically. When will people take action on climate in order to protect the things—their families, lifestyles, and property—that they care deeply about?
The Trigger
Peter Kalmus says—in a 11 September 2022 tweet—that eventual “society-wide emergency-mode climate action is assured” and that “the shift to emergency mode WILL happen once enough people freak out”.
It’s hard to imagine what the trigger will be—we’ve seen a lot of devastation. There’s a 4 August 2022 Guardian piece about “how people across the world are losing their lives and livelihoods due to more deadly and more frequent heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts brought by the climate crisis”—there’s also a 29 August 2022 CNN piece about Pakistan’s effort to “prevent further loss of life as it reels from one of its worst climate disasters with floodwater threatening to cover up to a third of the country of 220 million people by the end of the monsoon season”.
Viability
Climate stabilization is technically—and economically—viable. Mara Prentiss writes—in her 5 December 2019 piece—that “the news is hopeful” when it comes to science and technology. And Robert Pollin wrote the following chapter—about decarbonization—in the 2020 book The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy:
Pollin writes that “purely as an analytic proposition and policy challenge” it’s “entirely realistic to allow that global CO₂ emissions can be driven to net zero by 2050”. And he concludes that his “chapter has demonstrated that achieving a net-zero-emissions global economy by 2050—in line with the IPCC’s climate stabilization goals—is an entirely feasible project with respect to its technical and economic requirements”.
Pollin comments—in a 23 October 2022 interview—that he sees the Global Green New Deal as “the only viable program that can achieve the IPCC’s climate stabilization goals in a way that also expands decent job opportunities and raises mass living standards in all regions of the world, at all levels of development”. He says that “the Global Green New Deal should attract overwhelming support, both among people who are committed around climate issues as well as those whose primary focus may be paying rent and keeping food on the table”. And that “this level of support can only be achieved through organizing and educating”.
Opposition
But the political opposition is daunting. Noam Chomsky points out—in the aforementioned 23 October 2022 interview—that Washington’s climate bill is “a pale shadow of what was proposed by the Biden administration under the impact of popular climate activism”. The bill “is not meaningless” but is “radically insufficient in its reach”.
And the climate bill that corporate forces “were willing to accept includes vast government subsidies”—Chomsky cites a 9 October 2022 WaPo piece that says that the climate bill’s huge subsidies “‘are already driving forward large oil and gas projects that threaten a heavy carbon footprint, with companies including ExxonMobil, Sempra and Occidental Petroleum positioned for big payouts’”.
The piece also says that carbon capture—which the climate bill massively subsidizes—“‘has proven most successful is getting more oil out of the ground’”. And that all but one major carbon-capture project “built in the United States to date is geared toward fossil fuel companies taking the trapped carbon and injecting it into underground wells to extract crude’”.
The piece even observes a perverse dynamic where the “‘subsidies give companies lucrative incentives to drill for gas in the most climate-unfriendly sites, where the concentration of CO2 in the fuel is especially high’”—you get a “‘lucrative’” incentive for putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, since it’s all about how much you happen to trap during the process of pollution.
And Chomsky also cites a 28 May 2021 NYT piece—which says that ConocoPhillips plans to use thermosiphons to cool the Arctic’s thawing permafrost so that the company can keep drilling for oil—as well as a 27 September 2022 Guardian piece about “a huge expansion of oil pipelines”.
Delusion
You might wonder why the billionaires can’t all band together, deploy their enormous wealth, and obliterate the political opposition—it seems curiously suicidal for them not to do this. They have more to lose than anyone else—in certain respects—if things collapse.
Delusion might be an important factor regarding the billionaires’ absence—Douglas Rushkoff has a 4 September 2022 Guardian piece about an unhinged mindset that “encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind”. The adherents’ “extreme wealth and privilege” serves “only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion”—the adherents take “their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers”. This mindset “allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others” and “inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused”.
The billionaires don't have to colonize Mars or upload the brains. Even the most cataclysmic scenario won't kill *everyone*. They'll be in their gated and secure compounds as the world dies.
Indeed every loss or downturn presents an opportunity for capitalists, and they exploit it and do well. Their great grandchildren may or may not suffer in some qualitative way, but that's a distant prospect.