On Climate: "We Underestimate The Horrors Humans Will Adapt To", Esp In Light Of Vaccine Stupidity
I spent the weekend reading a book I wasn’t entirely comfortable being seen with in public. Andreas Malm’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is only slightly inaptly named. You won’t find, anywhere inside, instructions on sabotaging energy infrastructure. A truer title would be “Why to Blow Up a Pipeline.” On this, Malm’s case is straightforward: Because nothing else has worked. Decades of climate activism have gotten millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on emissions, or even investments. Citing a 2019 study in the journal Nature, Malm observes that, measuring by capacity, 49 percent of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure now in operation was installed after 2004. Add in the expected emissions from projects in some stage of the planning process and we are most of the way toward warming the world by 2 degrees Celsius — a prospect scientists consider terrifying and most world governments have repeatedly pledged to avoid. Some hoped that the pandemic would alter the world’s course, but it hasn’t. Oil consumption is hurtling back to precrisis levels, and demand for coal, the dirtiest of the fuels, is rising.
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Higher energy prices are political poison, which is, according to leaked audio, why Exxon Mobil supports a carbon tax: The company knows that any politician who dares propose such a tax will do more to harm the climate movement than to help it (this is a lesson, thankfully, that the Biden administration has learned). It’s difficult, then, to believe that raising prices on the same fuels through a campaign of bombings would mobilize the working class on behalf of climate action. Still, violence is often deployed, even if counterproductively, on behalf of causes far less consequential than the climate crisis. So skepticism of the practical benefits of violence does not fully explain its absence in a movement this vast and with consequences this grave. To that end, Malm quotes the writer John Lanchester, who asked, in 2007, whether the absence of eco-violence was because “even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it.”
This question does not apply only to violence. It applies to quieter questions of political strategy and policy demands, and it is often asked of the climate movement. “It has become fashionable to call for a World War II-style mobilization to fight climate change,” wrote Ted Nordhaus, the founder of The Breakthrough Institute, in an essay questioning whether climate activists believed their own rhetoric. “But virtually no one will actually call for any of the sorts of activities that the United States undertook during the war mobilization — rationing food and fuels, seizing property, nationalizing factories or industries, or suspending democratic liberties.” Nordhaus goes on: “The vagueness and modesty of the Green New Deal is not proof that progressives and environmentalists are closet socialists. It is, rather, evidence that most climate advocates, though no doubt alarmed, don’t actually see climate change as the immediate and existential threat they suggest it is.”
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We underestimate the horrors humans will adapt to. There is no expanse of suffering that guarantees a compassionate response. The wreckage of the coronavirus is a reminder that even the deaths of family members, friends and neighbors will not inevitably transform our politics. More than 600,000 American lives have been lost, and for all that, the 2020 election looked much like the 2016 election, and fights over even so modest an adaptation as masks roiled the nation. Worse, American politics moved on as soon as the epicenters of crisis shifted beyond our borders. There is nothing in the past year that should make us believe that ruinous suffering in India will focus minds in America.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opinion/climate-change-energy-infrastructure.html
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