The trouble is, there simply isn’t any other way to deal with it. Either we face up to our responsibility as the driving system for global climate or we abdicate that role, pretending that our professed ignorance is the same as innocence and being both surprised and resigned to miserable outcomes. It’s a shame about all the displaced peoples in the Third World, we’ll say, but what can we do? And how could we have known? And all that biodiversity rapidly disappearing, at least we were able to preserve most of them as digital recreations inside of simulated realities so future generations can experience them.
With global climate change the focus of concern has been continually misplaced around issues that should not be up for debate or of any disagreement whatsoever. In her failed bid for the 2016 US presidency, Hilary Clinton proudly declared that she actually believed in climate change (as contrasted with her opponent, Donald Trump), to which the only reasonable response would be: OK, so what’s your plan to deal with it?
The reality of global climate change is and has been apparent for quite some time now. What was somewhat less clear until a good number of years ago was the full extent of human influence on the matter, that is how much of it was anthropogenic (the answer is pretty much all of it).
Whether it was anthropogenic became a huge staging ground for vested interests because it seemed to imply a responsibility: if humanity was to blame for it, then humanity would have to pay the bill. Knowing exactly where that would land, the major oil and gas corporations marshalled their resources in a massive misinformation campaign (so-called 'public relations') intended to cast serious doubt on the anthropogenic nature of climate change. If they sensed success in this direction then the instinct was to head upwind, to then cast doubt on the evidence that the climate was changing at all. The endgame of such an approach naturally being to challenge reason, rationality and the scientific method itself, a complete assault on the world of discourse; anything to preserve the status quo.
But the debates to be had are hardly as straightforward as the oil executives imagined. First of all, whether climate change is anthropogenic is not the point about which everything hinges; the imagined choice between if we are to blame then we pay otherwise we carry on is just that, imaginary.
Showing Nature Who's Boss
With natural disasters with which we have some familiarity we have no qualms about flying in the face of ‘nature’. If a volcano is about to erupt we do what is in our power to evacuate the surrounding area. It is not enough to know that it is going to erupt and that the consequences will be utter destruction. What is crucial is a worldview that sees this outcome both as unacceptable and avoidable. A superstitious populace might argue against evacuation; after all the volcano would seem to be the judgment of the gods, and who would they be to oppose such will? They might prefer to stay and let the pieces (of themselves it would turn out) fall where they may. To embrace evacuation is to reject such thinking, it is to conceive of the volcano as one of those small obstacles one encounters in life which it is in our power to change or avoid rather than as part of the giant and obscure machinations of fate. Further, evacuation is the techno-fix.
Given our current state of knowledge and technology as well as the societal values as embodied in our economic systems, the techno-fix for volcanoes is to monitor them closely, predict their behaviour accurately, and use all the tools of telecommunications to effect an evacuation when the time calls for it. We do not ‘plug’ the volcano, or deploy some kind of ‘anti-bomb’ to render it inert. Such schemes might strike us as being fanciful 'techno-fixes' but as it turns out the real techno-fix is getting out of the way.
The most important thing is our attitude: once we have decided to change the predicted outcome we have already embarked down the path of the techno-fix. Therefore of course there are many techno-fixes, all unequal. There is not a singular techno-fix - imagined as some hair-brained scheme cooked up by a coked-up Bond villain - and a natural-fix, but many possible techno-fixes and no fix at all. We are already on the treadmill and there is no getting off. We must deploy technology to solve the problems created by the deployment of technology, and hope1 that we are able to continue to outpace our self-made disasters even as they grow exponentially in scale, speed, and complexity.
Ultimate responsibility for climate change is actually unimportant as to the question of what to do about it. People are not to blame for volcanoes, but we still take responsibility to protect them from it. There we say that people ought to be saved from trouble that is not their fault. But ought to be saved by whom? It wasn’t geologists and engineers who put volcanoes all over the map, but they take responsibility for them nonetheless. Not because they are to blame, but because they have the ability to do so.
Uncertain Outcomes
Faced with the reality of climate change, the questions of import are: what are the consequences? How confident are we in these outcomes? What are the causal factors that we could stop in the future to mitigate further change? What can be done about the changes already wrought, and what are the consequences of those fixes? We became ultimately responsible for the global climate the moment we were plausibly responsible for it. Whether what we were putting into the atmosphere was to blame is beside the fact that we were operating at such a scale that it could be. Once it became conceivable that we were measurably affecting the global climate, we became culpable for all of our output2. In short, we have been operating recklessly without appropriate restraint, restraint that we ought to have imposed long ago3.
To be fair, the most pressing questions as concerns climate change do not have easy or well known answers. The form that policy should take is contingent upon the answers to these questions, questions such as what are the economic costs of no action and with what certainty can we predict these costs4? Politicians are therefore happy to deflect the debate upwind to issues of no real concern to give the appearance of working toward a solution when in fact no work is being done5. However, certain things are abundantly clear and a paucity of faith in humanity has crippled investment, fed by a reactionary mindset that seeks only to squeeze what it has most tightly.
Most discussion of solutions try to deflect from the appearance of a techno-fix by pointing toward a change in behaviour rather than outright tweaking of the climate. Decarbonisation and electrification rather than schemes to deflect sunlight with particles scattered in the upper atmosphere or carbon absorption through mass seeding of algae blooms around the oceans. But if the latter schemes are rightly maligned it is because the knowledge and technology are not advanced enough to make them viable; after all, if a volcano plug could be made to work with acceptable consequences - say by redirecting magma to deep sea locations - then we’d certainly want to use it. Decarbonisation and electrification are schemes as well, schemes that carry their own hazards and unintended and unforeseen consequences. Even in the most optimistic outlook where we move to safer, cleaner and more abundant energy, this will serve to accelerate our collective growth, feeding capitalist accumulation and thereby shortening the timeframe until we once again come into conflict with material limitations. You either keep on the treadmill and keep running at an ever-quickening pace or get off the track. There is only the techno-fix.
