Global warming is unstoppable while capitalism blocks prevention

Written by Ed Finn and first published at rabble.ca

The tenacious refusal of the world’s business and political leaders to heed the warnings of climate scientists about global warming raises the stark possibility that it may already be too late. The tipping point beyond which concerted preventive action becomes impracticable is just 12 years away, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That’s all the time the IPCC scientists give us to keep the global temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius. If it rises higher than that, they warn, the consequent intensity of extreme heat, pollution, droughts, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, rising sea levels, and consequent mounting hunger, poverty, and mass displacements will annihilate billions of people.

Realistically, what are the odds that the scientists’ latest warning about global warming will be heeded, any more than their many previous alarms have been in the past?

I’d put the odds against at 100-to-1, perhaps even 1,000-to-1.

Starting with the Club of Rome’s seminal study on The Limits of Growth in 1972, climatologists, ecologists and other scientists have been trying to stop the economic folly of pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet. They have repeatedly called for curbs on carbon dioxide emissions, air and ocean pollution, resource depletion, deforestation, armed conflict, poverty, inequality, and overpopulation -- each successive plea differing only in its mounting urgency as it fails to spur preventive corporate and political action.

This apparent indifference of CEOs to a looming climate catastrophe is often mistakenly attributed to their dismissal of global warning as a hoax. Some of them undoubtedly are deniers, but most, though they may be avaricious and heartless, are not stupid. They can’t dispute the overwhelming scientific evidence that global warming is real and that, left unchecked, it will make the planet unlivable for billions of people, possibly even wipe out human civilization.

The entrenchment of capitalism

Why, then, you may ask, do business executives stubbornly continue to maintain a ruinous economic system whose contamination of the environment is clearly the chief cause of global warming?

The obvious answer is that neoliberal capitalism is now so deeply entrenched in both law and practice that even the most intelligent and ethical corporate officials dare not try to reform it on their own. Their legal charters and business mandates oblige them to make the maximization of profits and shareholder dividends their overriding objective. That fixation trumps everything else (no pun intended), including the broad public interest, a clean environment, and even humankind’s survival. 

The enshrinement of profit maximization is built into Canada’s business legislation, as it is in the United States and elsewhere. Our courts uphold this principle. In a noteworthy case in 2004 (the People vs. Wise), Canada’s Supreme Court ruling was based on the Canadian Business Corporations Act. The relevant section of this Act states that corporate directors and officers “owe their fiduciary obligations to the corporation, and the corporation’s interests are not to be confused with the interests of creditors or any other stakeholders.”

And there you have it. Any CEO or board of directors rash enough to deviate from the pursuit of profits for any reason – for the benefit of employees, customers, society as a whole, or even the planet – would be severely chastised. Either they’d be sued by major shareholders under the Act, or the subsequent decline in profits would leave them vulnerable to a hostile takeover.

So the corporations, in effect, are compelled by the law, by the greed of their investors, and by the very nature of their unbridled capitalist economic system, to continue their destructive assault on the environment. Capitalism is inherently dependent on maintaining the lunacy of perpetual economic growth, and hence opposed to any limits being placed on its virulent pursuit of profits. Capitalism and a clean climate, in short, are clearly incompatible. 

As for the world’s governments, who hypothetically have the obligation and potential ability to restrain the corporate environment-wreckers, they have also been effectively hamstrung. The far superior financial and economic might amassed by the big business barons now empowers them, in effect, to dictate most governments’ policies and priorities.

Certainly, any political attempt to seriously hobble the dominant capitalist system is now unthinkable. Even the corporations’ power to retaliate by shifting factories, jobs and investments to more compliant low-wage, low-tax countries is in itself a strong deterrent to would-be political planet-savers.

Is resistance now futile?

With both corporations and complicit governments thus locked into a perpetuation of environmentally destructive capitalism, it is not surprising that some scientists and activists have become deeply discouraged, and a small but growing number forlornly conceding that further resistance is probably futile.

Among the stalwarts who adamantly remain convinced that the struggle is not yet lost is climatologist Bill McKibben. In a recent New Yorker essay, he admits that “we are on a path of self-destruction, but argues that “there is nothing inevitable about our fate. Solar panels and wind turbines are now among the least expensive ways to produce energy. Storage batteries are cheaper and more efficient than ever. We could move quickly if we chose to, but we’d need to opt for solidarity and co-ordination on a global scale.”

He admits, however, that “the chances of that look slim.” One wonders, as time passes through the relatively brief 12-year deadline set by the ICCP, how much longer McKibben’s optimism will last.      

One of the eminent experts on the environment who is not at all sanguine about humanity’s chance of survival is Elizabeth Colbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of a recent best-selling book, The Sixth Extinction.

She lists the five major extinction events that have occurred since complex animals evolved on Earth more than 500 million years ago, first quoting from a plaque in the Hall of Biodiversity in the Museum of Natural History in New York:

“Global climate change and other causes, including collisions between Earth and extraterrestrial objects, were responsible for the previous five extinctions. But today we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.”

