Changes: Climate Change, Civilisation Change, System Change, Self-Change
I shall try to be as brief as I possibly can be. Over the years I have written extensively on the political, ethical, and existential implications of the converging social and ecological crises that are upon us. I shall provide links below on my work in this area for those who wish to go further and deeper. To effectively address the crisis in the climate system requires that we go beyond issues of personal failing – whether in the weak will of politicians or our own laziness and selfishness as consumers – to engage in serious institutional and structural analysis. We are all of us, as social beings, located within a matrix of socially structured patterns of behaviour. So I strongly encourage people new to this issue to see ‘system change, not climate change’ as not just a slogan or a popular demand issued to government, but as something requiring a genuine programme of action buttressed by a series of social practices. World-changing is a team-sport, and there's a place on the team for everyone demanding a change. I would just emphasize the extent to which social change is also a self-change, and that big social and institutional transformations require personal effort and sacrifice.
I have titled this piece ‘Changes,’ because the world is going through changes. So far, so obvious. We have become used to politicians aiming for office seducing the electorate with promises of ‘change.’ People probably remember it most from Tony Blair and his endless promises of ‘change’ to imply a shiny, new future after decades of Conservative rule. His words were politically vacuous. The attraction of a word like ‘change’ in politics is that, alone, it is neutral, and merely implies a better future in contrast with a present and a past that people feel bored and frustrated with. Blair was doing nothing new here. A Labour leader before him, Harold Wilson, did precisely the same thing in the 1960s. You will find a perceptive critique of Wilson on this in Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism (1987 edition). Miliband comments on how ‘change’ and ‘modernization’ were Wilson’s favourite words, not least because they implied a politically neutral transformation that reduced to technology, as a deliberate alternative to the widespread social transformation that real change entailed.
I use the word ‘change’ in precisely the sense of substantial social transformation. In the process, I also emphasize something that was key to Karl Marx – the coincidence of changing circumstances and self-change; that is, the changing of political and social systems which govern life, structure patterns of behaviour, and set social goals is also a self-change on the part of individuals agent. This is a participatory conception which incites action on the part of individuals, causes them to associate together in common cause, and take joint ownership of problems and solutions.
But ‘change’ also comes with other, less hopeful, possibilities. Unchecked, the crisis in the climate system will degrade and destroy the ecological conditions of civilized life. One way or another, changes are a-coming, and the future we face will be radically different from anything we have ever known. Either we voluntarily change the foundations upon which we live our lives, or changes will be forced upon us involuntarily by ecological necessity. The wise course is to individually and collectively determine the terms on which we manage our interchange with nature (and others in society) voluntarily, rather than have those terms imposed on us involuntarily in the shape of external natural (or social) force. The socio-economic aspects of collective life I have placed in brackets here indicate the way in which social and economic activities in an atomised society can tend to escape human comprehension and social control and come to be imposed in the form of external imperatives (the accumulative dynamic, economic cycles, crises etc).
We live in the age of change and of changes.
I can only deal briefly, hence inadequately, with these changes here. I refer readers to my work elsewhere for the depth the subject requires.
The simple line is that converging environmental crises (social and moral as well as ecological) impels us to transform our social systems, ethical systems, forms of governance, and ourselves in order to secure the bases for civilized life. If evolution proceeds by challenge and response, then we are now being challenged by the greatest problem that human civilization has ever faced, an all-encompassing global problem of unprecedented scale and scope. In Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how past civilizational collapses were all local. Civilization could collapse in one part of the world, but continue or arise elsewhere. Now, in the context of global interdependence, climate change and global heating threatens universal collapse. There is some good news in this universality, though. Whereas in the past, civilizations were cut off from the examples of others, and fell through blinkered visions and practices, we now have universal interconnections and communications and can learn from and support each other within the whole. Further, if the problems that face us are greater than ever, so too are the tools at our disposal. If the climate crisis is, as Joseph Stiglitz has recently argued, our third world war requiring a suitably bold response on our part, then we have the technics to support our grand ambitions.
