The Age of Climate Despair. The Understanding’s Slowly Dawning ... - Eudaimonia and Co

The Age of Climate Despair. The Understanding’s Slowly Dawning That… | by umair haque | Jul, 2023 | Eudaimonia and Co

The Age of Climate Despair

The Understanding’s Slowly Dawning That Our Civilization’s in a Climate Emergency

Everyone, meet 2023’s latest villain: the doomer. What you might call doomer-shaming now fills the pages of august newspapers, from the Guardian to the Washington Post. Bad Doomer! They cry. Don’t you know it’s not…that bad!

I think this deserves a certain scrutiny. Because our systems have a certain tendency: they tend to downplay risks, in the name of “balance,” while promoting a kind of feel-good optimism. It’s happened time and time again over the last few years, yielding more and more disastrous results. The pandemic, which they tell us is “over.” The rise of fascism, which was presented as a heroic story of intellectuals and brave rebels taking on The System. Is this what’s happening with….climate change?

The doomer-shaming argument — call it the optimists’ argument, if you like — goes like this. It advances three central claims. “We have the technology to solve climate change, we just aren’t applying it fast enough.” So: one, we have the ‘technology’, two, ‘we’ aren’t ‘applying it’, and three, hidden in all this, a claim of ‘not fast enough’, meaning we just need to scale up our current efforts.

But is any of this true? Does this argument carry any water?

Let’s examine the claims one by one.

‘We have the technology to stop climate change.’ Do we? What doom-shamers mean when they say this is the following: they use it as shorthand for certain regions in rich countries having shifted to renewable energy. So wind and solar and so forth are growing. That’s a good thing, but does it equate to ‘we have the tech to stop climate change’?

Our civilization doesn’t know how to make any of its basics without fossil fuels. None of them. Not food. Not cement. Not steel, not glass, not industrial chemicals, not plastics. There are substitutes beginning to arrive for some — a tiny few — of these huge, globe-spanning industries. Like bioplastics, or green steel. But they are at the scale of a town or a city. They are nowhere near capable of supplying a civilization. Not even remotely close.

Think of the simple example of food. Modern industrial agriculture depends on fossil…