“In an extinction event of our own making,” Colbert muses, “what will happen to us?” Her blunt answer: “Most likely, we will cause our own extinction.”

She reminds us that, “Having freed ourselves from the constraints of evolution, humans still remain dependent on Earth’s biological and geochemical systems. By disrupting these systems -- cutting down tropical rainforests, altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans -- we are putting our own survival in danger.”

In her book, she describes how humans have already driven hundreds of species into extinction, and many more into near-extinction. On a planet where most forms of life are interdependent to some extent, this mass slaughter is disastrous.

She quotes Paul Ehrlich, an ecologist at Stanford University: "In pushing other species into extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."

Colbert concludes her book with this somber epilogue: “Right now we are deciding, without meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. 

No other creature has ever managed this, and it will unfortunately be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built have been ground into dust and giant rats have inherited the Earth.”

Prominent pessimists

An even more pessimistic writer on the environment is William T. Vollmann, whose latest book, Carbon Ideologies, was recently reviewed in Harper’s by Nathaniel Rich. He describes it as "one of the most honest -- and fatalistic -- books about global warming yet written."

Rich notes that nearly every book about climate change that has been written for a general audience contains within it a message of hope, and often a prod toward action. But Vollmann declares from the outset that he will not offer any solutions because he does not believe any are possible:

“Nothing can be done to save the world as we know it; therefore, nothing need be done.”

Rich says that anyone who begins reading Carbon Ideologies in a hopeless mood will finish it hopeless. “So will the hopeful reader. But there exist other kinds of readers. Those who do not read for advice or encouragement or comfort. Those who seek to understand human nature, and themselves. Because human nature is Vollmann’s true subject -- as it must be.

"The story of climate change hangs on human nature, not geophysics. Vollmann seeks to understand ‘how we could not only sustain, but accelerate the rise of atmospheric carbon levels, all the while expressing confusion, powerlessness, and resentment.’ Why did we take such insane risks? Could we have behaved any other way? If not, what conclusions must we draw about our lives and our future?"

Rich sees Carbon Ideologies as being “in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature -- books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences.”

One of the climate commentators already in this vanguard is author Jonathan Franzen, whose latest book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled The End of the End of the Earth. He bluntly compares the state of our planet to “a patient with bad cancer” whose death is certain and whose main concern is maintaining as good a quality of life as possible before the end.

"Drastic planetary overheating is a done deal," Franzen declared in an article he wrote in 2015. "No head of state anywhere, even in places most threatened by flooding or drought, has committed to leaving carbon in the ground." The essay was angrily denounced at the time, especially by environmentalists and critics on the left.

In an interview with Postmedia, Franzen said that, if the essay had been published today, he wouldn’t expect it to have had such a furious reaction. “I think in the last three-and-a-half years that it has become much more apparent to many more people that we are not stopping climate change. We’re not even coming close to stopping it. In fact, we are continuing to accelerate it.”

He says that his foremost aim is to encourage people to live responsibly in the face of our all but certain extinction as a species. “Our world is poised to change vastly, and mostly for the worst. I don’t have any hope that we can stop this change from coming. My only hope is that we can accept the reality in time to prepare for it."

In much the same vein, Postmedia’s David Reevely, in a column last fall titled "Let’s prepare for climate change if we’re not going to fight it," urged that Canadian governments should at least make it a priority to help people adapt to a much warmer future.

Among his suggestions were: conserve city water and get used to brown parks and fields during the summer; renovate public buildings, especially schools and nursing homes, to cope with hotter weather; add air-conditioning, improve ventilation, and plant more shade trees; increase our capacity to fight forest fires; enhance medical research and training to cope with tropical diseases that don’t yet afflict us here; start building high flood walls around our coastal cities to protect them from rising sea levels; build more and wider roads to the Far North, so that, “when the Russians start eyeing our Arctic (as a safer residence), we can stop them with something other than pickup trucks."

"All of this, Reevely admits, “will make for a more expensive, more precarious, more cruel world. But, if we aren’t seriously trying to stop global warming, we should at least be getting ready for it."

Plutocrats plan for survival

Ironically, that is what many of the main propagators of global warming are doing. Corporate executives who are locked into the capitalist system’s suicidal pursuit of profits are secretly preparing to survive the catastrophic outcome.

This activity was revealed last year by the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos in an article aptly titled Survival of the Richest, and subtitled Why some of America’s wealthiest people are preparing for disaster.

Osnos tells us that “survivalism -- the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization -- has spread among many of the CEOs, financiers, bankers and big investors: the same capitalist kingpins whose devastation of the planet is causing the catastrophe they now plan to outlive.”

He says it’s difficult to find out how many wealthy people have become survivalists, but notes that it has certainly taken root in Silicon Valley and New York among technology executives and hedge-fund managers.

Osnos was told by Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit, that he and at least half of the Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some "apocalypse insurance" in the form of "a hideaway somewhere in the U.S. or abroad." One of them has bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and stocked it with generators, solar panels and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Others have bought houses or cabins in New Zealand, which has become a favoured refuge from a global cataclysm.

