[Photo credit: World Economic Forum]
Industrial-consumer modernism is often infused with glorified techno-imaginaries, unconstrained by the boundaries of scientific knowledge or by the requirements of achieving a society based on the wellbeing of people, not the accumulation of more capital by the hyper-rich. But what if we were to step back and take a look at what by all indicators is the basic nature of human life on planet Earth? What we would find is something quite different, and quite frightening to the ‘modern mind,’ that is, the mind that is shaped largely by the experience of living in modern industrial-consumer political economies, culturally isolated from Nature. Until the dawn of the modern era, human survival and sufficiency were assured mostly by mutual aid and habits of behavior that were carefully tuned to the ecosystems in which groups lived. That has been essentially lost as Nature is seen as something pretty out there.
We are, of course, creatures of habit. Habits of life that kept us alive when we lived in Nature—not off of Nature’s bounty from an artificial distance—served us very well back then. But now, survival and success in the global economy require putting various institutional interests ahead of family, community, ecology, and Nature itself. The so called “Green Transition” is a cover story for continuing along the terminal course of business as usual in the techno-industrial high extraction, high production, high consumption, and high waste global political economy, while making gestures toward ‘clean energy’ and reduced pollution.
The Many Faces of Existential Threat
I could not count the number of times I have encountered essays, blog posts, and comments on the ‘real’ sources and ‘appropriate’ strategies for confronting what most now call Climate Change—that soft term for destabilization of the Earth System. Each has its own logic, assumptions, and associated political, economic, or social interests attached, if not often admitted. Many are presented in an ‘either/or’ context for decision making.
One of the most interesting (and frustrating) exchanges that I have recently read involved an important post on LinkedIn and the comments that replied to it. Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov offered up a serious well thought out fact-filled post that opened with these words: “We need to talk about a dangerous fairytale. It’s called the ‘green transition.’” He received some opposing replies that were just as adamant as those two opening sentences. Others agreed vehemently with his analysis.
One of the most interesting and annoying things about such exchanges is the extent to which various forms of rhetoric deny the opponent’s position without facing factual evidence that supported it. The most furtive reply, by Young-Jin Choi used re-direction rather than confront the facts that lead to the conclusion that a ‘Green Transition,’ which includes continued economic growth (and presumably the same growing concentration of wealth in the billionaire class), is an achievable dream. That reply represents the underlying assumption of most “green transition” advocates, which is that radical climate action is politically and/or economically impossible, even though the evidence is clear that without addressing the root of the problem, the structure of industrial civilization, no business-as-usual palliatives will suffice.
The finite limits to growth, so obvious in the very nature of our bounded planetary resources, are simply ignored in asserting the imaginary viability of growth if it is somehow made “green.” As Reimer Bjørkskov put it,
But the truth is starker, and liberating once you see it:
👉 New energy sources don’t replace the old ones.
👉 Growth can’t be decoupled from destruction.
👉 “Green growth” is just old growth with better PR.
👉The only real transition isn’t more-but-cleaner. It’s less.
Each of those statements, of course, refers to an array of facts that together constitute evidence that the planet itself has unchangeable limits and that all the strongest evidence today indicates that those limits necessitate immediately constraining the unbounded growth of the global techno-industrial economy, in hopes of avoiding tipping points beyond which self-amplifying processes of ecological destruction will become unstoppable. Some may have already been reached, which is precisely why the term, emergency is appropriate.
Radical Refers to Roots
While the term is often used to imply that something is extreme, the term ‘radical’ refers to something that gets to the root of some issue, or is related to fundamental elements of a system. [From the Latin rādīc- (stem of rādix “root”) + -ālis -al; root]. Synonyms include ingrained, innate, original, essential, and basic. Ideas and beliefs that ‘go to the root of things’ may often seem or be ‘extreme,’ especially if they challenge widely held assumptions at the most basic level of a culture, an economy, or a political system.
Because the MAGA autocratic attempt is an attack on the most fundamental principles of the American political system, the Constitution itself, it can certainly be characterized as extreme, and radical. In contrast, and for the very same reason, any proposal to fundamentally transform the American political economy in order to stave off the looming climate catastrophe and to allow the repair and restoration of our ecosystems while preventing their further destruction, must also be considered extreme. Both seek radical change.
