Climate-shlimate
“Climate crisis” framing of the world is already “denialism” on steroids because, whether intentionally or inadvertently, it inevitably reduces the ecological crisis – and with it, the “metacrisis” about which philosophers like Iain McGilchrist (eg, see:
) are nowadays in the habit of speaking – to narrow questions of science and technology, more or less parts per million of CO2, or methane, or this or that many degrees of global average surface temperature, etc.
It’s not that the narrow technical details don’t portend momentous consequences, mind you. It’s just that there’s ALREADY a momentous planetary ecological crisis, or rather, a convergence of dozens of them. And most of them are going to continue accelerating EVEN IF some miraculous technofix were to “solve CO2” (or methane, or fluorocarbons, or any one or more of the other, innumerable noxious effluents we are drowning in).
In reality, the “one weird fix” we need that addresses a welter of superficially separate and equally devastating, convergent crises doesn’t require any captains of industry or egghead STEM geniuses. The “one weird fix” is a change in our way of thinking, AWAY from always believing that the world just needs to trust the same handful of magical fairy dust people, the same bourgeoisie, the same technocrats, and the same whizkids on their payrolls, to solve all the problems for us that THEY CREATED in the first place.
Also, there's a way of "lying with facts" (or better, "factoids"), without ever telling an outright, bald-faced lie. Masterpieces of this style of lying can be found in garbage books like "Freakonomics", or Steven Pinker's nonsense, or almost anything written by most contemporary economists.
What kinds of "lies", you ask?
Well, if the former is to be believed, for example, one would be better off reducing their "personal carbon footprint" by eating shrink-wrapped pieces of tofu manufactured by a megacorporation growing soybeans at "optimal efficiency" in Brazil, than buying almost anything locally grown on a small farm.
Or, in the case of the latter two, pretending, for example, that global measures of "wellbeing" that profess to prove an inexorable increase in it over the past half century, tell the whole story. And believing, for example, that a supposed halving in the number of people falling below an arbitrary "international poverty line", most of whom live largely in subsistence economies, constitutes more than adequate compensation for the devastation of fisheries, the enclosure of common agricultural and pasture lands, the wanton pollution of air and water, etc.
Amazingly, even the World Bank itself — the go-to source for a lot of this tomfoolery — explicitly admits that "there are many non-monetary indicators [of wellbeing]" that are "extremely important" and that it does nothing to take those into account yet. But ironically, it is also attempting with its "international poverty line" (IPL) to measure the wellbeing of the very group of people in all the world whose existence is LEAST moored to formal employment and easily quantified measures of wellbeing like wages, and MOST dependent on the very "non-monetary" factors that the Bank admits paying no attention to! (Factors like access to arable land suitable for subsistence food production, soil fertility, water quality, etc.)
Sadly, though, many, many well-meaning people who should know better — the likes of, say, Bill "Drill-Baby-Drill-For-Lithium" McKibben — fall right into all these traps set for the unwary like deer in the headlights.
In fact, in the rarefied salons of the likes of Nathan Myhrvold (billionaire former Microsoft CTO) or Bill Gates himself, one detects amongst these immaculate corporate "liberals”— as described in the "Freakonomics” book — a convergence of élite opinion with the doyens of Silicon Valley Trumpsterism. It turns out that the problem, you see, is that (very roughly paraphrasing), "we have more than enough brains and brawn to solve for almost any of these ‘hard technical problems' under the sun."
"But the real obstacles are always created by the pesky voters, workers, indigenous peoples, and other useless troglodytes, who keep wandering around shellshocked and making nuisance roadkill of themselves while WE, the annointed highpriests of technocracy, are trying with all might and main to speed the world along the superhighway of PROGRESS!”
[Sidebar: a new "booming economy” in firewood gathering in South Sudan:
]
Economists "lying with statistics":
By the way, with all that said, there are of course no pat answers. Our most probable response to any emergency situation is usually to go on a war footing. But what if the whole problem in the first place largely comes down to the fact that we've been operating an economy and a society on essentially a war footing to begin with?
In a war, you have no time to waste on messy democratic niceties. You need to concentrate power in a chain of command and get things done quickly. And sometimes that really is true. But when you have already built a whole society around that central operating principle, then the only guaranteed result is that the weak are crushed, and the powerful are made even richer and more powerful.
The bottom line is, we will "handle" the climate and other crises one way or another, whether proactively or reactively. The only real question is, will we build a humane society in their wake, or just expand and intensify the already prevailing dystopian nightmare?
You are seeing an awful lot of “NO’s” that I don’t disagree with but is there anything positive that you are saying? Is there something that you are building on or is it all critique?