Other wealthy would-be survivalists have built luxury complexes underground in abandoned nuclear missile silos. One of them, Larry Hall, paid $300,000 for a silo and another $20 million to create 12 private apartments that he has sold for $3 million each. They are stocked with enough food to sustain 75 people for five years, mainly by raising tilapia in fish tanks, and growing hydroponic vegetables under glow lamps.

"Opulent survival shelters like this, of course, are beyond the financial capacity of most victims of an apocalyptic event,” Osnos points out. “It is bitterly ironic that those most likely to live through such a calamity are the ones whose greed and power precipitated it."

Extinction may yet be averted

Despite these bleak and depressing forecasts, most people continue to reject rather than accept them. Perhaps they are right to remain optimistic about the future and continue to “eat, drink and be merry” as long as they can. But will the wisest and brightest of them belatedly be motivated by the increasing violence of Nature’s wrath to build the equivalent of Noah’s ark?

That will depend on whether and when enough people come to realize that the oncoming climate catastrophe is being caused primarily by the ravagement of Earth’s air, water and soil by the world’s big corporations. Specifically, by the dominant cancerous capitalist economic system that they have inflicted on the planet.

Regrettably, this pernicious corporate cancer will not be “cured” before the ICCP’s 12-year deadline elapses in 2020. But it’s not inconceivable that it will be detected and the first essential survival measures taken by that time.

It depends on how long it will take for the planetary vandalism  of unfettered capitalism to become so glaringly obvious that the exposure of its colossal carnage will spark a worldwide revolution and the overthrow of global plutocracy. Capitalism would then be replaced by some form of progressive democracy dedicated to saving as many people as possible from the devastation of an overheated planet.

The world's most brilliant thinkers and scientists would then be assigned the imperative mission of devising ways and means of preventing humankind’s extinction.

Even such a tardy endeavour would almost certainly succeed in saving millions of people -- many more than the wealthy few thousand hunkered in their underground bunkers. Certainly enough of them with the knowledge and dedication to undertake the monumental task of restoring some semblance of civilization for the survivors.

This optimistic prospect of humanity’s rescue from oblivion may seem as unlikely as the pessimistic outlook of the prominent skeptics quoted above. It will all depend on how much longer the corporate oligarchs and their political lackeys are permitted to keep poisoning and despoiling the planet. On how long, in effect, corrosive and unchecked capitalism is allowed to keep dragging us toward the abyss.

That nightmare looks like it will continue for at least another decade, until after the climatologists’ tipping-point deadline has passed. We can only hope, therefore, that humankind’s extinction will ultimately be forestalled by the too-long-delayed extinction of capitalism.

Ed Finn grew up in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada, where he became worked as a printer’s apprentice, reporter, columnist, and editor of that city’s daily newspaper, the Western Star. His career as a journalist included 14 years as a labour relations columnist for the Toronto Star. He was part of the world of politics between 1959 and 1962, serving as the first provincial leader of the NDP in Newfoundland. He worked closely with Tommy Douglas for some years and helped defend and promote medicare legislation in Saskatchewan.

My IPCC Take-away: Imagine. Take Action. Repeat.

Written by Rob Hopkins and first published at Transition Network

For those who care about the world and the people and creatures we share it with, the last 6 weeks has offered a barrage of dire news. The new IPCC report called for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. We learnt that since the time the Beatles broke up and I was born (I claim no scandalous link between those two events), human activity has caused a 60% decline in mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians.

We’ve seen the German government, whose ‘Energiewende’ we were all celebrating a few years ago, dragging away protesters trying to prevent the clearing of an ancient woodland in order to create an open cast coal mine. Oh, and Brazil just elected a fascist who has vowed to turn much of the Amazon, that vital global carbon store, into farmland, merging the departments of environment and agriculture so as to ensure maximum cheap beef burger output. 

My own personal WTF moment was the US Department of Justice arguing last week, in their attempt to overturn a court case brought by 21 young people, that “there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’”.  Er, excuse me? Is anyone actually taking this stuff seriously? Grief and rage feel an entirely appropriate response. As Bill McKibben put it, “we’re running out of options and we’re running out of decades”. 

As I work on the book I’m writing about imagination, I find myself intrigued with a thought that doesn’t seem to want to leave my head, namely that the deeper we get into climate change, the harder we seem to be finding it to imagine a way out. It’s an idea that, for me anyway, gets under the skin. We know that the more we see and feel its impacts, the more anxious we become, which in turn results in more cortisol in our systems and the contraction of our hippocampus, the imagination centre in our brain, hampering our ability to imagine the future.

We know that the increase of CO2 in the air we breathe impacts our cognitive abilities to the extent that the rise to 660ppm of CO2 by the end of the century forecast by the IPCC would lead to a 15% decline in those abilities. If we don’t intentionally put our priority on rebuilding the collective imagination, that vital ability may just slide out of our grasp. We know also that increased CO2 levels results in less of the vital minerals in our food that feed our brains and enable us to be imaginative.

