One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that is simply a mess.
A legend dating back to sixteenth-century Prague tells of a violent conflict between a man and his creation. The story begins with the rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew (1525–1609), who in a dream is instructed to create a golem to protect his people from blood libel.2 Heading down to the muddy banks of the Moldau River, the rabbi and his two assistants create a humanoid form out of earth, fire, water, and air, bringing the clay figure to life. The golem would consign the blood libel to the trash of history, and from there civilization could continue forward in peace and harmony. But the titanic muscular clay creature becomes increasingly independent, unmanageable, and injurious, grasping the city tightly in its fists, terrorizing everyone.
The rabbi tries to cooperate with the creature in hopes that by demonstrating his love for the golem, it will become more self-reflexive, capable of distinguishing between care and indiscriminate destruction. Unfortunately, with each day that passes the golem becomes increasingly uncompromising and harmful, posing a seemingly intractable problem for the rabbi. Although it shields the rabbi’s people from attack, it annihilates everything else in its path. Exhausted by the situation and the growing debris, the rabbi is compelled to act. As painful as it is, he returns back to the earth the creature he had authored into existence.
The fable provides an intriguing perspective on freedom and autonomy. The golem has no freedom: it is the rabbi who brings it to life and sentences it to death. Yet by returning the creature to earth, the rabbi holds the golem accountable for the destruction it wrought despite not being free. This is the basic premise of this book. We are not free, yet we are autonomous. We are constrained by the historical circumstances into which we are born, along with the institutions and structures that contain us. Nonetheless, each and every one of us also participates in and thereby confirms the legitimacy of those selfsame institutions and structures that dominate us, along with the violence they sustain.3 In this way, we are both the rabbi creator and the creature creation. Insofar as we are socially constituted, we are constrained by the historical and institutional forces that construct us. As political agents, we realize our autonomy as we interrupt and contest the historical and institutional conditions that regulate and organize the frames of reference through which we think and act. This structure of rupture and continuity is the modern narrative par excellence.
Fredric Jameson neatly summarizes the narrative condition of modernity as the dialectic between the modality of rupture that inaugurates a new period and the definition of that new period in turn by continuity.4 The ironical outcome, as I describe it in the pages that follow, is that despite the narrative category driving change in the modern world, everything continues to stay the same—perhaps because what this narrative produces is a virulent strain of amnesia. Every change or historical rupture contains within it the dialectical narrative structure of modernity such that the New and the period it launches into existence are mere ritual. What persists is the condition of violence embedded in neoliberal capitalism as it robs each and every one of us (other species and ecosystems included) of a future.
The narrative of modernity and the optimistic feeling of newness it generates are merely a distraction. Distractions such as decarbonizing the free-market economy, buying carbon offsets, handing out contraceptives to poor women in developing countries, drinking tap water in place of bottled water, changing personal eating habits, installing green roofs on city hall, and expressing moral outrage at British Petroleum (BP) for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, although well meaning, are merely symptomatic of the uselessness of free-market “solutions” to environmental change. Indeed, such widespread distraction leads to denial.
With the proclamation of the twenty-first century to be the era of climate change, the Trojan horse of neoliberal restructuring entered the political arena of climate change talks and policy, and a more virulent strain of capital accumulation began. For this reason, delegates from the African nations, with the support of the Group of 77 (developing countries), walked out of the 2009 United Nations (UN) climate talks in Copenhagen, accusing rich countries of dragging their heels on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and destroying the mechanism through which this reduction can be achieved—the Kyoto Protocol. In the absence of an internationally binding agreement on emissions reductions, all individual actions taken to reduce emissions—a flat global carbon tax, recycling, hybrid cars, carbon offsets, a few solar panels here and there, and so on—are mere theatrics.
In this book, I argue that underpinning the massive environmental changes happening around the world, of which climate change is an important factor, is an unchanging socioeconomic condition (neoliberal capitalism), and the magnitude of this situation is that of a political crisis. So, at the risk of extending my literary license too far, it is fair to say that the human race is currently in the middle of an earth-shattering historical moment. Glaciers in the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Alps are receding. The social impact of environmental change is now acute, with the International Organization for Migration predicting there will be approximately two hundred million environmental refugees by 2050, with estimates expecting as many as up to one billion.5 We are poised between needing to radically transform how we live and becoming extinct.