The crucial question is whether we have the psychological, moral, and imaginative capacity to be sufficiently bold and ambitious and to hold our nerve over the long haul. We are now tasked with having to rethink and re-order our social institutions and economic systems. Those who use ‘system change, not climate change’ as a slogan themselves have to put the banners down and get serious about tools and technics. That includes those political and psychological aspects which build a mass constituency for change through a consent that is active in a devotion and commitment to common ends. We have to end the exploitative and parasitic approach to nature, overcoming agri-business and engaging in rewilding, reject our addiction to consumption and the passive orientation to the world that comes with it, and exchange short-termist, individualist modes of thought for an orientation that gears modes of thought, action, and organisation to the long-term common good.
That’s not the work of a summer’s day. It’s a cathedral project, and it therefore requires a cathedral ethic as well as serious practical work in institution and system building. Facts and figures and the language of necessity couched in terms of survival won’t cut it. That simply tells us that we have a problem; alone, such things do not motivate. We know this because, after decades of campaigning in this manner, it hasn’t motivated. There is no point condemning human beings as indifferent here; that gets us nowhere, and covers failures in practice. If intrinsic motivation is lacking, then there is a need to work on extrinsic motivation, whilst also working to foster the inner motives (hence my interest in virtue ethics and character-construction, see Being at One). I therefore emphasize ecology as a moral ecology, establishing an ethic that draws human beings out of their egos into communion with others to see their lives as having meaning within a Greater Love. (see links below and further work to come from me on moral ecology, The Ecology of the Good).
I have campaigned for climate action since the late 1980s, beginning with the hole in the ozone layer. I have been a member of The Green Party since then, the only political party I have ever been a member of. I have not been active in Green politics these past couple of years, owing to health issues and, frankly, overwork and exhaustion. But part of my campaigning involved writing reports and summaries and letters on environmental issues, informing activists and, hopefully, raising interest and building support and inciting effective action before catastrophic climate events engulf us. The "Posts" section of this site presents in essay form some the environmental issues I have reported on over the decades. (I stuck to the facts in the reports, and wrote them up as essays later to add my own personal take on events).
I have no doubt that an eco-catastrophe is now on the horizon. But I won’t say that I or others involved in environmentalism in whatever form have failed, since the failure belongs to others, particularly those who obscured, confused, and misled as a deliberate political strategy. I hope they enjoy the last few years of enjoying their few dollars more. In the Communist Manifesto Marx speculated on the possibility of the common ruination of the contending classes. The rich and powerful cannot insulate themselves from the climate catastrophe to come. There is little comfort in knowing that, mind, seeing as we will all face the adverse consequences. All lose when the system fails, but the nature of collective action structured within asymmetrical social relations means that not all have the same incentive to ensure system health. In the short-run, it pays some to act in such a way as to gain an immediate advantage at the expense of long-term collective health. In business, those who lose advantage to another go to the wall. 'One capitalist always kills many,' wrote Marx. So long as society is based on this economic war, those seeking social survival will continue to try to steal an advantage over their rivals. In the long run, such decisions and actions sum to threaten the ecological survival of all. That’s the (il)logic of the capital system that we are charged with having to subvert and change. We are charged, too, with having to constitute ourselves as a genuine public ‘we’ capable of acting effectively in unison. Our predicament at present is that we are confronted with collective global forces that can only countered by effective collective force, but lack effective and appropriate collective means and mechanisms encouraging (ethical and psychological) and enabling (organisational and institutional) such control. I would argue, too, that ‘control’ is not the right word. In a world of interconnection and interdependence, we are required to devise a civilization that is more relational and fluid, organising everyday interchanges across the planet without the need for extraneous institutional force. The demand for ‘control’ originates in a neurotic anxiety that is born of loss and lack, that is, from our severance from the sources of life, belonging, and meaning. Repairing our connections to others in society as well as to the other beings and bodies in the more-than-human world – and ultimately to God – overcomes that neurotic concern with ‘control.’ We surrender to the community of life and love and find our health and happiness in sacrifice and service to others.
