Both Climate Optimists and Doomers are Wrong

It’s Not Hopeful Complacency or Smug Nihilism From Here On, It’s Selfless Mitigation

Photo by Timo Volz on Unsplash

Social media is primarily about confirmation bias. If you click on this article, chances are you already agree with its premise. You’ve found fault in both sides of the climate change debate — whether we’re going to “science” our way out of anthropogenic warming and ecological overshoot, or we’re irrevocably fucked — and you’re looking for an article elucidating why exactly you’re right.

We also like being challenged, sometimes — we get as much of a dopamine hit from confronting the opposition as we do cosying up to the echo chamber.

But whether it’s encountering the opposition or rallying with our own team, we like to be confirmed. And it’s true from social networks to podcasts and videos, to the national political news media.

This isn’t about both sides, though, or false equivalency. If anything is false, it’s this binary that we’re either hopeful about our green future with all the trimmings or that we’re plodding hopelessly toward an extinction we can do nothing about.

We don’t have to abide by either end of that spectrum.

And we shouldn’t.

Humanity tends to cleave in two. Imagine a huge slab of earth, like a giant cookie floating in the air. A fault line forms along the centre of that earth slab; just a hairline fracture. Despite its thinness, it forces people to one side or another. Gradually, then, they move away from that centre line, adding more weight to the sides. The fracture becomes a fissure, then a chasm. The more people pile onto the outer fringes, the more yawning the gap.

Social media —really, the infotainment complex writ large — has been an accelerant to this process. We’re incentivized (economically, psychologically), to play our cultural and political games at the fringes. And so it is with climate change, just another “issue” to get fed into the bifurcation machine, to get turned into a false binary.

You’re either a “techno-optimist” or a “doomer.” That is, either you believe we got ourselves here with technology and can get ourselves out of it (we’ll switch to renewables, and deploy our geo-engineering), or there’s nothing we can do to stop, slow, or dent climate change in any significant way, so we might as well buckle up and say our prayers.

To the doomer, anyone who doesn’t accept the helpless state we’re in is just “green washing.” They’re disingenuously peddling “hopeism” to line their own pockets, capitalists in sheep’s clothing.

To the optimist, anyone preparing for the End of Days, proposing de-growth or simply declaring “we’re fucked” are either nihilists or anti-capitalists (socialists!) looking to usher in the new world order of a totalitarian, Soylent Green age.

There is potential relief on both sides. If you’re inclined to the techno-optimism side, then someone is working on the problem. Maybe even you are, by getting those solar panels on your roof and switching to a hybrid. All will be okay.

For a doomer, the relief simply comes with the closure of “there’s nothing I can do.” Nothing more to stop climate change; it’s here, it’s un-doable, so might as well just get on with life any not worry about it. “Climate fatigue” is over. Perhaps you find solace in an article entitled “Why We Need To Stop Fighting Climate Change.”

Ahh, that’s better.

But here’s what the doomer-nihilists miss: while we may indeed be fucked, the degree to which we’re fucked is still in play. Literally.

If everyone just kept carrying on with business as usual, and we hit three degrees by 2100, or four, or five… even eight, as some of the scariest models predict, the outcome is unimaginably awful. Your mileage may vary, but for my money, anything around the four degree mark suggests the strong possibility of full End of Days as we know it.

At four degrees, even if there are still areas of un-scorched earth still inhabitable, the absolute upheaval of civilization from global migration, food shortages, water crises, weather calamities and outright war and economic devastation will kill us all. (Or, nearly all, with perhaps a few survivors braving a barren post-apocalyptic hellscape.)

So, every degree matters. Every fraction of a degree matters. Truly and incontrovertibly.

Think about it: someone you love, who is under your care, is diagnosed with a terminal disease. Do you spend the next six months carrying on like nothing has happened while they succumb to greater tortures and agonies, just waiting until the point it’s all over? Or do you try to extend the quality of their life as much as possible and make the ending as comfortable as it can be?

