This Changes Everything (10 page)

Indeed this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized global economy by mid-century.

But we didn’t do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist
Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, “There’s a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting
carbon into the atmosphere”: the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming. Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, further explains:
“Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy
has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.”
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Put a little more simply: for more than two decades, we kicked the can down the road. During that time, we also expanded the road from a
two-lane carbon-spewing highway to a six-lane superhighway. That feat was accomplished in large part thanks to the radical and aggressive vision that called for the creation of a single global economy based on the rules of free market fundamentalism, the very rules incubated in the right-wing think tanks now at the forefront of climate change denial. There is a certain irony at work: it is the success
of their own revolution that makes revolutionary levels of transformation to the market system now our best hope of avoiding climate chaos.

Some are advancing a different strategy to bring right-wingers back into the climate fold. Rather than trying to scare them with scenarios of interventionist governments if we procrastinate further, this camp argues that we need approaches to emission reduction
that are less offensive to conservative values.

Yale’s Dan Kahan points out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that do not challenge their belief that humans can dominate nature. In one of his studies, Kahan and
his colleagues polled subjects on their views about climate change
after showing some of them fake news stories. Some of the subjects were given a story about how global warming could be solved through “anti-pollution” measures. Others were given a story that held up nuclear power as the solution. Some were shown no story at all. The scientific facts about global warming were identical in all news stories. The researchers discovered that hard-core conservatives
who received the nuclear solution story were more open to the scientific facts proving that humans are changing the climate. However, those who received the story about fighting pollution “were even more skeptical about these facts than were hierarchs and individualists in a control group that received no newspaper story.”
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It’s not hard to figure out why. Nuclear is a heavy industrial technology,
based on extraction, run in a corporatist manner, with long ties to the military-industrial complex. And as renowned psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton has noted, no technology does more to confirm the notion that man has tamed nature than the ability to split the atom.
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Based on this research, Kahan and others argue, environmentalists should sell climate action by playing up concerns
about national security and emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and “geoengineering”—global-scale technological interventions that would attempt to reverse rapid warming by, for instance, blocking a portion of the sun’s rays, or by “fertilizing” the oceans so that they trap more carbon, among other untested, extraordinarily high-risk schemes. Kahan reasons that since climate change is perceived
by many on the right as a gateway to dreaded anti-industry policies, the solution is “to remove what makes it threatening.” In a similar vein, Irina Feygina and John T. Jost, who have conducted parallel research at NYU, advise policymakers to package environmental action as being about protecting “our way of life” and a form of patriotism, something they revealingly call “system-sanctioned
change.”
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This kind of advice has been enormously influential. For instance, the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that specialized in attacking grassroots environmentalism for its supposed lack of “modernity”—is forever charting this self-styled middle path, pushing nuclear power, fracked natural gas, and genetically modified crops as climate solutions, while attacking renewable energy programs.
And as we will see later on, some greens are even
warming up to geoengineering.
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Moreover, in the name of reaching across the aisle, green groups are constantly “reframing” climate action so that it is about pretty much anything other than preventing catastrophic warming to protect life on earth. Instead climate action is about all the things conservatives are supposed to care about more than
that, from cutting off revenues to Arab states to reasserting American economic dominance over China.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t work: this has been the core messaging for many large U.S. green groups for five years (“Forget about climate change,” counsels Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. “Do you love America?”
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) And as we have seen, conservative opposition to climate action has only hardened in this period.

The far more troubling problem with this approach is that rather than challenging the warped values fueling both disaster denialism and disaster capitalism, it actively reinforces those values. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on
exactly the kind of reckless, short-term thinking that got us into this mess. Just as we spewed greenhouse gases into the atmosphere thinking that tomorrow would never come, both of these hugely high-risk technologies would create even more dangerous forms of waste, and neither has a discernible exit strategy (subjects that I will be exploring in greater depth later on). Hyper-patriotism, similarly,
is an active barrier to coming up with any kind of global climate agreement, since it further pits countries against one another rather than encouraging them to cooperate. As for pitching climate action as a way to protect America’s high-consumerist “way of life”—that is either dishonest or delusional because a way of life based on the promise of infinite growth cannot be protected, least of
all exported to every corner of the globe.