Getting Off Track
One might suppose that there is or ought to be a way to get off the track, a means by which technology could be applied with more restraint. And indeed in theory this is eminently possible. It is only quite recently within human history that technological development has been freed from any human concerns or constraints and thereby given rise to industrialisation and the concomitant notion of progress - and progress is not really an aspect intrinsic to technology.
Technology is what we do with the world, what we make of it and how we process and reprocess it through our integral and extended sense perceptions. We have always had technology, although we tend to think of only those technologies with which we have yet to fully come to grips with as technological6. For most of human history there has been no perceptible linear progression of technology in all fields. In the ancient world industry developed only up to a point beyond which it flatlined despite thoroughness of development in public services and the army7. From a modern lens, technological uptake of historical civilizations seems haphazard and baffling. Some technologies were readily adopted, others completely ignored despite seemingly obvious benefits. Periods of rapid development were followed by very long periods of stagnation. Most of history was characterised by a very flat state of affairs, with very little development, and very often regression. It was only with the Middle Ages that a slow but steady state of technological development and improvement as we would recognize it began to take shape (Rushkoff, 2010).
Why Technology Took-Off
What accounts for this? Was ‘tech’ simply waiting to reach some sort of critical momentum with which it could achieve escape velocity, after which point it would gradually build up speed until accelerating at the present maddening and exponential pace? Was such an outcome inevitable, simply a matter of historical time give or take a few random perturbations in an otherwise predestined track? Or was it contingent upon some political, economic, or ideological development which made the unthinkable thinkable, which provided a drive to the development that had previously been entirely lacking; a drive so powerful and simple that it could sustain this development indefinitely, or at least until it reached a stage where it destroyed itself?
It was capitalism that severed the ties between property and labour, between human and land, and between man and nature (Arendt, 1998). This emancipated the life process and enabled it to couple to the growing technoplex. Capitalism’s accumulation for accumulation’s sake, its totalitarian impulse to liberate (and ultimately liquidate) all integral systems, gave the kick to ‘progress’. Without it, technology would never have been able to achieve the liftoff to become a self-sustaining process. For it is capitalism, the ultimate self-sustaining and self-replicating process, that provides the template and the framework for all other such processes.
Regaining Control
To say that we ought to be able to control our technological development, to take the reigns of the pace of the treadmill, is akin to saying we ought to be able to make this development subservient to our values. To which the question naturally arises, what values? For there are no human values left save those as embodied in our economic systems. And indeed our technology and all of life is enslaved to these values; yet we seem collectively unwilling and uninterested in changing them, while lacking the imagination to see how doing so would even be possible. To say that the treadmill should not continue at an ever-accelerating pace is to call for a supra-authority to impose values upon capitalism. Where this could come from when capitalism has already been allowed to eviscerate all such contenders for such a position is a mystery.
After all, it is only under the drive of capitalism that all improvements in efficiency or innovative step-changes will almost immediately be used up, consumed, and exhausted by increased usage. In a situation where capitalism were not the ultimate authority it is conceivable that we could prevent the pace from being quite so breathless.
The non-techno-fix is that component of the techno-fix which makes changes to the system itself. Given our present state of development, it seems unlikely that such a fix could be non-technological. Many visions of what form a supra-authority could take involve submission to a machine intelligence - the ultimate techno-fix. But there ought to be an alternative. If we believe in human beings, then we believe in empowering them, and technology may enable us to do that much more directly than has ever been possible.
Footnotes
1 Of course hope has nothing to do with any potential transitory success - it takes concerted collective effort, the combined application of resources, ability and will.↩
2 Non-anthropogenic climate change is actually a far more terrifying prospect, as we would still be responsible for the fix, but the causal factors would no longer be guaranteed to be within our control. It's comparable to an imminent asteroid collision - we have to stop it, but we possibly don't know how.↩
3 That our atmosphere is not an inexhaustible resource that we can use as our dumping ground with impunity at any scale is patently obvious. The question has always been at what scale?↩
4 There are numerous consequences that economics is blind to or tolerant of which should offend us on a moral level. For example, loss of biodiversity is a consequence that should register on more levels than simply the subsequent effects on trade and peoples' livelihoods. However, political policy seems largely impervious to such considerations, despite much lip-service.↩
5 Emissions have only decreased with periods of economic decline, with targets perpetually postponed as their deadlines loom. The targets themselves are also no indicator of progress, as acceptable limits are set with a view on what is economically (and therefore politically) tolerable.↩
6 So communications technology is seen as such, but fire, or writing or wheels are perceived to be non-technological.↩
7 Hannah Arendt provides an explanation for this: property owners used development as a means to participate in public-political life, which was seen as the objective of such development. To become devoted to development was seen as slavishness, as being no more but a slave of the life-process, and therefore looked down upon (Arendt, 1998). It is interesting to note the arresting power that beliefs can have, giving the lie to the idea of 'inevitability'.↩
References
The Nation (2018) Ursula K. Le Guin: Listening to the Unheard Voices. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_vzSgkjBEI (Accessed: 19 November 2018)
Arendt, H. and Canovan, M. (introduction), (1998) The Human Condition: Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published 1958.
Rushkoff, D. (2010) Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. New York: OR Books.
