It appears that I've "underestimated" activist Naomi Klein. I last demolished her delusional views in my essay Confusion In The Twilight Zone, but her new missive Climate change is the fight of our lives – yet we can hardly bear to look at it is so over-the-top that I need to reconsider my position.
Before I look at her epic self-delusion, let's take a brief look at the facts (up to 2010). I'm talking about carbon dioxide emissions (CO2).
Things have gotten worse since 2010, and the EIA now reports that U.S. emissions grew in 2013, the first increase since 2010. Still, a modest 2% increase in the U.S. is nothing compared to what we've seen in China, India and "other non-OECD" (light blue, graph above).
There are only two possible responses to this data—growing despair or utter self-delusion.
It would take considerable effort to deconstruct every fantasy or contradiction in Klein's essay, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Instead, let's get to the heart of the matter.
The good news is that, unlike reindeer and songbirds, we humans are blessed with the capacity for advanced reasoning and therefore the ability to adapt more deliberately – to change old patterns of behaviour with remarkable speed.
If the ideas that rule our culture are stopping us from saving ourselves, then it is within our power to change those ideas. But before that can happen, we first need to understand the nature of our personal climate mismatch.
That's a Big IF because everything rides on it. (I will ignore humans being "blessed with the capacity for advanced reasoning" because that's just too damn easy.)
Climate change demands that we consume less, but being consumers is all we know. Climate change is not a problem that can be solved simply by changing what we buy – a hybrid instead of an SUV, some carbon offsets when we get on a plane. At its core, it is a crisis born of overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy, which means the world's most manic consumers are going to have to consume less.
The problem is not "human nature," as we are so often told. We weren't born having to shop this much, and we have, in our recent past, been just as happy (in many cases happier) consuming far less. The problem is the inflated role that consumption has come to play in our particular era.
Humans generally, and activists in particular, necessarily cling to the delusion that humans control own their destiny, no questions asked. You know, Free Will and all that. But of course that is the central delusion governing the Flatland brain—that our tiny, hapless "awareness" or "ego" is running the show, and there is no vast, underlying unconscious sea driving our behavior, both in individuals and populations. All of our self-created problems are chalked up to "cultural" (not instinctual) behaviors which are easily amenable to change. Thus Klein writes this, repeated from above—
If the ideas that rule our culture are stopping us from saving ourselves, then it is within our power to change those ideas...
I don't agree with everything psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, but he got it right when he said—
The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth.
Klein's fantasy, which is the most generalized human fantasy, is that all human behavior is culturally driven. In so far as human cultures are merely arbitrary products of the human mind—the mind is a blank slate upon which arbitrary cultural "norms" get written—it is thus possible to change human cultures in arbitrary ways, and in so doing, change human minds in arbitrary ways as a result.
Got a problem? Simply change the culture, and voila — problem solved!
This is not only the "worst idea" in all of psychology; it is the most delusional idea humans have. Tragically, that delusion is necessarily a product of the Flatland brain. Now let me go off on a related tangent.
Humans have known they are changing the Earth's climate for many years now. The ball got rolling when Jim Hansen testified to that effect before the United States Senate in 1988. Nearly all real uncertainty had been vanguished by the early 2000s. And when I say 'humans' in that first sentence, I mean important, elite humans. Climate "deniers" are not important, although in some cases they are among the human elite.
There is hardly a financial bigwig or big cheese politico on Earth who doesn't fully understand that human activity is changing our once benign Holocene climate into something which threatens our very existence. As Leonard Cohen said, everybody knows (video below). Whether that certain knowledge is fully conscious or buried somewhere in the unconscious matters not at all, which was Cohen's point.
The Naomi Kleins of this world like to focus on the Koch Brothers or whoever is running Exxon Mobil. They like to blame these people for human inaction on the climate. Even those people know that humans are changing the climate, despite what they might say publically. But they also know with great certainty that mitigating climate change is bad for business, so they have sown seeds of doubt in the public mind, helped along by the corporate-owned, compliant and worthless mainstream media in the United States.
What did Calvin Coolidge say in the 1920s? The business of America is business. He could have been talking about every country on Earth here in the 21st century, now that so many more countries are getting the opportunity to do business (graph at the top). Nobody wants to do anything that might be bad for business.
Public opinion (here in the U.S., or in China, or anywhere) about whether the climate is changing and whether that change is human-caused is utterly unimportant. Because you see, everybody on Earth who is somebody already knows. It is always delusional to place any importance upon what the general public thinks about anything.
The entire climate activists/climate deniers brou-ha-ha is superficial bullshit, a sideshow to the main event. The main event is taking place in the human unconscious. The important stuff is going on outside of awareness. You can pretty much forget about almost everything you hear humans say about global warming. So much of it is incoherent nonsense. Humans everywhere will not do anything which is bad for business.
Take a good, hard look at that graph at the top of this post. If you think the Koch Brothers or the CEO of Exxon Mobil are influencing what the Chinese or Indians or all those other "non-OECD" humans are doing or not doing to reduce CO2 emissions, you have gone completely off the deep end. You are literally out of your mind. You are like Naomi Klein.
C'mon! Do you think the Chinese central planning committee starts every meeting with "what's up with those Koch brothers?"
That emissions graph at the top strongly suggests that humans are fundamentally unable to respond to the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, an inability which spans all human cultures. (Well, there's Denmark, which has fewer people than Chengdu city in west, central China. There's always itsy-bitsy little Denmark )
Self-delusion is not a substitute for actual thought.
If humans are to do something about their own behavior, they will have to come to grips with what that behavior is. That's the only way out. Clinging to the sort of delusions that got us to this point in the first place will not change anything. I would have thought that was obvious.
Another delusion is that nationality, culture or politics has anything to do with the disaster that is humankind. Just because the US and EU are in decline (CO2 levels changing 'modestly') and China, India and 'Other Non-OECD' are amid the excess of their own industrial revolution (CO2 emissions galloping ahead) doesn't make the net result any better, for anyone living anywhere. If the US economy was making things, rather than just pushing fake money around, CO2 would be on a steeper incline in the USA. And of course, a lot of the excessive shit that Americans consume is made in the regions where CO2 is replacing oxygen at fantastic rates. So it's pointless, fruitless and narrow-minded to single out who is responsible for emissions. Nostra culpa.
Posted by: Oliver | 04/24/2014 at 05:22 PM