Why does the climate crisis appear hopeless? A critique of Nathaniel Rich's NYT piece

Climate change appears to be a hopeless spiral into ever-hotter temperatures, with eventual outcomes being crop failure, release of methane clathrates from permafrost and from ocean floors and the transformation of Earth into a planet of Venus-lite, dead to the universe. The world will end in the way Mary Shelley's once-disliked novel The Last Man ended -- with everyone dead.

It sure looks that way right now; it looks like at some point an inexorable physics will take over and there will be a collective global death spiral. To be honest, I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why the climate crisis appears this sort of hopeless. The persistence of capitalism, for instance, is a very important reason why the climate crisis seems hopeless. Naomi Klein mentions that one in her critique of Rich's piece, titled "Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not 'Human Nature.'"

Naomi Klein's recent piece, here, is a critique of another piece, Nathaniel Rich's "Losing Earth," which has received a ton of print space and publicity from the New York Times. I have to imagine the Rich piece as ultimately reactionary. Still, Rich recounts an interesting history which is worth reading if you can get past his ideas of who is to blame for climate change, what to feel about climate change, and what to do about climate change.

Klein is correct about Rich as regards his historical arguments -- she argues that the late '80s period Rich celebrates as the chance "we" blew to do something real about climate change was in fact merely the big growth period for neoliberal capitalism. But at this point the historical argument is water under the bridge. The Eighties came and went, and yes they sucked even though climate change was coming into public awareness back then. People were not aware of how they were being manipulated.

To some extent they still aren't; but groundbreaking articles such as "Beyond Paris: avoiding the trap of carbon metrics" reveal the man behind the curtain. The Powers That Be want you to believe that the only way to "reducing carbon emissions" is by reducing carbon emissions, whereas the trick that will really count toward a better world is in creating a post-carbon society from whole cloth while phasing out the fossil fuel industry. Playing a cute numbers game with a couple of emissions reductions here and there will mean nothing to the dead planet our grandchildren will inherit if we continue with the society we've got. And past unenlightment is sad truth, but certainly avoidable for the sake of the enlightenment of the present.

Capitalism is an important reason for our despair, to be sure; yet one can easily read "Losing Earth" and suspect that the real culprit and cause for climate change hopelessness is in writers such as Nathaniel Rich. Rich and his friends are the vanguard of the culture of fake climate change activism, the people who keep the elites happy in their escape from responsibility and who get large quantities of space in places such as the New York Times and its online equivalent. Let's go over some Rich statements so we can see for ourselves how rich they in fact are. Starting with this one:

Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

Grappling with physical solutions to climate change would mean that the fossil-fuel industry would have looked for ways of putting itself out of business. Rich of course doesn't mention this. To reduce "carbon emissions" to the extent necessary, a world must be created with no fossil-fuel industry, and therefore no fossil-fuel extractions.

Or how about this one?

Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring,” and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes.

Rich wants to comfort us in our bullshit notions that individual belief in climate change matters all by itself. Donald Trump doesn't believe in climate change, but we do, so it's all kewl, as implied by the likes of Rich. Never mind that we don't have a smidgen of the power Donald Trump has. In reality, of course, what matters is not belief but action, and in fact not all action matters but only a certain type of action, action involving democratic empowerment to end capitalism for the sake of global sustainability, really matters.

Ultimately, Rich wants to invoke liberal guilt as the primary emotion to feel about climate change. His big question? "Why did we do this to ourselves?" But as Kate Aronoff points out:

Rich begins by summarizing a decade of meetings, hearings, summits, and backroom deals between scientists, politicians, and lobbyists. The upshot? We blew it, and failed in “breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels.”

Aw, gee, we couldn't quit the hard stuff fast enough back in the Eighties. So we are at fault, and so let's mope on that one a bit like good liberals. But wait a minute! Could it be, maybe, that back then we were too busy freakin' earning a living to contemplate some kind of half-baked and elitist individual divorce from the fossil fuels we needed to use in order to earn a living? Well, now that you put it that way, maybe we were more in the way of victims of circumstance than we were anything else.

Kate Aronoff's argument against Nathaniel Rich is also fun because she skewers his main premise so well. Here it is, for joy and pleasure:

In the story, global warming is presented as a problem that humans aren’t fully equipped or prepared to confront. “We have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present,” Rich writes. We “worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.” At a private event unveiling the piece Tuesday night, Rich put it more bluntly. “We haven’t reckoned, at the level of civilization, with what we’ve done to ourselves,” he explained.

But who’s done what to whom exactly? Who is the “we”?

The Aronoff argument, however, loses its grip on the solution at that point when she starts to blame Americans as the "we." It continues:

The fact remains that other nations—197 of them—haven’t been quite as profligate on climate action as the United States, which accounts for around 15 percent of emissions worldwide. The kind of outright climate denial that helped arrest our participation in the Kyoto Protocol 21 years ago and, more recently, the Paris Agreement, isn’t widespread outside of the United States, either. It’s not that the global community has a fool-proof mitigation plan; it does not. But America’s particular failure to address climate change isn’t a failure of all of humanity.

