As we head for the edge of a climate change cliff, neoliberal market capitalism is chewing up the biosphere and the lives of everyone in it. But it’s not too late to act.
A recent report released by the International Panel on Climate Change reaffirmed what everyone already knows: We are in big trouble. The billions of tons of greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels have put us on pace for a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures within the next two decades, which would move us beyond humanity’s ability to claw back to any kind of normalcy without extraordinary measures. It’s quite possible we could trigger the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, a catastrophe that would inevitably hammer human civilization and endanger billions of lives. Even rich people will be affected — there’ll be no escaping, not even in New Zealand, not even to Mars.
I first became aware of all this when I visited Antarctica in 1995. There was still plenty of ice down there, of course. But all the scientists there were already talking about climate change, describing to each other and to me the growing body of evidence that the world was warming as a result of our dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I realized that even I had witnessed some of this evidence; the little glaciers I had been visiting in California’s Sierra Nevada were all about half the size they had been when I first saw them in the early 1970s. That was a small part of something much larger. Climate change was really happening, the scientists told me, but the news wasn’t spreading or having an effect.
In truth, it was a hard story to tell, and I struggled to find a way to express it all in a novel, until the findings from the Greenland ice core studies gave me the material for a trilogy of books informally called Science in the Capital (now in one volume as Green Earth). More recently, the real possibility of rapid sea level rise inspired me to write New York 2140; and really, all of my work over the last 20 years has been influenced by the coming reality of climate change. If you write the kind of science fiction I do, the topic can’t be avoided — and it’s the kind of story that science fiction is uniquely positioned to tell.
Now it no longer seems like science fiction; the future has crashed into the present, and everyone who’s willing to look can see what we’re headed for. But what can we do about it? And is it too late for us to act?
It’s late, yes, but not too late. There are actions we can take now that will help the situation immensely. Because the other vast, undeniable truth that goes hand in hand with the reality of our changing climate — the crux and cause of the problem — is that we live under a global capitalist system, in which the market rules. And that system’s oversimple algorithm, which measures priceless things in terms of quarterly profit and shareholder value, is mindlessly chewing up the biosphere and the lives of everyone in it. It’s like the hypothetical superintelligent AIportrayed in certain science fiction stories, which, in trying to maximize something like strawberry production, turns the whole world into a strawberry patch — thereby killing off all humans in the process as impediments to the stated goal.
This market that rules the world also systematically underprices things. Sellers compete to charge less than each other, eventually lowering their prices below what they paid to make their products in the first place. Those costs are ignored or hidden in various ways, but they are never unpaid; they are merely translated into other, more dangerous currencies. Cutting labor costs? That means hurting workers. Externalizing environmental costs? That means pollution damaging the biosphere, which ultimately is our extended body and our life-support system. The upshot is this: Neoliberal market capitalism, an experiment in power that since 1980 has been doubling down on the previous forms of capitalism, is wrecking people’s lives and creating a climate catastrophe.
Only the richest people on Earth defend this system, perhaps because they benefit enough in the present, and are still insulated enough from the impacts, to outweigh in their minds the obvious costs to others and our future. They nervously assure each other that things are okay, at Davos and elsewhere, but they can only hope things will hold together through their lifetimes. Everyone else feels precarious, or is already in a world of hurt.
So climate change and capitalism are two parts of the same problem; they are effect and cause. And capitalism is not only driving climate change, but also our response to it — by influencing government policy, and the development of new technology, and our basic understanding of the options open to us as we fight for a planet that can sustain life. We need to fix our economic systems, meaning our political systems, in order to fix climate change.
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