The Overweening Overentitlement
of the Happy-Enders
Nowa Fantastyka Jan 2019
Last month we talked about grieving and loss, in light of the ongoing mass extinction we’re inflicting on the planet. This month? Let’s talk about solutions.
Let’s not, however, talk about them the way the Hope Police would have it. Let us not fall into that trap. You know the one: it still lies waiting at your feet, even after the half-dozen apocalyptic climate reports that have landed on the doorstep over the last months. Kim Stanley Robinson, the famous optimist, has doubled down. (He refuses to describe his climate-change novel New York 2114 as “apocalyptic” because “that means the end of everything . . . That’s not what’s going to happen with climate change, at least not at first.” Note that smidgen of honesty peeking through in the last clause there.) If any of the usual suspects nagging us to be more positive have changed their tune, I haven’t heard about it.
The arguments, in case you’ve forgotten them from last month, go something like this: people without hope won’t try to save the planet, and too much dystopian fiction will just feed a paralyzing narrative of gloom and despair. Because we science fiction writers are so important, you see. Because we wield so much influence that we can infect the world with our bad moods, we can stop people from even trying to make things better. It’s not enough to rub their noses in problems; it’s our duty to offer them solutions as well.
The unspoken and unadmitted assumption behind this argument is that solutions don’t already exist. That solutions haven’t been blindingly fucking obvious for almost half a century.
In fact, we knew how to fix things back in the early eighties; back then, even the petro-behemoth Exxon was on board with the reality of climate change and the need to transition away from fossil fuels. All that hopeful initiative died the moment Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House, of course; but that didn’t magically make those solutions undoable. Only undone.
Even the most recent IPCC report, dire as it is, spells out solutions of a sort. There are ways to mitigate things, there are ways to fix them. Ban fossil fuels. Stop eating meat and dairy; according to an IPCC report from 2014, animal agriculture contributes at least as much to global greenhouse gas emissions as the combined exhaust of all the world’s vehicles.
What’s that you say? Too difficult? Can’t switch to an oil-free economy overnight? Okay, here’s something that’s effective, simple, and as convenient as a visit to the nearest outpatient clinic: stop breeding. Every child you squeeze out is a Godzilla-sized carbon bootprint stretching into the future—and after all, isn’t 7.6 billion of us enough? Are your genes really that special? If even half the men on the planet got vasectomies, I bet we could buy ourselves a century—and as an added bonus, child-free people not only tend to have higher disposable income than the sprogged, they’re also statistically happier.
Sadly, though, far too many people think their genes really are that special. It’s not impossible to override our genetic imperatives—hell, I got a vasectomy on a dare when I was thirty, and have never regretted it for a moment—but too many regard the Free Breed as some kind of inalienable Human right.
So the next time you read some finger-wagging diatribe about how it’s science fiction’s job to offer solutions, keep in mind: we already have solutions in abundance. What these people are really demanding is that we give them easy solutions, soft solutions, solutions that save the planet without requiring them to sacrifice anything. The kind of “solutions” demanded by spoiled children who’ve never troubled themselves with imagining necessary sacrifice, and who don’t want to start now.
In fact, I would argue that there’s a fundamental weakness in the very idea that technological solutions—SF-inspired or otherwise—will ever get us out of the hole we continue to dig for ourselves. That weakness was first codified, ironically enough, in the coal-burning factories of the 19th Century. An economist named William Stanley Jevons observed that as the efficiency of coal-fueled machinery increased, less coal was needed to do the same amount of work—and yet coal consumption did not decline, but skyrocketed. Turns out that when something gets cheaper, or more efficient, we just end up using so much more of the stuff that the savings disappear under a wave of increased consumption.
They call it the “Jevons Paradox”, and it applies to pretty much any human resource. Halve the price of computer memory, we’ll increase demand by a factor of four. Increase solar efficiency by ten times, we’ll suck back twenty times as much of the stuff. And you just know that if we resort to geoengineering to buy time—use stratospheric sulfates to compensate for ongoing carbon emissions, for example—people will just be that much less inclined to cut those emissions any time soon. We are not wired for restraint; let us off the leash, and we will devour whatever is available.
New technology is unlikely to fix the problem, because the problem is not technological. The problem is Human Nature, and the only technology that can fix that is genetic. If we can figure out some way to rewire Human Nature, right down in the brain stem, we might yet have a chance.
There you go. Yet another solution for the Happy Enders, if they’re serious about wanting them.
Perhaps we can save Human civilization if we stop being Human.