After decades of campaigning on the environment, missing out on who knows what in terms of personal life, there is some slight satisfaction in seeing the case for effective action to address the climate emergency that is now upon us starting to gain a degree of common acceptance. But only some. The intention all along had been to inspire efforts and actions on the part of government, business, and citizens so as to avoid climate emergency. We raised the alarm, and were dismissed as alarmists. So now we have to declare a climate emergency, because the predicted crisis is now upon us. Now that records are being broken everywhere, we are no longer called alarmists. The Labour Party has declared a climate emergency, and it is encouraging that the prospective leader of the Conservative Party – and by far the best candidate – Rory Stewart states openly that ‘of course there is a climate emergency.’ Of course there is. Common acceptance of the fact is nowhere near enough, mind. There needs to be common action. But it’s coming. It just needs to come quickly, lest events overtake us and people give up all hope.
The actions that need to be taken are of a scale and scope far greater than anything that has ever been done in history. It involves not just recalibrating a global economic system – which sounds merely difficult stated in the abstract, but well-nigh impossible in the context of geopolitics and different countries with different developmental priorities – but rebuilding an entire civilization, including the very psychologies of billions of people. But the need for such bold and ambitious thought and action is increasingly being understood in the worlds of science, business, government, and military.
It is nearly three decades since the first United Nations climate treaty was agreed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. I remember it well. And I remember the words of Green Party spokesperson Jonathan Porritt, to the effect that he didn’t expect much from Rio and wasn’t disappointed. We can say the same thing about every conference and agreement that has come since. George Monbiot described Copenhagen as a white flag of surrender on the environment by the world’s governments. Governments are rubbish and we are on our own, said Lucy Lawless. I tended to agree in the first instance, but argued that we needed to think more deeply before succumbing to political pessimism. Governments are not, as many people think, a public domain subject to democratic will, but are implicated within a regime of private accumulation: hence when it comes to a straight choice between (capitalist) economics and the planetary ecology, they choose economics. It is politically naïve to expect otherwise, even if the long-run of such action ensures the collective ruination of each and all of us. Such is the nature of false sacrifice in the false religion in the worship of the false God of capital. I had to defend environmentalism against the charge that environmentalists were engaging in the ‘new religion of climate alarmism.’ I’ll not dignify those make that charge by naming them, they deserve to be forgotten (the names are in my campaign writings, I remember them, and part of me still wants accounts to be settled with these characters for the damage they have done with their death-dealing lies). Examine these people closely, and they were none of them on nodding terms with true religion: they were worshippers of Mammon and Moloch, one and all. They loved capital so much, they gave up the one and only nature we have.
The climate conferences and agreements came and went, accompanied by armies of lawyers tasked with rendering commitments so thin and feeble as to be worthless. Whilst I was outraged by Donald Trump’s callous withdrawal from Paris, part of my outrage was a self-criticism aimed at the environmental movement for ever having exalted something so feeble as Paris as something so worthy in the first place. Paris was yet another half-house, with a view to doing better in the future. That same promise of better to come has been sustaining poor politics for decades. This ‘realist’ political approach to climate change racked up decades of failure to produce something so feeble that someone like Trump could just withdraw, and face no sanctions. That's hard high politics - what sanctions do you have to apply against non-cooperators. When people are free not to join, they won't join. For all of the agreements made and commitments undertaken by nation states, three decades of climate politics and diplomacy through existing institutional channels has resulted in a situation in which global carbon emissions have continued to rise, giving us last year’s record total of 37.1bn tonnes. Why on Earth are we fighting the likes of Donald Trump on Paris – WE should have been ripping Paris up and building a mass global movement to effect real change.
