We don’t like change … even though change is inevitable. Sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 up alongside the head to get our attention. And then we “see” that some change in our lives could have been avoided if only we had paid attention.
The New York Times, on Aug. 1, published a sobering, must read 27,000 word plus article by Nathaniel Rich entitled “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” This narrative by Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the cause of greenhouse gas emissions.
“Nearly everything we understand about global warming,” Rich writes in his article based on 18 months of research and over a hundred interviews, “was understood in 1979.” 1979 – that’s one year shy of four decades ago.
The Rich article is a must-read if you truly want to learn about the discovery and comprehension of the impacts of global warming on humankind and about those who understood and raised the alarm and those who understood but didn’t want us to know.
There is a direct relationship between our steadily degrading environment and the ever-growing quest for profit at any cost. As comprehensive as Nathaniel Rich’s work is, Naomi Klein takes issue with Rich for not connecting unregulated capitalism to our national inaction on climate change. Klein, whose book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate” was on the New York Times Bestseller List in 2014, critiques Rich for writing “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”
“Just in case,” Klein says, “we missed the point of who and what is to blame for the fact that we are now ‘losing earth,’ Rich’s answer is presented in a full-page callout: ‘All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.’”
“Yep, you and me,” Klein writes, “not according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who sat in on every major policy meeting described in the piece. When those meetings failed to yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason is that humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the political system is corrupt and busted?”
Klein also disagrees with the central premise of Rich’s piece: that the end of the 1980s presented conditions that “could not have been more favorable” to bold climate action. “On the contrary,” she writes in The Intercept, “one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human evolution for our species to come face to face with the hard truth that the conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the habitability of the planet.”
“Why?” she asks. “Because the late ’80s was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade, a moment of peak ideological ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to vilify collective action in the name of liberating ‘free markets’ in every aspect of life. Yet Rich makes no mention of this parallel upheaval in economic and political thought.”
When Klein delved into this same climate change history some years ago in her important book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” she concluded as Rich does, “that the key juncture when world momentum was building toward a tough, science-based global agreement was 1988. That was when James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before Congress that he had ‘99 percent confidence’ in ‘a real warming trend’ linked to human activity.”
In her book Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate. Americans were told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth was digging us in deeper every day. Americans were told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we knew exactly how to do it – that it just requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies.
The long-time greenhouse gas impact predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (consisting of scientists the world over) are no longer predictions; they are reality. The planet is now responding to the way we humans have lived on Earth by “talking back” with floods and mud slides, fires, hurricanes and tornados, earthquakes, rising oceans and melting polar caps. Denial of climate change is either an ignorant or deliberate “belief,” not a fact.
Klein writes that “we aren’t losing earth – but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us.” That said, she is more optimistic than I am. Klein sees the fact that countries with a “strong democratic socialist tradition” – like Denmark, Sweden and Uruguay – “have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. From this we can conclude,” she says, “that socialism isn’t necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism…appears to be humanity’s best shot at collective survival.”
Which brings Klein to note the growing movement of political candidates who are advocating a democratic eco-socialist vision and rejecting the neoliberal centrism of the establishment Democratic Party, “with its tepid ‘market based solutions’ to the ecological crisis, as well as to Donald Trump’s all-out war on nature.”
Fear, abject fear, may be the only thing that gets our attention – that brings us to our senses about global warming. It will be only then that we will have to face up to the reality that it is already too late for our grandchildren’s children. Whatever actions we still may be able to take as we approach the end of this century might prolong the time that is coming when Darwin’s survival of the fittest will be humankind’s all-consuming challenge. The “fittest” will not include the poorest.
The wondrous world we once knew no longer exists. Humankind’s (mostly MANkind’s) “dominion” over Earth is over. The planet will survive but millions of tomorrow’s children will not. Are you paying attention?
John Bos lives and writes in Shelburne Falls. For a PDF of Rich’s “Losing Earth” and Klein’s “Capitalism Killed our Climate Momentum” ask at john01370@gmail.com.