Words&Dirt

This is definitely the best resource I’ve encountered for a crash course in the root causes of climate change and the potential negative outcomes if the global community continues to ignore the problem.  Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have condensed years of research into a tiny book––all the better to penetrate the noosphere of a world demanding easily-digested reading options.

Presented as a fictional academic paper from the perspective of a Chinese historian three hundred years in the future, this text is packed with useful insights, the most intriguing of which are a handful of big-picture assessments of the recent historical trends that have contributed to runaway carbon emissions and the intractability of governments in addressing the problem with the seriousness it deserves.  The book’s tone is historically detached, chiding, playful, and ultimately chilling as our fictional narrator blithely scrutinizes the reader’s confused present and bleak future.  Oreskes and Conway paint a hellish picture of 21st century Western life that would be alarmist if the real risk were not so imminent, so thoroughly empirically supported, and so extreme in magnitude.

One of the intellectual highlights here is Oreskes and Conway’s critique of reductionism/specialization in the practice of science, which they claim as the primary contributor to the scientific community’s sluggish attempts to popularize and push for government action to address what ought to be extraordinarily disturbing data.  Reductionism, they posit, “impeded investigations of complex systems” and “also made it difficult for scientists to articulate the threat posed by climate change, since many experts did not actually know very much about aspects of the problem beyond their expertise” (14).  This trend meant that there was little inquiry into “systems science, complexity science, and…earth systems science” (15).  This seems a fair and accurate complaint, and yet the authors say nothing about how an appropriately holistic science would function in practice.  To support a scientific apparatus capable not only of investigating specialized fields (which no doubt would still be necessary), but also of identifying and articulating robust patterns between disciplines in order to fashion a better picture of the ecological landscape, would require far more public and private investment than scientific endeavors currently enjoy, at least in the United States.  Just another reason why public funding for science is so important.

The other, more destructive component of the climate problem is the western addiction to neoliberalism, or what Oreskes and Conway refer to as “market fundamentalism.”  This ideology is all too familiar to anyone who has watched with dismay as the economic obsession with market autonomy has eroded the public sphere over the last several decades, sidelining infrastructure, worker’s rights, and sensible pollution prevention in favor of the consolidation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands.  Oreskes and Conway cleverly point out that individual freedom, the cornerstone concept of the neoliberal worldview, will be drastically imperiled in a world where we do nothing to prevent climate change: “Neoliberalism, meant to ensure freedom above all, led eventually to a situation that necessitated large-scale government intervention” (48).  The authors warn that if we continue to allow the fossil fuel industry to pursue short term profits that wreck the environment, disasters will become the norm, and governments will increasingly be forced to intervene in order to retain whatever semblance of peace can be salvaged from the chaos.  Without swift government action to implement proper regulations and actively bolster a transition to a green, sustainable economy, it’s not absurd to suggest that future Westerners may very well experience martial law on a mass scale.

Most disquieting is Oreskes and Conway’s suggestion that the failure of Western civilization to respond adequately to this crisis might be construed as evidence for the impotency of the democratic way of life, even to the point of discrediting democracy as a desirable form of political organization for future generations: “By blocking anticipatory action, neoliberals did more than expose the tragic flaws in their own system: they fostered expansion of the forms of governance they most abhorred” (52).  The authors imagine that autocratic China, while suffering serious losses of its own, would muster more efficient and large-scale responses compared to Western nations, thus obviating climate change’s worst consequences and retaining the basic structure of Chinese civilization.  Indeed, China’s recent environmental woes have already caused the government to enact green reforms, which they can institute by fiat rather than having to push them through a body of elected representatives.  Conversely, many democratic nations still struggle to wrest the legislative power of elected officials from corporate influence and systemic political gridlock.  Confronting climate change, then, may mean more than just trying to avoid disaster or preserve biological flourishing––it might mean proving to the world that letting people have a say in how their government is run is a fundamentally efficacious idea that’s here to stay, and not some whimsical, ill-fated experiment that occurred as we blindly rushed from one feudal era to the next.

With the holiday season fast approaching, this is an excellent gift for people who don’t understand the climate problem’s urgency or who want to learn about it but aren’t sure how to get started.  For more in-depth looks at the political, economic, and technological requirements for a just transition to a better future, I recommend Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society.

Rating: 8/10