Modern (postindustrial) society inaugurated what geologists refer to as the “Anthropocene age,” when human activities began to drive environmental change, replacing the Holocene, which for the previous ten thousand years was the era when the earth regulated the environment.6 Since then people have been pumping GHGs into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can reabsorb them. If we remain on our current course of global GHG emissions, the earth’s average climate will rise 3°C by the end of the twenty-first century (with a 2 to 4.5° probable range of uncertainty). The warmer the world gets, the less effectively the earth’s biological systems can absorb carbon. The more the earth’s climate heats up, the more carbon dioxide (CO2) plants and soils will release; this feedback loop will further increase climate heating. When carbon feedback is factored into the climate equation, climate models predict that the rise in average climate temperature will be 6°C by 2100 (with a 4 to 8°C probable range of uncertainty).7 For this reason, even if emissions were reduced from now on by approximately 3 percent annually, there is only a fifty–fifty chance that we can stay within the 2°C benchmark set by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. However, given that in 2010 the world’s annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon was the largest in a decade, bringing the world’s CO2 concentrations to 389.6 parts per million (ppm) and pushing concentrations to 39 percent higher than what they were in 1750 at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (approximately 278 ppm), and that there is no sign of growth slowing, then even the fifty–fifty window of opportunity not to exceed 2°C warming is quickly closing. If we continue at the current rate of GHG emissions growth, we will be on course for a devastating scenario.8 We need to change course now.9
Climate change poses several environmental problems, many of which now have a clear focus. The scientific problem: How can the high amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere causing the earth’s climate to change be lowered to 350 ppm? The economic problem: How can the economy be decarbonized while addressing global economic disparities? The social problem: How can human societies change their climate-altering behaviors and adapt to changes in climate?10 The cultural problem: How can commodity culture be reigned in? The problem policymakers face: What regulations can be introduced to inhibit environmental degradation, promote GHG reductions, and assist the people, species, and ecosystems most vulnerable to environmental change? The political problem is less clear, however, perhaps because of its philosophical implications.
Political philosophy examines how these questions are dealt with and the assumptions upon which they are premised. It studies the myriad ways in which individuals, corporations, the world’s leaders, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and communities respond to climate change and the larger issue of environmental change characteristic of the Anthropocene age. More important, political philosophy considers how these responses reinforce social and economic structures of power. In light of this consideration, how do we make the dramatic and necessary changes needed to adapt equitably to environmental change without the economically powerful claiming ownership over the collective impetus and goals that this historical juncture presents?
By drawing attention to the political problem of equality in the context of environmental change, I need to stress that I am not a market Luddite; rather, I am critical of the neoliberal paradigm of economic activity that advances deregulation, competition, individualism, and privatization, all the while rolling back on social services and producing widespread inequities and uneven patterns of development and social prosperity. I am also not intending to make negotiable the “non-negotiable planetary preconditions that humanity needs to respect in order to avoid the risk of deleterious or even catastrophic environmental change at continental to global scales.”11 Indeed, my argument is that by focusing too much on free-market solutions to the detriment of the world’s most vulnerable (the poor, other species, ecosystems, and future generations), we make these preconditions negotiable: the free market is left to negotiate our future for us.
The contradiction of capitalism is that it is an uncompromising structure of negotiation. It ruthlessly absorbs sociohistorical limits and the challenges these limits pose to capital, placing them in the service of further capital accumulation. Neoliberalism is an exclusive system premised upon the logic of property rights and the expansion of these rights, all the while maintaining that the free market is self-regulating, sufficiently and efficiently working to establish individual and collective well-being. In reality, however, socioeconomic disparities have become more acute the world over, and the world’s “common wealth,” as David Bollier and later Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note, has been increasingly privatized.12 In 2010, the financial wealth of the world’s high-net-worth individuals (with investable assets of $1 to $50 million or more [all money amounts are in U.S. dollars]) surpassed the 2007 pre–financial crisis peak, growing 9.7 percent and reaching $42.7 trillion. Also in 2010 the global population of high-net-worth individuals grew 8.3 percent to 10.9 million.13 In 2010, the global population was 6.9 billion, of whom there were 1,000 billionaires; 80,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals with average wealth exceeding $50 million; 3 billion with an average wealth of $10,000, of which 1.1 billion owned less than $1,000; and 2.5 billion who were reportedly “unbanked” (without a bank account and thus living on the margins of the formal financial system).14 In a world where financial advantage brings with it political benefits, these figures attest to the weak position the majority of the world occupies in the arena of environmental and climate change politics.