Here I need to say, more clearly this time: addressing climate change does not mean doing anything effective about it. And doing something, in turn, means taking control of the social systems which define, empower, and limit acts of "doing something." Americans are only a bit worse than the other peoples of the world in our failure to take charge. So let me suggest another "we" at fault for the failures of climate change mitigation. "We," in this version, are the likes of Nathaniel Rich, people who want to imagine a Golden Age of Climate Change Activism in order to stop at appeals to liberal guilt and bogus discussions of "human nature" in their half-baked search for a social solution to climate change.

Oh, sure, go ahead and read Rich's long history of climate change research and scientific discussion. While you're at it, though, read Spencer Weart's book on the history of climate science. It will give you the context necessary to understand what Rich is talking about. Rich's history may be good -- but his ideas of what to do about it? Puh-leeze.

Meanwhile, enjoy the record high temperatures!

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boriscleto's picture

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

WoodsDweller's picture

... it's industrial civilization. We can look at the 20th century as both the last gasp of monarchy (not relevant) and the conflict between communism and capitalism. The winner of the contest was the system which could transform natural resources into wastes at the greatest rate and broadest scale. Capitalism won, so we can regard it as being at fault for our current situation, but any system that facilitates industrial civilization would have brought us to the same end.
Intelligent life is the biome becoming self-aware. It may be a universal outcome of a thriving planet. If an intelligent creature evolves in the sea it may achieve heights of philosophy, music (consider the songs of whales), and social organization. It won't develop technology in the form of working with metals or harnessing fossil fuels. It could be stable for hundreds of millions of years.
Could a land-based intelligent species avoid the trap of technology and its widespread adoption? Perhaps, but not ours. We will likely persist just long enough to tap all the easily available resources necessary to discover the laws of nature and technology to exploit it. Then we'll sterilize the land in a mass extinction.
The Earth will be fine. She's done this dance before. Life will colonize the land again, and a new intelligent species arise. It won't have the natural resources needed to develop industrial civilization which conveys the power to destroy the climate.
It isn't about us. It was never about us. We're just a necessary mechanism to purge the crust of concentrations of raw materials. Industrial civilization a one-time catastrophic event in the life of a planet. Once it's over the real work can begin.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

earthling1's picture

@WoodsDweller
and all other life on this planet will become a whole new deposit of fossil fuel. Time will turn everything living today to crude oil.
Rinse, repeat.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

WoodsDweller's picture

@earthling1
It takes hundreds of millions of years to produce fossil fuels from living tissue, and it only happens in specific conditions. Fossil fuels aren't the first stage of technology, metals are. Concentrated metal ores near the surface that can be extracted with nothing more complicated than a campfire will be gone, and without those a new species won't progress to the point of being able to access fossil fuels once they finally form.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

Hawkfish's picture

@earthling1

The Carboniferous era was caused by a lag between the evolution of cellulose and the evolution of fungi that could digest it. We will be digested long before we can become oil.

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

Cassiodorus's picture

@WoodsDweller

The winner of the contest was the system which could transform natural resources into wastes at the greatest rate and broadest scale.

That winner was always capitalism. Capitalism was from the get-go the one and only system which transformed "natural resources" (the capitalist's concept) into consumer products (waste being what Jason W. Moore calls "negative value") with a speed bounded only by the speed of the technical resources available to the capitalists. "Communism" from its foundations in Stalin's rule of Russia was never intended as a world-system (see in this regard Joseph Stalin's philosophy of "socialism in one country"). Instead, "Communism" was what Immanuel Wallerstein called a "mercantilistic semi-withdrawal from the capitalist world-system" -- "Communism" attempted the bootstrapping of certain peripheral countries (Russia, China etc.) into the community of the core states within what was assumed all along to be a capitalist world-system. It was not a coincidence that the Russia of 1917 and the China of 1949 were peasant nations and not, as Marx had wanted for the birthplace of "Communism," the "most developed countries."

In this regard it's important to make a distinction between the Russia of Stalin and of Khrushchev with its rapid economic growth, and the Russia of the late Seventies and afterward, which became a debtor nation under the economic thumb of the G-7. Once the mercantilistic bootstrapping had been accomplished, all that lay ahead was more capitalism.

(As a side note, it must be remembered that Adam Smith was a latecomer to the capitalist system even though capitalist economics today has his name imprinted upon their collective banner. Before Smith were the mercantilists, whose fundamental unit of economy was the state and who viewed corporations as auxiliaries. Smith's big book dates back to 1776, whereas capitalism is a phenomenon going back to 1452 or (if one is stingy) 1492. Mercantilism, then, defines what Stalin did with Russia's economy, with the caveat that under Stalin the state was itself its own corporate auxiliary.)