The IPCC report does not say that climate breakdown is inevitable. It tells us that climate breakdown is inevitable if we continue with growth-based neo-liberal economics.  As David Fleming once wrote, “if the mature market economy is to have a sequel it will be the work, substantially, of imagination”. We need to be able to imagine it before we can build it, and we need to help those around us be able to dream about it too. It’s at times like this I come back to Joanna Macy’s assertion that these times call for 3 equally important pillars to underpin our responses:

Holding Actions: putting our bodies on the line to say “no” to the things that are driving us over the edge, always aware that this work is vital, but not enough on its own.

Structural Change: where we build the new world within the shell of the old dying one, creating the structures, economy, connections and models that we will need in order to thrive.

Shift in Consciousness: the inner work needed for the other two to succeed, changing our values and stories to enable the depth of change needed to become instinctive.

We won’t see the imagination needed coming from the top, that much is clear. If it ever was to be found up there, it has long since evaporated. The IPCC report stated clearly that our survival depends on our using less energy, consuming less stuff and eating less meat, and the next day, the UK’s imagination-bereft Energy and Climate Minister Claire Perry told the BBC “who would I be to sit there advising people in the country coming home after a hard day of work to not have steak and chips?”

On my recent visit to the amazing Art Angel project in Dundee, which uses art to help people with mental health issues, anxiety and depression back into the world, I was told that the key aspects of what they create are “safety and hope”.  In the people I spoke to there I saw the rekindling of their imaginations, their connection to the future, because of the safety and hope now in their lives that wasn’t there before.

It feels vital to me that alongside the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’ and the very welcome and needed wave-upon-wave of civil disobedience that the recently-launched Extinction Rebellion are calling for, we must never lose sight of the need to fire the imagination about the future it is still possible to create. Research published recently reminds us that making changes in our own lives, living the change that’s needed, and talking about it with others, does have an impact on the thinking of those around us. The same goes for the projects that our communities undertake too. 

Those stories are infectious. Really bold, amazing, world-changing, imagination-firing stuff is happening all over the world, even though you most likely won’t see it on the BBC News. If you haven’t heard about what’s happening in Rojava, Jackson, Cleveland or Iceland, or countless other places too, then you need to really bathe yourself in that stuff. And of course without the policy space and change that results from direct-action like the Extinction Rebellion, making low carbon alternatives happen continues to be like swimming against a very strong tide.

Alongside the call to mobilise hundreds of thousands of people to get arrested, and the call, being heeded by more and more companies and even nations to divest from fossil fuels, what if a similar call invited people to occupy empty shops on their High Street and reopen them as stores that model a low carbon future, and create spaces for conversation and connection? Or playful artistic events that bring together activists and artists to ‘makeover’ their place so people wake up to find themselves in the world we’re talking about, the world where we made it? Acts, if you like, of non-violent anticipatory futures-building in very public places.  As David Graeber wrote, “it’s one thing to say ‘Another World is Possible’. It’s another to experience it, however momentarily”.

While I completely understand that grief and despair are, right now, entirely appropriate, I tend to agree with Dee Hock that “it’s far too late, and far too urgent for pessimism”. Last week I spoke with Kali Akuno at Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, about the amazing work they’re doing there rebuilding their economy around co-operatives and social justice. He told me: “Wallowing in a defeatist attitude is a sure way to be defeated. The lesson from Mississippi is that we need to stay grounded and utilise what opportunities we have”.

I find it helps to see growth-based economics as being a war on imagination, feeding the inequality, disconnection and anxiety which directly undermines it, creating what Henry Giroux calls the ‘disimagination machine’.  I love this, from ‘Rant’ by Diane di Prima: 

“The war that matters is the war against the imagination

all other wars are subsumed in it….

the war is the war for the human imagination

and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise

it is not only fierce, it is practical

men die everyday for the lack of it,

it is vast & elegant”.

Last week, Preston, the northern English city implementing a radical approach which is, in essence, city-scale Transition, was chosen as “the most improved city in the UK”. This stuff works, it changes economies, lives and expectations. The expansion of Transition, through the Municipalities in Transition project, to focus on the enabling and collaborator role that local government can play, is one of the most fascinating developments in its evolution.  Of course it’s not yet enough, by any stretch. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be.

My main take-away from the 2018 IPCC report is that there may still be time, but only if we can bring about a deep reimagining of what the world could be and how it might work. As Daniel Aldana Cohen put it, “we are only doomed if we do nothing”. While mass arrests and a firm “no” is vital, our “yes” being sufficiently rich in imagination, play,  invitation, joy, awe and possibility matters just as much. “Rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. How deeply do those words call to your imagination?  What yearning do they evoke? What possibilities and delights do they invite, what do they call you to step up and do?

As the great Captain Beefheart once said, “fifty years from now you’ll wish you’d gone ‘wow’”. It may well be that the degree to which our work evokes “wow”, here and now, may turn out to be the best indicator we have of its success, and indeed our ability to navigate the next 20 years may, as much as anything else, depend on our ability to cultivate it in those around us. 

* The ‘Imagine. Take Action. Repeat’ from the title of this blog is not my own creation, it is unashamedly purloined from this video by the brilliant Centre for Story-Based Strategy.  All images by James McKay are taken from Paul Chatterton’s new book ‘Unlocking Sustainable Cities‘.

Yet Another Appeal for “Green” Capitalism, Annotated

Written by Stan Cox and first published at Green Social Thought

The Guardian recently published an opinion piece by its economics editor in which he argued that capitalism can rescue civilization from the global climate emergency. Here is the full article, interrupted by my responses:

Capitalism can crack climate change. But only if it takes risks by Larry Elliott

This summer’s heatwave has provided a glimpse of the future, and it is not a pretty one. On current trends, the years to come will see rising temperatures, droughts, a fight to feed a growing population, and a race against time to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.

The struggle to combat climate change brings out the best and worst of capitalism. Decarbonisation of the economy requires alternatives for coal and cars that run on diesel, and that plays to capitalism’s strengths. Innovation is what capitalism is all about, and there has been staggeringly rapid progress in developing clean alternatives to coal, oil and gas. 

The cost of producing solar- and wind-powered electricity has collapsed. Great advances are also being made in battery technology, which is vital for the new generation of electricity-powered vehicles. . . .

This is an often-heard argument: that capitalist economies are going to prevent climate catastrophe because “green” technologies are becoming cheaper thanks to innovation. But all this innovation we’re seeing has only one goal, and that’s to generate profits. And while capitalist economies are able to spin off improved renewable-energy systems or energy-efficient technologies, they’re even better at producing new energy-consuming technologies and products—and those are getting cheaper, too.

Furthermore, those analyses purporting to show that 100 percent of current and growing energy demand can someday be satisfied with renewable sources are based on bad assumptions and flawed models, but even if the “100%” vision were achievable, it would leave stranded billions of people around the world who already suffer energy poverty. Back to Elliott: 

Humans are endlessly creative. In the end, they will crack climate change. But by the time they do, it could be too late. Capitalism – especially the dominant Anglo-Saxon variant of capitalism – has trouble thinking beyond the here and now. People running big corporations see their job as maximising profits in the short term, even if that means causing irreparable damage to the world’s ecosystem. What’s more, they think they should be free to get on with maximising profits without any interference from politicians, even though the fight against climate change can [only be won only] if governments show leadership, individually and collectively.

People running big corporations—indeed, those running businesses of all sizes—seek to maximize profits not because they are misguided, but because that’s their job in a capitalist economy. The common goal of both the private and public sectors is rapid, sustained GDP growth, so the only climate actions that companies or governments are willing to take are those that will not risk slowing wealth accumulation. (When Elliott says capitalism must take risks, he doesn’t mean that kind of risk!) This is why no governments have yet taken the actions that will be necessary to steeply reduce carbon emissions.   

The economist Joseph Schumpeter talked about the process known as “creative destruction” – the way in which inefficient producers are put out of business by disruptive new technologies and that, as a result, transformation happens. During wars, the best brains are employed by governments to produce more efficient killing machines.

But normally creative destruction takes time, especially if the old guard can marshall sufficient resistance to change – something the fossil fuel industry has been adept at doing. 

It is vital that capitalism’s Dr Jekyll emerges victorious over its Mr Hyde. More than that, it needs to be an immediate knockout blow.

Whoa, there’s a lot going on here. He seems to be recognizing that disruption can have both desirable and undesirable results (although it’s not clear to me on which side of the ledger he puts those efficient killing machines.) We often see it argued or implied in the mainstream climate movement that if only we could take down the fossil-fuel companies, the pipeline builders, and the armament makers, the way would then be clear for the good side of the business world, the Jekylls, to lead us into a green future. But the only direction the Jekylls plan to lead society is toward whatever generates the most profit, whether or not it’s good for the climate (and it’s usually not).

In the past, politicians have [only tended to focus only] on climate change when they think there is nothing else to worry about. Tony Blair, for example, commissioned a report from the economist Nick Stern into climate change during the years before the global financial crisis, when growth was strong and wages were rising. Margaret Thatcher only started to talk publicly about protecting the environment when the economy was booming at the end of the 1980s.

That is an interesting observation that warrants further discussion.

When policymakers have other things to worry about, tackling climate change drops down the list of things to do. The Paris agreement in 2015, which committed the international community to restricting global warming to well below two degrees centigrade, shows that the issue is taken more seriously than it was two or three decades ago, but that doesn’t mean that it is a top priority.

The Paris Agreement contains no commitments that would reduce warming to 2 degrees, only wishful thinking. And even a 2-degree increase would be catastrophic.

When times are tough, politicians are suckers for the argument that there is a trade-off between growth and greening the economy. There isn’t. Companies account for capital depreciation when they draw up their profit and loss accounts. If governments adopted the same principle and accounted for the depletion of natural capital when drawing up their national accounts, growth would be lower. In countries such as China and India – where the cities are dangerously polluted – it would be markedly lower.

Here we come to a myth that lies at the core of this essay: the notion of “natural capital.” The great ecological economist Herman Daly has debunked that myth, for example, when he responded to this statement by Dieter Helm, chair of the UK Natural Capital Committee: “. . . [T]he environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed.” Daly wrote, “If the Chairman of the UK Natural Capital Committee gets it exactly backwards, then probably others do too. The environment, the finite ecosphere, is the Whole and the economic subsystem is a Part—a completely dependent part. It is the economy that needs to be properly integrated into the ecosphere so that its limits on the growth of the subsystem will not be missed. Given this fundamental misconception, it is not hard to understand how other errors follow, and how some economists, imagining that the ecosphere is part of the economy, get confused about valuation of natural capital.”

The good news is that in Beijing and New Delhi, policymakers have woken up to the idea that green growth is better growth. China is committed to phasing out coal, in part because it is worried about climate change and in part because it sees an opportunity to be a world leader in green technology. India, although slower to act, is also starting to take advantage of collapsing prices for electricity generated by solar and wind, and has set itself demanding renewables targets.

India and China, already plagued by chronic power outages, are aiming to satisfy rapidly growing energy demand in the coming decades. In India, energy demand for buildings alone is projected to almost triple by 2050 (with a huge share going for air conditioning), while it will rise by 75% in China, which already has the highest energy consumption by buildings in the world. All of that new renewable energy capacity being built in the two nations will supplement, not replace, fossil and nuclear capacity. Emissions will continue.  

But the bad news is that progress towards decarbonisation is still not fast enough. As things stand, fossil fuels will still account for more than 50% of energy consumption by 2050. CO2 emissions will carry on rising and global warming will continue.

Stern says technological progress has been much faster than he thought possible when his report was published in 2006, and he thinks it is quite something that all the major car-makers now accept that the era of the internal combustion engine is coming to an end. “But the speed of action is still far too slow,” Stern warns. “Emissions have to be peaking now and turn down very sharply. We have not yet acted on the scale needed, even though the ingredients are there.”

Stern is right that emissions have to be reduced “very sharply,” but for that to happen, there will have to be an immediate, declining cap on the quantities of fossil fuels being extracted and burned, years before we have enough renewable capacity to substitute significantly for fossil energy. That will mean a steep decline in society’s overall energy consumption, and an even steeper decline in production of consumer goods and services, because a significant share of the fossil fuels still being burned will have to go to building renewable energy capacity.

So now that “all the major car-makers” have accepted that “the era of the internal combustion engine is coming to an end,” we’re going to have to give them the bad news that the era of personal car, however it is powered, is going to have to come to an end. There will not be enough renewable electricity in America to satisfy an energy demand at today’s level, let alone the additional burden of 100 million or so electric vehicles. And, no, ride-hailing and autonomous cars won’t solve the problem.

Winning the race against time requires political leadership. It means acknowledging that the Chinese model of managed and directed capitalism might be more appropriate than the Anglo-Saxon model.

Very true that decision-making can no longer be left to the market, that economic planning will be essential. But if we look to Chinese capitalism as a practical strategy, it will indicate that we’re running out of ideas. Chinese government and business talk a good ecological game, but they also won’t take any action that might slow economic growth. Go to page 10 of this issue of CounterPunch for an interview with environmental historian Donald Worster in which he discusses the current state of China’s “greening” in historical context.

A massive scaling up of investment in clean technology is needed, because the $300bn spent on decarbonisation worldwide last year merely matched the cost of the losses in the US from climate and weather-related events. It also means scaling up the lending of the World Bank and the regional development banks to help poorer countries build wind and solar capacity. And a global carbon tax set high enough so that fossil fuels remain in the ground must be implemented.

A carbon tax is not even close to a panacea. It would simply be an attempt to reduce consumption indirectly by making it more costly. The tax would have to be extremely high if it is to achieve the necessarily steep emissions reduction, and that would place an insupportable burden on the world’s poor majority.

Even if some of the revenue from the tax were redistributed, everyone but the rich would suffer under shortages and inflation, while the rich could afford to maintain their accustomed lifestyles. The only fair alternative to a carbon tax—rationing—would, unlike taxes, directly reduce emissions while ensuring sufficiency for all. But it would have to apply not only to consumers. Production would have to be rationed, too.

And, more than anything, it means accepting that the world needs to wage war against climate change. Powerful vested interests will say there is plenty of time to act, and they are aided by climate-change deniers who say there is nothing to worry about. These people need to be called out. They are not deniers, they are climate-change appeasers. And they are just as dangerously misguided as fascism’s appeasers in the 1930s.

Some climate activists as well have been advocating a climate “war”. (Bill McKibben went so far as to write that we must “literally declare war” on climate change.) What they, and presumably Elliott, mean by “war” is that we should launch a renewable-energy buildup analogous to the rapid development of war production capacity in the 1940s. They tend to skip over the more important features of the World-War-II-era economies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries: central planning of production and rationing of many essential goods.

Note how in Elliott’s formulation, the war-on-climate-change metaphor allows us to single out as climate-change appeasers a narrow slice of the capitalist world: the coal and petroleum interests and their abettors. Then we can imagine that once those Hydes and Chamberlains are taken down, the rest of the business world can get on with saving the Earth.

But while you’re waiting for that to happen, don’t hold your CO2.