I am well aware that all of this raises the question of whether I am doing the same thing as the deniers—rejecting possible solutions because they threaten my ideological worldview. As I outlined earlier, I have long been greatly concerned about the science of global warming—but I was propelled
into a deeper engagement with it
partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of social and economic justice in which I already believed.

But there are a few important differences to note. First, I am not asking anyone to take my word on the science; I think that all of us should take the word of 97 percent of climate scientists and their countless peer-reviewed articles, as well as every national academy of science
in the world, not to mention establishment institutions like the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, all of which are telling us we are headed toward catastrophic levels of warming. Nor am I suggesting that the kind of equity-based responses to climate change that I favor are inevitable results of the science.

What I am saying is that the science forces us to
choose
how we want to
respond. If we stay on the road we are on, we will get the big corporate, big military, big engineering responses to climate change—the world of a tiny group of big corporate winners and armies of locked-out losers that we have imagined in virtually every fictional account of our dystopic future, from
Mad Max
to
The Children of Men
to
The Hunger Games
to
Elysium
. Or we can choose to heed climate
change’s planetary wake-up call and change course, steer away not just from the emissions cliff but from the logic that brought us careening to that precipice. Because what the “moderates” constantly trying to reframe climate action as something more palatable are really asking is: How can we
c
reate change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions? How,
they ask, do you reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

The answer is: you don’t. You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible, knowing that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right. And rather
than twisting yourself in knots trying to appease a lethal worldview, you set out to deliberately strengthen those values (“egalitarian” and “communitarian” as the cultural cognition studies cited here describe them) that are currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It has changed many times before and can change again. The delegates
at the Heartland conference understand this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence
proving that their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

The Heartlanders understand that culture can shift quickly because they are part of a movement
that did just that. “Economics are the method,” Margaret Thatcher said, “the object is to change the heart and soul.” It was a mission largely accomplished. To cite just one example, in 1966, a survey of U.S. college freshmen found that only about 44 percent of them said that making a lot of money was “very important” or “essential.” By 2013, the figure had jumped to 82 percent.
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It’s enormously
telling that as far back as 1998, when the American Geophysical Union (AGU) convened a series of focus groups designed to gauge attitudes toward global warming, it discovered that “Many respondents in our focus groups were convinced that the underlying cause of environmental problems (such as pollution and toxic waste) is a pervasive climate of rampant selfishness and greed, and since they see
this moral deterioration to be irreversible, they feel that environmental problems are unsolvable.”
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Moreover, a growing body of psychological and sociological research shows that the AGU respondents were exactly right: there is a direct and compelling relationship between the dominance of the values that are intimately tied to triumphant capitalism and the presence of anti-environment views
and behaviors. While a great deal of research has demonstrated that having politically conservative or “hierarchical” views and a pro-industry slant makes one particularly likely to deny climate change, there is an even larger number of studies connecting materialistic values (and even free market ideology) to carelessness not just about climate change, but to a great many environmental risks. At
Knox College in Illinois, psychologist Tim Kasser has been at the forefront of this work. “To the extent people prioritize values and goals such as achievement, money, power, status and image, they tend to hold more negative attitudes towards the environment, are less likely to engage in positive environmental behaviors, and are more likely to use natural resources unsustainably,” write Kasser and
British environmental strategist Tom Crompton in their 2009 book,
Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity.
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In other words, the culture that triumphed in our corporate age pits us
against the natural world. This could easily be a cause only for despair. But if there is a reason for social movements to exist, it is not to accept dominant values as fixed and unchangeable but
to offer other ways to live—to wage, and win, a battle of cultural worldviews. That means laying out a vision of the world that competes directly with the one on harrowing display at the Heartland conference and in so many other parts of our culture, one that resonates with the majority of people on the planet because it is true: That we are not apart from nature but of it. That acting collectively
for a greater good is not suspect, and that such common projects of mutual aid are responsible for our species’ greatest accomplishments. That greed must be disciplined and tempered by both rule and example. That poverty amidst plenty is unconscionable.

It also means defending those parts of our societies that already express these values outside of capitalism, whether it’s an embattled library,
a public park, a student movement demanding free university tuition, or an immigrant rights movement fighting for dignity and more open borders. And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that
would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.

Many are attempting to draw these connections and are expressing these alternative values in myriad ways. And yet a robust movement responding to the climate crisis is not emerging fast enough. Why? Why aren’t we, as a species, rising to our historical moment?
Why are we so far letting “decade zero” slip away?