The Climate Crisis - Why We're Not Playing to Win

It's been some time since I realized that we will never avert climate catastrophe until we recognize that Earth is finite and the only future for humanity depends on our willingness and ability to change our ways. We have to live in harmony with our biosphere, Spaceship Earth. There are far too many of us, consuming too many resources and producing too much pollution, contamination. That is the state we have been in since the early 70s and it has steadily worsened ever since.

The first glimmer of hope emerged when Camilo Mora, the renowned climate scientist from University of Hawaii, stepped outside the narrow bounds of science during an interview with Yale 360.  Here was a climate scientist speaking out on collateral problems, overpopulation and consumption.

The worldwide population is 7 billion people, and we know that to sustain a human being you need on the order of two hectares per person. That means that the world human population every year consumes on the order of 14 billion hectares. The planet only has eleven to give to us. Every year, we consume in excess of three billion hectares.

Mora stuck his neck out to openly criticize the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for ignoring overpopulation. 

It’s pure fear. It seems amazing, but friends of mine recommended to me not to publish that paper. They said, “This paper is going to be damaging to you. You don’t get it. You don’t need it.” What is remarkable, though, is that after the paper got published, I had multiple people calling me to endorse it.

When world leaders gathered in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit, you could be forgiven for assuming that climate change was a standalone threat to the future of mankind.  Fix that and it's clear sailing. It's a problem of greenhouse gas emissions. 

I didn't hear one of them suggest that climate change is an integral part of a far larger, far more dangerous problem - humankind's refusal to live within the physical limits of our planet, Earth. Not one of them linked climate change to overpopulation, excess consumption or the worsening loss of biodiversity.  In that failure was their unanimous admission of defeat.

Anthropologist Jared Diamond warns that, when faced with multiple existential threats, solving one of them (such as the climate crisis)  ultimately doesn't matter. When you have four guns pointing at your head, disarming one of the gunmen doesn't accomplish much.

It was encouraging when the venerable James Lovelock surfaced this week in an op-ed in The Guardian.  Lovelock, creator of the Gaia Hypothesis, warned that fighting climate change isn't enough. He said our leaders need a holistic approach.

We also need to address the problem of overpopulation and to urgently halt the destruction of tropical forests. Most of all, we need to look at the world in a holistic way.

...my fellow humans must learn to live in partnership with the Earth, otherwise the rest of creation will, as part of Gaia, unconsciously move the Earth to a new state in which humans may no longer be welcome. The virus, Covid-19, may well have been one negative feedback. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier.

Overpopulation, the destruction of nature, our own doing, are moving Earth to a new state in which humans and other complex lifeforms may no longer be welcome. Have you heard our leaders speak of these things? Have you heard them acknowledge that their pursuit of perpetual exponential growth is humankind's death sentence, a suicide trap?  If they can't open our eyes to this peril, what good are they?

It's been more than 200 years since Thomas Malthus penned this warning:

The power of population is so superior to the power of Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

The Guardian's eco-scribe, George Monbiot, responded dismissively to the leaders' antics at the Glasgow summit.

In some respects, preventing climate breakdown is highly complicated. But in another, it’s really simple: we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. All the bluster and grandstanding, the extravagant promises and detailed mechanisms discussed in Glasgow this week amount to nothing if this simple and obvious thing doesn’t happen.

A recent study in the scientific journal Nature suggests that to stand a 50% chance of avoiding more than 1.5C of global heating, we need to retire 89% of proven coal reserves, 58% of oil reserves and 59% of fossil methane (“natural gas”) reserves. If we want better odds than 50-50, we’ll need to leave almost all of them untouched.

Everything about the relationship between nation states and the fossil fuel industry is perverse, stupid and self-destructive. For the sake of this dirty industry’s profits and dividends – overwhelmingly concentrated among a tiny number of the world’s people – governments commit us to catastrophe.

Look at the shameless touting of our own prime minister who announced that some time in the future he'll impose a cap on fossil fuel emissions but not really, just the production of them. Canada, under Trudeau or the next Tory, will remain in every respect a petro-state. That's Canada's Big Bold Lie.

The Tyee's award winning eco-journalist and author, Andrew Nikiforuk, this week wrote of a return to the 1970s. The early 70s. Global population stood around 3.5 billion (8 billion today). The human ecological footprint had not quite exceeded our finite planet's carrying capacity. We didn't live as long. We didn't consume as much. Mankind was (quite unintentionally) living in balance with our biosphere, Spaceship Earth.

 Nikiforuk attacked leaders like our own for perpetuating the Big Bold Lie.

Thanks to bright green technologies, we can continuously grow the level of consumption on planet Earth and deliver a bloated North American lifestyle to all without inviting climate catastrophe or a general breakdown of natural ecosystems that support all living things.

That’s the big bold lie that politicians are telling themselves this week at yet another climate conference.

That much is inarguable. 

We must contract the global economy, restructure technological society and restore what’s left of natural ecosystems if we want to live and breathe.

Big green lies allow the political class to avoid talking about a radical restructuring of the technological society and an end to economic growth.

The high priests of the Technosphere.

Unfortunately, today’s leaders refuse to enable the conversation we need to have. That is because they reflect our society’s dominant technological bias. Most of us are now inmates of what a group of British geologists call the technosphere, or what the social critic Jacques Ellul described as “la technique” long ago.

It is a parasitic growth on the biosphere (the living world) that consumes fossil fuels to drive economic and human growth. All of that growth requires increasing levels of technological complexity that seeks to control every aspect of human life. But the cheap energy to power this complexity is now dwindling and creating a crisis the system can not register, let alone acknowledge.

Big green lies allow the political class to avoid talking about a radical restructuring of the technological society and an end to economic growth.

There are among us some who claim the laurel of "progressive" a notion they define as anything slightly to the left of the Conservatives. They turn hydrophobic at any criticism of the Liberals or their leader and joyously swallow the Big Bold Lie.

Searching through my original blog there's nothing here that I haven't been writing about for years. It began when I decided to compile a list of the gathering threats facing our global civilization - everything from droughts to floods, severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration; ocean acidification; species and pest migrations; food insecurity, terrorism and nuclear proliferation. It swelled to a large paragraph.

It struck me that there must be common threads that ran through these issues and eventually they emerged. They were all man made. And, from that realization, came the universal solution. We could solve them all if we chose to. All of them, the lot. We had the means. We had the knowledge. All we had to do was bring mankind back into harmony with nature, our one and only biosphere, Spaceship Earth.

We will never solve these problems if we treat them as standalone threats. You can't "fix" climate change with promises of slashing greenhouse gas emissions. You have to fix the underlying cause because it creates all of these dangers.

We need to shed the malignant form of capitalism that demands perpetual exponential growth. We need what James Lovelock called "sustainable retreat."  We can no longer overburden this planet. Earth is already showing it will not tolerate that any longer.  We must stop running from the hard truth. We cannot outrun this.