Stan Cox is on the editorial board of Green Social Thought He is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing and co-author, with Paul Cox, of How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia.

100 Percent Wishful Thinking: the Green-Energy Cornucopia

Written by Stan Cox and Paul Cox and first published at Counterpunch

At the People’s Climate March back last spring, all along that vast river of people, the atmosphere was electric. But electricity was also the focus of too many of the signs and banners. Yes, here and there were solid “System Change, Not Climate Change” – themed signs and banners. But the bulk of slogans on display asserted or implied that ending the climate emergency and avoiding climatic catastrophes like those that would occur a few months later—hurricanes Harvey and Irma and the mega-wildfires in the U.S. West—will be a simple matter of getting Donald Trump out of office and converting to 100-percent renewable energy.

The sunshiny placards and cheery banners promising an energy cornucopia were inspired by academic studies published in the past few years purporting to show how America and the world could meet 100 percent of future energy demand with solar, wind, and other “green” generation. The biggest attention-getters have been a pair of reports published in 2015 by a team led by Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, but there have been many others.

A growing body of research has debunked overblown claims of a green-energy bonanza. Nevertheless,  Al Gore, Bill McKibben (who recently expressed hope that Harvey’s attack on the petroleum industry in Texas will send a “wakeup call” for a 100-percent renewable energy surge), and other luminaries in the mainstream climate movement have been invigorated by reports like Jacobson’s and have embraced the 100-percent dream.

And that vision is merging with a broader, even more spurious claim that has become especially popular in the Trump era: the private sector, we are told, has now taken the lead on climate, and market forces will inevitably achieve the 100-percent renewable dream and solve the climate crisis on their own. In this dream, anything’s possible; Jacobson even believes that tens of thousands of wind turbines installed offshore could tame hurricanes like Katrina, Harvey, and Irma.

The 100-percent dream has become dogma among liberals and mainstream climate activists. Serious energy scholars who publish analyses that expose the idea’s serious weaknesses risk being condemned as stooges of the petroleum industry or even as climate deniers. Jacobson has even suggested that he might take legal action against NOAA scientist Christopher Clack and twenty coauthors whose critical evaluation of his work was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June.

Jacobson’s team and others cling to the idea of 100-percent conversion because they (rightly) want to eliminate fossil and nuclear energy, and how the world breaks foresee that any future supply gap left by a shortfall in renewable generation is going to be filled by those dirty sources. That is indeed stated or implied by many of the opposing analyses, including the Clack study.

But the two sides also share other basic assumptions. They both seek to satisfy all future demand for energy solely through industrial production, technological improvements, efficiency, and markets, without any strict regulatory limits on the total quantity of energy consumed in production and consumption. The 100-percenters believe such a scenario is achievable while their critics conclude that it is not, but they agree on the ultimate goal: a permanent high-energy economy.

That part of the dogma, not the “100-percent” part, is the problem. America does need to convert to fully renewable energy as quickly as possible. The “100-percent renewable for 100 percent of demand” goal is the problem. Scenarios that make that promise, along with the studies that dissect them, lead me to conclude that, at least in affluent countries, it would be better instead to transform society so that it operates on far less end-use energy while assuring sufficiency for all. That would bring a 100%-renewable energy system within closer reach and avoid the outrageous technological feats and gambles required by high-energy dogma. It would also have the advantage of being possible.

Waking up from the dream

The pursuit of the 100-percent dream didn’t start with the 2015 Jacobson et al. papers, and critiques of it didn’t start with Clack et al. For example, there was a 2015 paper by Peter Loftus and colleagues that critically examined 17 “decarbonization scenarios.” Then earlier this year, a study by a group of Australian researchers led by B.P. Heard rated the feasibility of 24 published studies that describe 100-percent renewable scenarios.

The Heard group concluded that among the research papers they evaluated (which included several with Jacobson as lead author), none “provides convincing evidence that these basic feasibility criteria can be met.” They found a wide range of technical flaws in the proposed systems. Most scenarios assumed unprecedented and deeply unrealistic improvements in energy efficiency (in terms of kilowatt hours consumed per dollar’s worth of output). Because the chief renewable technologies, wind and solar, fluctuate continuously in their output and regularly drop to zero output, they must be backed up with large supplies of “base load” electricity if all demand is to be met without interruption; no studies managed this without ecologically destructive levels of biomass burning or wildly unrealistic estimates of hydroelectric output.

Scenarios did not account for the overcapacity and redundancy that will be needed if a high-energy economy is to function in an increasingly unpredictable global climate. (This year, the people of Texas, Florida, and the West in particular can attest to the deep impacts of that unpredictability.) Studies did not account for the expected four- to five-fold expansion of the power transmission infrastructure that will be required to accommodate renewable energy. And they did not address the difficulties of maintaining voltage and frequency of alternating current within extremely tight limits (a necessity in technologically dependent societies) when a large share of the supply is from wind and solar. This all adds up, writes the Heard team, to a systemic “fragility” that will render futile all attempts to deliver the promised output of electricity when it is needed.

The Loftus group found several of the same weaknesses in the studies they examined. But they singled out scenarios in papers by Jacobson and Delucchi, the World Wildlife Fund, and Worldwatch. Those scenarios had in common two assumptions that Loftus and colleagues regarded as out of the realm of reality: efficiency improving at as much as 3 to 4 times the historic rate, and buildup of renewable generation capacity at many times the rate at which today’s total electric generation capacity was built up in past decades. They concluded that it would be “premature and highly risky to ‘bet the planet’” on the achievement of scenarios like those.

Unrepealable limits

In their PNAS publication, the one that prompted Jacobson to hint at a lawsuit, Clack et al. critically examined two papers from 2015, one of which was a widely hailed “roadmap” for plentiful, 100-percent renewable energy in all 50 United States. In addition to “modeling errors,” much of the Clack critique is aimed at the Jacobson group’s assumed ubiquitous deployment of technologies that either don’t yet exist or are only lightly tested and can’t be scaled up to the huge scales envisioned. They include underground thermal energy storage for virtually every building in the country, a full air transportation system run entirely on hydrogen(!), wind farms covering 6 percent of the entire land surface of the 48 contiguous states, an outrageous and unrealistic increase in ecologically harmful hydroelectric power, and a buildout of electricity generation capacity that hurtles along at 14 times the average rate of capacity expansion in the past half-century.

But even if it were physically possible to achieve all of those scaleups, and even if Congress found a way to repeal and replace Murphy’s Law, the full-blown 100-percent dream could not be realized. In a series of papers published since 2010 (e.g., a 2016 paper in Energy Policy), Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery of Monash University in Australia have identified several crucial factors that will limit the total global output of renewable electricity. For example, renewable technologies exploit the windiest or sunniest locations first, and, as they expand, they move into less and less productive territory. There, their construction and operation will require as much energy input as before, but their output will be lower.

Furthermore, because of inherently intermittent generation, much of the electric power from wind and solar will have to be stored using batteries, hydrogen, compressed air, pumped water, or other means. It will then have to be reconverted to electricity and transmitted from often remote regions to places where people and businesses are concentrated. The result is a severe shrinkage of the net energy available to society, because much energy is expended or lost during both conversion and transmission. Finally, all production of wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and especially hydroelectric energy has an ecological impact on the landscapes where it occurs. So if we are to halt our degradation and destruction of the Earth’s natural ecosystems, it will be necessary to declare large areas off-limits to the energy sector.

Moriarty and Honnery show that given all of these factors, expansion of renewable energy will hit a brick wall, a point at which as much energy is required to install and operate electric facilities as they will end up generating in their operating lifetimes. But even before that point is reached, it will have become pointless to expand generation capacity that has lower and lower net output. They conclude that as a result, future renewable output “could be far below present energy use.”

What are we hoping  for?

A generally overlooked but crucial point about high-energy, 100-percent renewable proposals is that they seek to meet future demand patterns in a way that would leave in place today’s great distortions in access to energy and other resources. The American economy would carry on uninterrupted with its overproduction, overconsumption, and inequality, while billions of people in poorer regions and countries would not get the access to energy that’s required for a minimally good quality of life.

The 100-percent scenarios themselves, as well as the critiques of them, hold one especially valuable lesson. Unintentionally, they show in stark terms why rich countries need to start planning to live in the renewable but lower-energy world envisioned by Moriarty and Honnery rather than the high-energy world that the mainstream 100-percent scenarios envision. The world that the latter scenarios would create, one focused on maintaining current profligate consumption levels, would not be a green and pleasant one. Herculean quantities of physical and mental labor power will have been expended, boundless physical resources (including vast tonnages of fossil fuels) will have been consumed, and countless entire ecosystems across the Earth’s surface will have been sacrificed to generate more electricity. All of that would make for a pretty grim world. With society having zeroed in singlemindedly on acquiring enough energy to keep driving, flying, and overproducing as much as we want, there’s no reason to expect that other problems, including enormous distortions in economic and political power and quality of life, along with racial and ethnic oppression, would have been solved.

Some in the climate movement believe in the 100-percent dogma and the dream it holds out: that the (affluent) American way of life can keep running forward in time and outward in space without breaking stride. There are others who know that to be an impossibly rosy vision but urge the movement to limit public discussion to such green dreams anyway, because talking about a regulated, low-energy economy would crush hope and enthusiasm at the grassroots.

The debate about hope ignores the relevant question: what are we hoping for? If our hope is to deploy solar and wind capacity that maintains indefinitely the current throughput of energy in the world’s affluent societies, then, yes, the situation is hopeless. But there can be other hopes that, although they’re looking dim for now, are at least within reach: that greenhouse warming can be limited sufficiently to allow communities around the world who are currently impoverished and oppressed to improve their lives; that access to food, water, shelter, safety, culture, nature, and other necessities becomes sufficient for all; or that exploitation and oppression of humans and nature be brought to an end.

There’s always hope, as long as we don’t confuse dreams with reality.

Stan Cox and Paul Cox are the authors of “How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia,” coming in July from The New Press. Write them at cox@howtheworldbreaks.com