Neoliberal capitalism ameliorates the threat posed by environmental change by taking control of the collective call it issues forth, splintering the collective into a disparate and confusing array of individual choices competing with one another over how best to solve the crisis. Through this process of competition, the collective nature of the crisis is restructured and privatized, then put to work for the production and circulation of capital as the average wealth of the world’s high-net-worth individuals grows at the expense of the majority of the world living in abject poverty. Advocating that the free market can solve debilitating environmental changes and the climate crisis is not a political response to these problems; it is merely a political ghost emptied of its collective aspirations.
In the following pages, I mine the political and pragmatic implications of this dance of death between neoliberal capitalism and environmental change. I prefer to use the term environmental change rather than climate change except when directly dealing with the issue of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere. When I use the term climate change, I am specifically referring to the long-term warming of the earth as a result of GHGs entering the atmosphere because of human activities. The “changes” that the term environmental change refers to are both the changes that are the result of human activities’ thickening the earth’s CO2 blanket and the broader environmental changes wrought by modernity and the free market, such as the privatization of the commons, landfills, freshwater scarcity, floods, desertification, landslides, coastal and soil erosion, drought, crop failures, extreme storm activity, land degradation and conversion for agriculture and livestock farming, urban heat-island effect, polluted waterways, ocean acidification, and many other problems on a growing list.
We might not be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch the climate as it changes. Most of us—those who do not have the sophisticated empirical skills and knowledge of a scientist—cannot directly witness changes in the earth’s climate. But all of us are a part of history, and as such we bear witness to the changes in our environment every day of our lives.
I notice that the summers are becoming unbearably hot and that the coldest days in winter are brutally cold. I am surprised when leaves fall later in the year or when my tomato has no taste or if my local fish restaurant announces that “cod is temporarily unavailable” because fish stocks are low. In the Colorado Rockies, I am alarmed at all the dead trees wiped out by a particularly virulent outbreak of mountain pine beetle. I am distressed when my city of birth, Sydney, looks like planet Mars after being covered in a blanket of orange dust from the outback. I am appalled by documentary footage showing factory-farm animals not far from where I live in Ohio being tortured and the toxic sludge that large-scale livestock farming reduces the land to, so much so that a piece of steak has never looked or tasted the same again, prompting me to stop eating meat altogether. As I walk for miles in rural India in search of potable water, I realize how lucky I am that I usually have the luxury of just turning on the tap; I cannot say the same for the barefoot, rag-clad children who beg me to buy a bottle of water for them as well. I am dismayed when Ohio governor John Kasich signs into law (July 1, 2011) a new measure that will open up our state parks to oil and gas drilling. The environment in which I live at this moment in time structures how I understand and encounter others and the world in which I live; all of us (other people, species, ecosystems, future generations, and I) are part of this broader collective life and time.
Environmental change exposes problems inherent to the modern political order and presents that order with a crisis. Although this book is very much about the failure of politics to produce equitable political options in response to environmental change, it is also an attempt to break through the dominant political edifice to get to the structures and conditions that constrain a viable alternative from appearing. Habitual thinking and praxis have to be replaced by a more utopian imagination—one that injects disobedience into the institutionalized political order.
The philosophical concerns that drive my analysis are the failure of imagination, the poverty of politics, the nature of change, and the meaning of life in the absence of a future. I suggest that this political crisis concerns the distant relationship between utopian imagination (ideal futures) and social unrest (real presents and pasts) as well as, more significant, the new collective arrangements that the utopian imagination and social unrest create when brought into proximity with each other.
All in all, my point is that it matters who claims ownership of the discourse and politics surrounding environmental and climatic change and how they do so. One significant political lesson we can take away from the failure of Kyoto and of the various international climate change talks over the past few decades is that if the economically powerful are allowed to continue monopolizing the meaning of environmental change, then the disagreement and disobedience that collective conditions and aspirations present lose their relevance.