Sustainable Ecology
Shane Partridge Pear Tree Twitter
There can be no doubt that climate change is happening; it has already started wreaking damage, and is set to do much more. Temperatures have risen by nearly 1C since the industrial revolution, and in 2012 the World Bank predicted a rise of 4C by 2100, bringing "extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity and life‑threatening sea-level rise". And yet coordinated international response is completely missing. The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit settled for a half-hearted 2C target, then failed to secure commitment even on that. Obama seems stuck, as the US fracks and drills its heart out and Canada tears up Alberta in the race for tar. Climate, politics and business are caught in a vicious triangle, and at the moment it's the climate that is getting squeezed.
The only way to resolve this is with tough, fair, world-level regulation. But instead we have a vacuum, into which pours all manner of noxious nonsense. Climate-change deniers, luxuriantly astroturfed. Charities cosying up to fossil-fuel interests, including one, Klein has discovered, that has put oil and gas wells on its own bird reserve. Clever chaps who should know better – Stephen Hawking, the lads from Freakonomics – with their fantasies of terraforms and geo-engineering. Eddying little markets in non-solutions: carbon offsets, emissions trading, organic nappies. What's wrong with us that we've let this happen?
Klein argues that humans don't cause climate collapse, and nor does carbon. The problem is a particular arrangement of these elements – in other words, capitalism, the whole point of which is to find resources and exploit them. It's a habit of mind, if you like, a form of behaviour. As such, it can be changed. Except that most of the time we cannot see this, because we are "locked in, politically, physically and culturally" to the world that capital has made. "We lack the collective spaces in which to confront the raw terror of ecocide," is how Klein encapsulates the problem. Lucky for everybody then that opening up such spaces is exactly what Klein does best.
Capital, Klein argues, has been separating humans from the world around them since the discovery of steam. But it is what she calls "our great collective misfortune" that just as leaders started waking up to the emissions problem in the early 1990s, they were also establishing the World Trade Organisation, and with it, a "new era" of hyperactive deregulation, tax-cutting and privatisation of public space. When historians look back, as Klein says, they'll see the two processes in parallel, each pretending not to know about the other: the climate movement, "struggling, sputtering, failing utterly" and corporate globalisation, "zooming from victory to victory". The climate movement needs to think harder about capital, if it is to have a chance of getting real.
There's one especially good bit, that completely stopped me dead. If you follow the climate science, you'll have heard the talk about how change doesn't happen incrementally but touches sudden "non-linear tipping elements", which may at any moment run completely out of control. Well, Klein also discusses a paper called "Is Earth Fucked?" by the geophysicist Brad Werner, which models the likely progress of "earth-human systems" towards various unpleasant outcomes.