Nowa Fantastyka July 2015
I’m going to try some optimism on for size. I think it might be a bit tight around the middle.
Of course, if you’ve read any of the interviews I’ve given over the years you might remember that I’ve always claimed to be an optimist. I build dark futures full of no-win scenarios, critics clutch their bosoms and wonder how anyone with such a nihilistic outlook can even get out of bed in the morning, and I say But my characters try to do the right thing! It’s not their fault they’re stuck in such a hellish future, that they have to kill a thousand people to save a million; that’s the future we’re building for them right now. If I ignored that fact I’d be writing wish-fulfillment fantasy instead of SF!
Real people are scum, I continue. They launch jihads; they rob the poor to further fatten the rich; they trick countries into going to war just to line the pockets of their oil-industry buddies! And if they’re not scum, they’re idiots! Nobody in my novels would deny the reality of evolution or climate change. Why, when it comes to human nature, my writing is almost childishly optimistic!
All of which is true—about my fiction. My outlook on the real world, though, is somewhat dimmer—because the real world is infested with religious nutbars, and corporate sociopaths, and well-dressed puppets who prance upon the World Stage pretending to move by themselves while multinationals pull their strings. Species die off orders of magnitude faster than they have since Chicxulub took out the dinosaurs; droughts and firestorms sweep across the faces of continents, having somehow turned from transient events to permanent fixtures while we weren’t looking. Glaciers melt—always so much faster than even the most pessimistic predictions—and slide into the rising sea.
Here in the real world, we’re pretty much fucked. There’s a reason my blog is subtitled “In love with the moment; scared shitless of the future.”
And yet here I am, trying on some optimism. Because here in the real world, I can’t help noticing a few hopeful developments amongst all the impending doom:
• A half-dozen Pacific island nations, especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, have launched a campaign to take developed nations to court over their disproportionate production of greenhouse gases.
• The Netherlands has just lost a class-action lawsuit at the District Court in the Hague, which ruled illegal their plans for a measly 14-17% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020; the court has ordered more rigorous reductions of 25%.
• The Pope—of the very same Church of Rome that’s come down on the wrong side of everything from birth control to the heliocentric solar system—has released an encyclical summoning the faithful to combat climate change, and decrying the turning of our planet into a “pile of filth.” I have, in years past, stood awestruck by the magnificence of European cathedrals that took centuries to build; I’ve wondered what might be accomplished if such multigenerational devotion were turned to the pursuit of good instead of evil. Perhaps we’re about to find out.
• The production of solar energy has grown exponentially for at least two decades, far faster than any conventional energy source; it’s expected to achieve grid parity across 80% of the global market within two years, and has already passed that point in somewhere around 30 countries including much of Europe. (And that’s not even counting the impact of other renewable sources like wind and geothermal; Costa Rica recently powered itself entirely on renewables for 75 days running).
That last item probably carries the greatest impact. One of the biggest reasons we haven’t come to grips with the climate crisis is the simple fact that we’re not wired for foresight: to the Human Gut, today’s inconvenience is far more real than next decade’s catastrophe. You’ll always have an uphill struggle asking someone to pay now for a bill that won’t come due for decades (even if the bill is actually coming due today after all).
But getting gouged for oil when solar is cheaper? That’s something the gut understands. Nobody cares about saving the world, but everyone wants to save money; if paying less for energy happens to save the world in the bargain, so much the better. Renewables are finally getting us to that tipping point.
There may be cause for hope.
Lest you think I’m going soft, I hasten to add: I’m only trying these optimistic pants on for size. I haven’t bought them yet. Big Carbon’s fighting back; in some US states they’re penalizing people who go solar by charging them extra fees for “infrastructure use.” Solar’s ascendance might perversely provoke a massive short-term increase in the burning of fossil fuels, as oil-rich interests work furiously to dig all that petro out of the ground now, before it stops being profitable.
Papal influence? Politicians use religion to manipulate others, not to guide their own behavior. It’s no surprise that the US’s religious right stopped thumping their bibles just long enough to tell the pope and his encyclical to fuck right off. Nor should we get too swept up by the legal option. The Netherlands may well appeal the Hague’s ruling1, and as for those island nations and their adorable little “Declaration for Climate Justice”—even if they make it to court, even if they win, does anyone really think the world’s most powerful nations are going to obey any verdict that goes against their own interests? The US doesn’t even follow its own laws when they prove inconvenient; how seriously do you think they’re going to take a bunch of finger-wagging third-worlders at the Hague?
Even if they did—even if the whole world pulled together and swore off carbon tomorrow—we’re still in for a rough ride. The ship has sailed, the carbon’s already in the atmosphere, and thermal inertia guarantees that even our best-case trajectory gets worse before it gets better. So yes: there’s still every reason to believe that we’re sending this planet straight down the crapper.
That has not changed.
What has changed is that finally there are a few shreds of good news amongst all the bad. Where once there was nothing but a sea of untreated sewage spreading to the horizon, now a few green sprouts poke up here and there amongst all the fecal matter. It’s not much, but it’s more than there was. And it’s for the better.
At this point, I’ll take what I can get.
1 That decision will have been made by the time you read this.