As for industrial civilization, industrial capitalism was and is an outgrowth of the exploitative premises of preindustrial capitalism, as preindustrial capitalism consumed the planet at a rate far surpassing that of feudalism. See e.g. Patel and Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things for further elaboration. Consumption unto death goes back before industrialism to (as Patel and Moore put it) the conversion of Madeira into a sugar plantation in the 15th century. The big jump, then, was not the creation of Dickensian factories or even the steam engine but rather the earlier creation of the capitalist plantation.

There is nothing innate about capitalism. But creation of an alternative to capitalism will require the creation of a history that does not favor a competition between different rates of exploitation to see which one can finish off the planet more quickly.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

I knew here was something off about the article that I couldn't put my finger on. The collective guilt aspect. It's all out fault because we're the ones that cared about it, why didn't we just fix it. To parody the student court proceedings in "Animal House"...

Otter: What's the difference? Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with scientific climate models—we did. [winks at President and Congress] But you can't hold a whole industry responsible for the behavior of a few, sick perverted corporations. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole capitalist system? And if the whole capitalist system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our financial institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg: isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!
[Leads the capitalists out of the hearing, all humming the Star-Spangled Banner]

The only thing that would break through the noise would be a disaster. An unprecedented drought and failure of the aquifer leading to food shortages and mass migration to where there's water, something. If we can be sold on the myth that poor people caused the great recession because they lied on their mortgage application, then they'll buy the blame shifting in Richs article. Just enough truth to make the fiction plausible.

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Lookout's picture

I suspect we are past the tipping point, but even if not...we lack the will and power to cease the extraction and use of fossil fuels. Therefore dooming our species to the fate of most...extinction. The only question is how soon. Will we make it to 2100?

Bacterial-growh-Curve.jpg

BTW Rich was interviewed on democracy now this week. Here's the transcript or video.
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/2/losing_earth_how_humanity_came_to
I wasn't impressed with him nor his article.

We've known for a long time. Here's a warning from 1958 (1.3 min)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg]

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

@Lookout We think like people. I am sure that there are some, with the means and influence that think a good, lethal plague (not for them) would be a good idea. Then again, sperm counts are declining world wide. Farmers dump surplus milk and burn surplus crops. What do you do with surplus workers that think they have the right to breathe?

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Lookout's picture

@Snode

influenza did a pretty good job. Killed about 100 million, infected 500 million.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

And this essay explains why.

The primary reason why so little has been accomplished is that Climate Change is a Producer Class problem. It can NOT be solved with Leisure Class solutions. Yesterday, I watched some climate change evangelist from Switzerland claiming on RT that his message was so important it justified his flying all over the world. Well, no! Anyone except the very dimmest among us know the climate is changing. The only interesting question is, what are we going to do about it. Of course they never got to that. When you propose change, you go from being a mere critic to being a target of criticism. That leap is made by the very few.

But honestly, nothing quite depresses me like the idea that somehow climate change can only be meaningfully addressed with some variation of Socialism. The reason Marxism failed was that it didn't work. Chairman Mao went so far as to decree backyard steel mills. See, Marxists believe that they can rule by decree. They honestly believe that with correct political thoughts, they can order around nature itself.

And the environmental records of the industrial socialist states were dismal. The most blatant example were side-by-side nickel smelting operations in Norway and USSR. Turns out that for all the pronouncements of socialist concern for the nature, the USSR one was roughly 8 times more polluting. Apparently, respect for nature is enhanced more by starting from Martin Luther than Marx.

It is beyond obvious that if we have to wait around while the new generation of Marxists hold up progress while they argue that THIS time their crackpot ideas of how the world works will turn out fine, the climate really is doomed. And ultimately, the Marxist distractions are so frustrating because there are many, far better, Progressive alternatives to choose from.

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Climate change is a scientific, engineering, and economic problem. It is NOT a political problem so ignore the politicians.

Cassiodorus's picture

@jonathan

But honestly, nothing quite depresses me like the idea that somehow climate change can only be meaningfully addressed with some variation of Socialism.

And nothing quite depresses me like people who think that "socialism" is the Soviet Union. Bernie Sanders thinks "socialism" is a better health care system. Does he depress you too, merely because he uses the word?

The reason Marxism failed was that it didn't work.

There are a hundred different types of "Marxism." There is no "it."

Chairman Mao went so far as to decree backyard steel mills. See, Marxists believe that they can rule by decree.

No, that would be capitalism, in which the rich and powerful rule the world by multiple decrees. In the real world, most Marxists want more democracy. We'd like, for instance, democratic control over the proceeds of our labor. Nobody wants some dead Chinese emperor (e.g. Mao) or Russian czar (e.g. the Soviets) ruling the world.

(standard right-wing boilerplate ignored)

To be honest, Jonathan, you're all so boringly typical. "Nobody can have a better world because omigod the BOGEYMAN!" Maybe if you say it enough times it will be true.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama