The wickedest of all problems - IX

One major problem in dealing with climate change is the difficulty human brains have in thinking about the many scales of time involved. In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that humans must combine two perspectives that involve vastly different time scales - one pertaining to "the planet” and the other to "the globe”. We need to look at humans today from both of these perspectives at once if you want to understand the planetary environmental problems humans face today, 

"The planet” is the Earth system – the earth as a planet in which biological and geological processes connect to create a “system”-like entity that has kept complex multi-cellular life going for more than half a billion years. "The globe” is what humans have created – it refers to the technological connectivity that binds this world together to make human flourishing possible on a very large scale. Global processes – the growth of European empires, global technologies, and a world market - have started impacting the domain of the planetary (the workings of the Earth system).

The scientific literature on climate change brings to our attention the role played by nonhuman creatures (microbes, fungi, planktons, plants) and entities (glaciers, forests, deep seas, oceanic currents, the Siberian permafrost, polar ice caps) in keeping the earth habitable for complex forms of life. We don’t have to forget human desires and priorities but have reached a position in history where we also must become more aware of how this planet “works,” what makes it a life-bearing planet and how life has, in turn, changed this planet.

The global COVID problem can be thought of as the “planetary” clashing with the “global”. Humans are the vector for spreading SARS-COV-2 because we live in congested cities, and are extremely mobile in search of profit and livelihood. That’s global history. But our bodies have also become evolutionary pathways for the virus, and that is an event in the history of biological life on the planet. This virus has been living in the guts of bats for millions of years. Its history belongs to deep, planetary history. 

Elizabeth Colbert calls the current rapid disappearance of species The Sixth Extinction. Far worse extinctions have happened in the past and the earth has recovered. But recovery and restabilisation occur at planetary, not human, time scales — that is, millions of years after the disturbing event. At this scale, we are powerless to harm; the planet will take care of itself. Our planet is not fragile at its own time scale but this time scale is irrelevant to humans in normal times.

The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. Around 56 per cent of all the CO2 that humans have liberated by burning fossil fuel is still aloft. The consequences we suffer at any one point in time are the result of past emissions. Because of this long CO2 lifetime, we cannot solve the climate problem by slowing down emissions by 20% or 50% or even 80%. Computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere.

Our economic model has no simple way to account for environmental costs. Agriculture does not take into account the costs of soil depletion. Fossil fuel burning does not take into account modification of the atmosphere. People do not pay for the CO2 they emit. Habitat destruction does not take into account the destruction of species. Fishermen do not pay for the fish they take from the sea; lumber, oil, coal, and mining companies do not pay for their resources, aside from the cost to buy the land. Economic costs are only those of extraction and delivery — Earth is free.

Some people say that we’re not going to solve the climate crisis until we get rid of capitalism. Maybe there’s something to the argument but it’s just not relevant. There’s no conceivable possibility of the kind of social change that they’re talking about within the timescale that’s necessary to solve this problem. Couple of decades means urgent. This doesn’t mean everybody’s going to die in 20 years. It means processes will be set in motion that won’t be reversible. After that, you can’t do anything to control it. 

In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman writes that a veteran Israeli religious politician Yosef Burg used to tell a joke about two Israelis discussing philosophy. One says to the other, “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” and the other answers, “I’m an optimist, of course. I am certain that today will be better than tomorrow.” I am a similar optimist. Surprisingly, religion might have some valuable lessons for secular thought and the two need not be regarded as opposites. (And I say this even though I am not religious at all.)