The problem with doomers, is that while they may not be sociopaths, the nihilism of giving up is sociopathic. It’s not their fault, though. We’ve been built by evolution to elevate acute short-term threats and goals over long-term abstract ones, and worrying about future humans dealing with multiple cascading failures is not in our wheelhouse, really.

We need to change that.

The problem with the techno-optimist view, of course, is that it risks complacency. There’s too much faith placed in science and tech (along with governments, altruistic billionaires and the shareholders of multinational corporations) to do what needs doing so we can all just carry on with our lives. We can’t, and we shouldn’t. We should be living scared, thinking about the worst possible outcomes, and fighting tooth and nail against those dark eventualities every goddamn day.

A second problem with the optimistic view is it tends to overlook the fundamental reason we’re in this pickle in the first place, and I’ll quote Medium writer indi.ca who says it best:

Centuries ago, colonizers incarnated human greed as corporations, and these now ruling AI have done what they’re programmed to do: grow at any cost.

Agree 100%.

Personally, I’ve been saying it since I first went out into the world and had my Siddhartha-Guatama-style wake up call: infinite progress on a finite planet is a recipe for disaster. I’ve spent most of my life since arguing with people who celebrate the Sam Waltons and Jeff Bezoses of the world like gods, who believe we humans can do no wrong, can’t alter the planet, and any admitted negative externality of our global industrial consumer culture is a result of laziness, perhaps a lack of Jesus, and nothing to do with the system itself.

Of course we can alter the planet, of course endless growth is going to come to a head at some point, and that point is, for the most part, now.

But this doesn’t mean we just say I told you so, pull a Tyler Durden and let go of the steering wheel.

When someone points out how, precisely, we’re fucked, these days my response is, Okay, agreed; Now what?

And this is where a real binary emerges: either we do nothing at this point, or we do all that we can — there’s really no middle ground.

Indeed, we must consider the possibility of exacerbating the problem with each potential mitigation effort. But at the same time, we need to absolutely eschew any notion that unless it’s a panacea, it’s off the table. There is no one-size-fits all here. No grand solution that will change everything. It’s all hands on deck, it’s everything everywhere all at once.

We have to transcend our own evolutionary psychology. Because we’re wired to downplay far-off, intangible threats, this is not the time to shrug, decide we can do nothing, and spend our days collecting kudos for being the darker doomsayer in the lot. Nor is it time to think we’re going to solve the problem by switching milk, fuel sources, or political parties, espousing technological fixes as if they’ll save us all in the nick of time.

It’s just this: we have to do everything that has a greater-than-zero chance of offsetting, slowing, mitigating global warming so that we can, potentially, save our future fellow humans from some unquantifiable measure of suffering in the future. So that we can buy our future selves a little more time.

Maybe it means a million people won’t die in some heatwave.

Maybe it means a little longer until maize production stops entirely, or lack of water foments a brutal civil war, or a boatload of children struggling to cross a body of water don’t drown horribly. Maybe it gives just an edge of a chance to someone striving to get somewhere less riven with gang violence, somewhere with food, somewhere with possibility, somewhere they just won’t suffer as much.

That’s all you have to do now, is consider the unconscionable human suffering bearing down on us; some way more than others, but all of us everywhere, eventually.

And not just humans, either — you’re right — the myriad species of all living things on this planet getting wiped away by climate change, by heating oceans, habitat destruction, deforestation. Them too.

We should be scared. We should be terrified. And then we should do something. We should communicate this to one another. We should behave accordingly. We should elect leaders who are willing to try everything to work against the most horrific future possibilities. We should consider carefully our divestments and investments. We should champion the people working on the problem, while never declaring victory. We should use this time to absolutely consider the fundamental flaw in our paradigm — that we could control and exploit nature without consequence.

And we should make adjustments in our own lives — not because these adjustments are going to solve the problem, but because we’re being witnessed. By our neighbors, by our children, by history.