Just today, I ran across a New York Times article describing the latest, and possibly one of the least dangerous of the many efforts at geoengineering proposed in this era of illusions about the actual nature of climate change and human life on planet Earth.
A little over two weeks ago, an article appeared in Resilience.org by Richard Heinberg in which he stated, “[The failure of COP29 and the election of Donald Trump] underscore the inescapable conclusion that bureaucratic, top-down, green-growth global efforts to stop climate change are essentially dead.” No more Biden half-hearted gestures toward climate action.
Clearly, the top-down ‘green-growth’ approach to the increasingly urgent climate emergency has always relied on imaginary new technologies to remove the pollutants from industrial civilization from the environment in the faint hope of continuing business as usual in a cleaner way. That does take quite an imagination, given the latest facts on climate-trends and their imminent consequences. But it continues to infect public policies to make them seem somewhat less irrational.
What’s Wrong with Industrial Civilization?
The various forms of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, to adding iron to the ocean in hopes of storing carbon dioxide on the sea floor, are policy gestures. They are meant to do everything from buy some time before the inevitable transformation of society, either by intentional ecological reorganization of the way we live, or to somehow avoid catastrophic collapse altogether. Technological innovation has always been an integral part of the ‘progress’ of industrial civilization. New inventions, new products, new markets, are always tied in with the impetus to grow the economy for more return on capital invested.
But that is all over now, except for the shouts of denial. Global expansion has not only filled all remaining spaces, replacing the natural flora and fauna with humans and our livestock and feedstocks, it has disrupted or destroyed key ecosystems that had sustained the balance and stability of the Earth System itself.
The research findings that confirm that conclusion are detailed, extensive, and incontrovertible—unless you are a conspiracy theorist, a simple denialist, or just plain indifferent. And that is what’s wrong with industrial civilization. Some of us part of the time, but most of us, most of the time, live in an illusion.
The Illusion
As I move around in the modern world, I see pretty much the same thing wherever I go. Lots of traffic, mostly to and from giant malls and big-box stores and other forms of consumer entertainment. I marvel at the ubiquity of plastic in every product and packaging, from toys to fresh produce. I am overwhelmed by the proliferation of ‘fast fashion’ while consciously ignoring it, even as so many people dress down to the ‘gangsta’ style, with endless emblems of commercial brands affixed to their bodies to reflect the illusion of individualism. Every item has an increasingly shorter shelf life.
A few years after building my home near the central coast of California in 1980, the pump failed on our well. When the well maintenance man installed a new pump, the acknowledged highest quality brand, he said, “don’t worry, this should last you about five years.” Wait a minute, the old one lasted for fifteen years. “Yes, but the new ones have so many plastic parts; they are cheaper, so they wear out much sooner.”
That is the story of ‘industrial progress,’ lower quality, higher profits, more replacements sooner—ever increasing turnover. It is also the story of industrial-consumer culture. We expect and want a new iPhone with each new model, which contains features we have to figure out not only how to use them but also why we need them at all. Not to worry; the techno-marketers will provide a rationale.
I am old enough to remember when there was no plastic beyond the new ‘Bakelite’ material from which the body of the new table-top radio was made. I’m sure that there were a few other things that a small child in the mid-1940s would not notice. But everyday products for household use were made of other, usually natural, materials. We had ‘butcher wrap’ paper or newsprint, not plastic packaging; we had vegetables and fruits on display unadorned. My mother carried them hope in her shopping bag or cart. We did not miss what we did not know existed because it did not exist. We were happy, except for the growing haze from smog in LA.
Change
I usually post a comment here every other Wednesday. But, well… New Year’s Eve… And that was a bit of a revelation this year. I am on the central Pacific coast of Mexico, and on New Year’s Eve I attended a celebration on the rooftop patio of a condo building with residents, friends and visitors, with diverse foods and drinks—Mexican beef birria cooked by a Canadian, Ecuadorian shrimp ceviche by an American artist, blue-cheese dip by an Oregonian, etc. At the stroke of midnight, the fireworks began.
The few clouds had cleared for that New Year’s Eve rooftop celebration. From seven stories up, we could see the entire Bahia de Banderas, all the way south past Puerto Vallarta and north almost to Punta Mita. At the stroke of midnight, fireworks went off all along the coast, in an arc about sixty kilometers long. Quite spectacular. Context: Because of the LA-like traffic on a good day, that drive would take about two hours. Puerto Vallarta has become almost a constant traffic jam in recent years. I detect almost zero interest/concern in the climate emergency here as elsewhere; it’s all about shopping and which cruise ship has now landed at Puerto Vallarta harbor.
Before the New Year’s Eve celebration, I had an interesting conversation with an oil pipeline inspector visiting a friend who lives in the building. He’s a welder by trade who works around the tar sands of Alberta and pays over $50,000 of his $200,000 salary in taxes to the Canadian government, and complains about the billionaires who run the companies he works for who get away with little if any taxes just like the American ones. He is not alone…
This energetic young man gives passing lip service to climate, but complains that a pipeline construction project was held up for a couple of months at great expense because a Robin made its nest within some number of meters from the construction site—the pause was due to migratory bird regulations… He sees governmental regulations as hindrances; but, really, the global financial oligarchy regulates pretty much everything, including government.
Seems it’s all the same everywhere…economic growth and related personal careers versus Nature. My oil-patch acquaintance is 38 and wants to retire early by 50 and live comfortably in Mexico… In a lot of ways, that is a perfectly rational outlook, from his individual perspective.
On the other hand, here we are with vast, rapidly growing empirical evidence of an impending global societal collapse, due to the exponential accelerating Earth System instability, to which Alberta’s tar sands as well as the U.S.’s highest oil/gas production in the world contribute significantly. So, I don’t see much meaning in complaining about how so much of their plastic many people fail to recycle. It’s the production, stupid! (But that is a collective structural problem.)
The thing is, all the evidence points to a rapidly increasing level of global destabilization, of both ecosystems and the political economy of perpetual growth, the scale of which even those of us who analyze these things have difficulty imagining. What, in that context, can we expect from the rest of the people who have but little choice but to work for a living within that system, and for most have scarcely the time to consider anything beyond work and a little entertainment, as global wealth continues to centralize amid depressed wages? Meanwhile, a great unraveling of industrial civilization is well underway. You just would not think so, looking out over a spectacular holiday fireworks display.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 