I'm reading that the climate crisis is so bad, and governmental response the world over has been so poor, for so long, that we may have no option but to engage in some form of planetary engineering. In a report released last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it will take very ambitious efforts -- a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70 percent by 2050 -- to keep climate change at acceptable levels. The dire predictions have some asking whether it's time to think about geo-engineering: an attempt to use large-scale, high-tech methods to cool the planet. These ideas have included launching giant mirrors into space or fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate phytoplankton growth. There's no doubting the seriousness of the climate crisis, but the acceptance of political and institutional inertia, even failure, intrigues me. Because, in my view, any engineering solution in that context can do little more than buy time - whilst changing nothing about the very social system that is the cause of the planetary crisis. Sooner or later, we must address this question at the level of politics. But the debate is worth following. We need to remain open when it comes to thinking and solutions. http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201404150900 Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, argues that although we are facing a climate emergency, governments are taking only ‘utterly trivial’ measures. "Co2 levels are rising at a faster than exponential rate, and yet politicians only want to take utterly trivial steps such as banning plastic bags and building a few windfarms. Having done almost nothing for two decades we need to adopt more desperate measures such as considering geo-engineering techniques as well as conducting a major nuclear programme."
Government and politics have failed miserably, hence Wadhams’ demand for geo-engineering and a worldwide nuclear power station "binge" in order to avoid runaway global heating. And when the planet is on the move, politics will be no more than a rescue squad at best, reacting rather than adapting. Scientists, technologists and engineers are having to fill the void left by the collapse of a genuine politics. But technique is not politics, is not philosophy; it is a means being pressed into the gap where ends once were. And techno solutions are a gamble. Wadhams himself acknowledges that such technical solutions possess inherent dangers and offer no guarantees. I can accept this reasoning, certainly in light of decades of political failure, of governments and political leaders but also of electorates, both too wedded to 'business as usual' to change in any substantial respect. For me, though, the question is not 'energy' as such but why energy demands are so large and continually increasing. The problem is a voracious and unsustainable demand deriving from an endlessly expanding economic system. The real question is why we need so much energy in the first place. We are in danger of turning a socio-economic problem into a technical one, and that is a blatant moral and political evasion (born of political failure). Capital, subject to its endless, expansionary imperatives, will take all your energy forms and still want more. It's a time to recover a sense of political economy and its critique, to investigate issues of control and power in order to understand how our social relations are arranged and to what end. My view is that we need to defend, extend and deepen the commons, expand the moral circle with respect to the common good, and do so on the basis of protecting our common ground, the life-support systems upon which we depend. But there's a nagging doubt that even that might not be enough. "What if it were possible that humanity, that nations in their greatest concerns and deeds are linked to Being and yet had long fallen out of Being, without knowing it, and that this was the most powerful and most central cause of their decline?" (M. Heidegger, Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik, 5th ed. (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1987), 28.) Can we redeem our alienated technical, instrumental and economic powers and organise them for the human and planetary good? I would argue yes. Through our invention and ingenuity we have attained a high standard of living for large numbers of people. I'd just draw attention to the things we take for granted - health, education, insurance, communications - before indulging in a general lament over human intervention in nature and 'progress'. “From various standpoints reason as discursive, logical, scientific, calculative, and technological—pathologies ultimately deriving from the Greek metaphysics of the rational logos—is accused of betraying the primordial wholeness of Being. Theoretical inquiry must be subordinated to the recovery of a prescientific and mythopoetic stance toward nature, with a sense of man's place as "embedded" rather than as dominant within the whole.” (R. Velkley Being After Rousseau, 2002 ch 3). And there is the paradox of the human condition. Can we be "embedded" in nature in this way? We certainly need to end our dominant and exploitative relation to nature. The solution is to manage our interchange with nature and with each other in society in such a way as to enable human and planetary flourishing. “For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of balance.” (Fritz Schumacher)
We have ruptured that balance with our practical transformation of our environment. We once thought we had conquered nature by technique and organisation. The climate crisis shows otherwise. Further, in the process, we have created a second nature which has confined us just as assuredly as did first nature. We flatter ourselves that we have conquered natural necessity, but fail to see that we have become prisoners of a new social necessity. But if we are our own jailors, we can be our own liberators, reclaiming the alien powers of the state, capital and bureacuratic power as our own social power. But the exercise of that power will still have to respect planetary boundaries. That is the task before us as we come to practise ecology as politics. "Is the evolution of our species in perfect harmony with the laws of the Earth? This is what it concerns us to know!" (Elisee Reclus, Mankind and the Earth). Our survival depends upon the extent to which we come to understand the extent to which ecosystems act together to maintain conditions favourable to life. Human and planetary flourishing go hand in hand and require we connect our nature within to nature without. "The natural world outside our farms and cities is not there as decoration but serves to regulate the chemistry and climate of the Earth, and the ecosystems are the organs of Gaia that enable her to maintain our habitable planet." (James Lovelock,
(New York: Allen Lane, 2009), 9.