Now, Americans value what we perceive as our freedoms, and those values are deeply embedded in the culture. We also highly value stability. Yet, in any complex adaptive living system, no element has ever had complete liberty except within the bounds that allow the whole system to operate effectively and maintain the stable existence that facilitates those freedoms. Living systems in which some element is allowed to grow without limit is experiencing a cancer, or its equivalent.
By that measure, the current autocratic attempt is like most other fascist movements in history; it grows until it is either excised or it destroys its host, the society from which it sprang, and which it tries to consume. Now, in the case of the global techno-industrial-consumer political economy, when we consider its clearly demonstrated disruption of the balance of Nature, that is, the stability of the entire Earth System, which is its host, the ‘limits to growth’ and the consequences of breaching them, become very clear.
On the one hand, the radical MAGA autocratic attempt is a cancer upon its political host, the American political economy, one of the most powerful components of the global political economy, which itself has become a cancer upon the entire Earth System.
On the other hand, the radical proposal that the global political economy must be transformed into an ecological civilization (or excised and replaced by an ecologically viable wellbeing economy) is, although just as radical, an entirely opposite proposition.
The climate-ecological emergency, which is completely denied by the perpetrators of the autocratic attempt, refers to a complex living system, the Earth System itself, being in imminent danger of full destabilization and collapse, because of the impacts on it from the global political economy and all its destructive actions on Nature.
One radical project, the MAGA autocratic attempt to shape a fascist state on top of a terminal global political economy, is doomed to end very badly, since it adds to the ongoing ecological destruction. The other radical project, which is to transform or replace the failing techno-industrial political economy to achieve an ecological civilization amid the ruins, is a gesture of hope in an extremely difficult situation. The goal of the ecological project is to restore ecosystems while shaping an economy based on human wellbeing instead of further concentration of wealth and power in the growing but faltering and fragmented global oligarchy.
The fundamental failure of the so-called “green transition” is that it is an illusion in search of a cultural platform. The attempt to construct imaginary technologies that can adapt to the failing Technosphere while somehow—usually with new untested technologies—capturing and storing carbon, as it ignores the continuing ecological destruction, is a myth for all the reasons that Reimer Bjørkskov explained. This should not be taken to dismiss the extremely important efforts to restore rainforests and Nature’s other systems of carbon capture, which are essential for establishing an ecological civilization.
But the ideology of a “green transition” already has significant elements of a cultural platform because it plays on deeply held beliefs in progress through economic growth and technological innovation, despite the existential limits to that growth on this finite planet. It is in a strange sense anti-radical because it denies that anything needs to be done about the fundamental crisis of the global political economy at its root.
We live, as I have said before, in far too interesting times. The autocratic attempt and the advocacy for a “green transition,” both either fully deny or avoid the ongoing trend toward global ecological chaos inherent in the continuation of the global techno-industrial-consumer political economy. If either one were to “win” the current political-cultural battle, we will all lose all of our security, safety, and for many, our lives.
If somehow, the long-shot project of societal transformation were to somehow ‘win’—although it is still not even a subject taken seriously in the public discourse—we would be able embark on a long struggle to renew the human project as members of our world, instead of imaginary overlords.
At this point, even if we do everything right, the human losses and suffering will be great. Some estimates, given the environmental trends, are a minimal loss of half of the world’s human population. It is pointless to quibble about such numbers. What is baked in is baked in. What matters is not what we cannot control; it is whether we take the radical actions that are required to control what we can control.
Meanwhile, four of the largest complex systems on earth—the Greenland ice sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the South Asian monsoon, and the Amazon rainforest, are significantly destabilizing toward critical tipping points. A report in Nature found that “the stability of these four tipping elements has declined in recent decades, suggesting that they have moved towards their critical thresholds, which may be crossed within the range of unmitigated anthropogenic warming.” Each of these Earth-System destabilizing forces will have catastrophic consequences for human and other life forms. In that context, the “green transition” is far worse than a very bad joke on humanity. Radical transformation of our modern societies offers the freedom of recognizing necessity.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 