Having avoided a catastrophic century, could we be happy with a merely wretched one? Or might we redefine our ideas about “decent living”, to cope better?
Thursday’s blog showed how we’re already beginning to creatively adapt to the reality of Covid, and the disordered biosphere it’s a small part of: if we need to be in the open to be safe, then do you business in retrofitted, car-cleared streets! That’s what humans do - improve and enrich their niche, or move to a new one if need be.
But in order that we can keep our ingenuity going, we may need better, richer stories about what adapting to a baked-in level of climate disruption might mean. Our editorial last week made a terminological gear-change - suggesting we replace Lockdown with The Shift. That’s a metaphor - but what would a real shift feel like, in an immersive and richly imagined way? Where would it leave our assumptions, our habits, our vocabulary?
We’ve done enough on speculative fictions here - Cli-Fi is the most pertinent genre - but it’s of interest to see climate theorists and researchers increasingly evoking future visions based on their findings. Here’s two quite different examples.
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For Time magazine, the veteran environmental America writer Bill McKibben takes a look back from 2050, and tries to relate a story which is neither victorious, nor apocalyptic, but realistic. The fight against disordered nature still proceeds - but at least we are capable of it, and wise in the face of it:
There were, in fact, two possible ways forward. The most obvious path was a constant competition between nations and individuals to see who could thrive in this new climate regime, with luckier places turning themselves into fortresses above the flood.
Indeed some people in some places tried to cling to old notions: plug in some solar panels and they could somehow return to a more naive world, where economic expansion was still the goal of every government.
But there was a second response that carried the day in most countries, as growing numbers of people came to understand that the ground beneath our feet had truly shifted. If the economy was the lens through which we’d viewed the world for a century, now survival was the only sensible basis on which to make decisions.
Those decisions targeted not just carbon dioxide; these societies went after the wild inequality that also marked the age [via the Green New Deal]…Slowly both the Keeling Curve, measuring carbon in the atmosphere, and the Gini coefficient, measuring the distribution of wealth, began to flatten.
That’s where we are today. We clearly did not “escape” climate change or “solve” global warming—the temperature keeps climbing, though the rate of increase has lessened. It’s turned into a wretched century, which is considerably better than a catastrophic one.
We ended up with the most profound and most dangerous physical changes in human history. Our civilization surely teetered—and an enormous number of people paid an unfair and overwhelming price—but it did not fall.
…What’s changed most of all is the mood. The defiant notion that we would forever overcome nature has given way to pride of a different kind: increasingly we celebrate our ability to bend without breaking, to adapt as gracefully as possible to a natural world whose temper we’ve come to respect.
When we look back to the start of the century we are, of course, angry that people did so little to slow the great heating: if we’d acknowledged climate change in earnest a decade or two earlier, we might have shaved a degree off the temperature, and a degree is measured in great pain and peril.
But we also know it was hard for people to grasp what was happening: human history stretched back 10,000 years, and those millennia were physically stable, so it made emotional sense to assume that stability would stretch forward as well as past.
We know much better now: we know that we’ve knocked the planet off its foundations, and that our job, for the foreseeable centuries, is to absorb the bounces as she rolls. We’re dancing as nimbly as we can, and so far we haven’t crashed.
More here. That’s a compelling notion - that our sense of collective pride shifts towards prizing our human resilience and adaptive power, in the face of a planet rolling around like a beachball. But can we really aim to draw satisfaction from living in a “wretched” century, as opposed to a “catastrophic” one? Could the “post-materialist majority” (long predicted by sociologists) become dominant, and actually change our consumerist sensibility and expectations - so that wretched conditions look something more like sufficient conditions?
That’s the biggest challenge. An interesting (though bracing) angle on it comes from this Science Direct paper. It tries to imagine what the components of a “decent living standard” might be for humans across the earth, and then tries to calculate the energy needed to sustain that.
To reproduce their table of what those decent living standards might be is to invite immediate debate - but that’s the point!
Does that seem reasonable? The authors go on to put precise numbers on what levels of sustainable energy, tech innovation, and political regulation of the economy would secure the conditions above, for 10 billion on this planet - and optimistically suggest that “despite population growth, 2050 global energy use could be reduced to 1960 levels”. This “requires advanced technologies & reductions in demand to sufficiency levels…But ‘sufficiency’ is far more materially generous than many opponents often assume”. Further:
We reiterate what has been suggested by countless other authors: high-quality, low-energy housing, widespread public transport, and diets low in animal-based foods are globally important issues for sustainability ambitions. In other words, demand-side solutions are an essential part of staying within planetary boundaries…
To suggest where consumption can be reduced most effectively, it would then be useful to take current energy consumption data and distinguish (so far as is possible) luxury, wasteful, and sufficiency based consumption…
What our current work does offer are answers to broader questions. To avoid catastrophic ecological collapse, it is clear that drastic and challenging societal transformations must occur at all levels, from the individual to institutional, and from supply through to demand.
From an energy-use perspective, the current work suggests that meeting these challenges does not, in theory, preclude extending decent living standards, universally, to a population of ~10 billion.
By Evan Cohen, from NYT’s How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change
So, there’s the offer. What would it feel like? The authors make their attempt, dealing with sceptics and critics:
Decent living is of course a subjective concept in public discourse. However, our current work offers a response to the clichéd populist objection that environmentalists are proposing that we return to living in caves.
With tongue firmly in cheek, the response roughly goes “Yes, perhaps, but these caves have:
highly-efficient facilities for cooking, storing food and washing clothes;
low-energy lighting throughout;
50 L of clean water supplied per day per person, with 15 L heated to a comfortable bathing temperature;
they maintain an air temperature of around 20 °C throughout the year, irrespective of geography;
have a computer with access to global ICT networks;
are linked to extensive transport networks providing ~5000–15,000 km of mobility per person each year via various modes;
and are also served by substantially larger caves where universal healthcare is available and others that provide education for everyone between 5 and 19 years old.’
And at the same time, it is possible that the amount of people’s lives that must be spent working would be substantially reduced.
The authors conclude: “What sort of political-economy could create a world with both low throughput and high living standards and the levels of equality that achieving these requires? What sort of culture would accept and support the necessary policies and institutions?”
What indeed. As they note, “in the Global North, the trends towards sufficiency-levels of consumption that exist – such as Transition Towns and the minimalism movement – are notoriously middle class and white, and are the exception rather than the norm… In the Global South, consumption of the upper-classes has leapt well beyond sufficiency levels, while hundreds of millions remain left in poverty.” And to conclude:
The ideals of sufficiency, material thresholds and economic equality that underpin the current modelling are incompatible with the economic norms of the present….Where unemployment and vast inequalities are systematic requirements. Where waste is often considered economically efficient (due to brand-protection, planned obsolescence, etc.). And where the indefinite pursuit of economic growth is necessary for political and economic stability.
Full paper here. The weird effect of bringing these two pieces together - McKibben’s fabulation, and these scientists’ empirically based evocation of a lifestyle - is that the second feels like a future stage of the first. Consider them both carefully—somewhere here is our next set of moves in the climate crisis.