But if governments have been and indeed remain ‘rubbish,’ that does not and cannot apply to government as such. That was the point I made back against critics of government and politics. Both are necessary to any collective global solution. Effective climate policies require concerted action within a comprehensive framework, what Aubrey Meyer calls 'Contraction and Convergence' right across the board to deliver climate justice: a reconciliation without the ongoing rancour of retribution. That means a central role for government, reclaiming government as an agency of the universal interest. (Hence my criticism of Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley for claiming the Greens to be the party of individual freedom against the authoritarianism of the state and socialism. That is simply incoherent politics, since you cannot address climate change as a collective global force as individuals. I say more on this elsewhere, so shall not repeat myself).
In October 2018, scientists at the United Nations warned that if we wait until 2030 before making the changes that are required now, the target of 1.5C of global heating would be beyond our reach. My understanding is that it already is. My further understanding is that all such targets are based not on science but on political expediency, attempts to set goals for laggard governments, targets which they accordingly proceed to miss given their economic and electoral priorities (citizens are dependent upon 'the economy,' and will vote thinking of material self-interest in the short-run). Targets don’t work psychologically, either, since they give the impression that we can postpone making changes until close to the proposed date, rather than making them now. If something is right, then it is right, and you do it now because it is right. It is right - innovate the appropriate means and mechanisms enabling us to do it.
The 1.5C target is considered the critical threshold, beyond which temperature increases are predicted to cause colossal disruption. The target is not ‘safe,’ as some have been inclined to think, it is exceedingly dangerous. It’s just short of catastrophic. Beyond 1.5C we get catastrophe: melting ice caps; millions displaced as a result of rising sea levels; increased flooding; massively deleterious impacts on agriculture, including destruction of crops, desertification; a greatly increased risk of fires, drought and extreme weather; destruction of plant and insect habitats and extinction of species; the extinction of coral. These things are already happening: they will get worse. That's a sober view based on dry facts. If you want alarmism, then consider that if Freud was right, and human beings will 'murder for trifles,' then just imagine what they will do to one another as resources start to run out.
Activists and scientists have been writing on precisely these things for decades now. It has been a long, hard, and often lonely slog. It seems that, at last, all that effort and hard work, all that that expertise allied to activism, and - and let’s be honest as to what this really amounts to - all that love and concern, is starting to have an impact in society and politics. Green parties across the world are starting to pick up support. Part of this may well be disillusionment with the failures of mainstream parties, but part of it is a positive embrace of Green issues. Extinction Rebellion activists have caused a stir, putting the climate issue before the public with a force and vigour – backed by an analysis – that cannot be overlooked. I have expressed criticism here. I dislike constant headlines along the lines of “Greta Thunberg tells” this or that institution or political leader to ‘act’ on climate. I agree very much with plenty that she says. I should do, seeing as I and many others have been saying it for decades. To the response that says that we have failed, and that the youth are taking over, I say ‘feel free,’ because sooner or later you will face the same institutional and structural questions that blocked effective climate solutions in the past. If, this time, the defences are weaker, and if, this time, there is greater receptiveness and responsiveness to climate action on the part of the public, then it will be because the people who have supposedly failed in the past have broken their heads and bodies in weakening the walls that may well now be on the brink of collapse.
My principal criticism refers to the attempt to press science into doing the work of ethics and politics. The headline “Greta tells” smacks too much of environmental philosopher kings to me. If politics is about truth, then philosopher kings will do fine. But it isn’t; the temper of politics is judicious, and it involves all people. The principle of self-assumed obligation holds that individuals are legitimately bound only by those laws in which they have had a hand in making. This was the great insight of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sought to replace the illegitimate chains of elitist government and economic slavery with the legitimate chains of a public community based on the active consent of the citizens. Rousseau was also the greatest modern Platonist. He gave us a Plato for the democratic age. He was a truth-seeker who affirmed the existence of transcendent standards. To make this idea comprehensible in terms of this debate on environmentalism as politics, we can see these standards as ‘climate truth.’ Some would write ‘Nature’ here, others would say the same thing, only spell it ‘God.’ Rousseau’s great insight here was to have seen that truth cannot simply be passively given, but must be actively willed on the part of the citizens: it must be known by them, incorporated into their very being, and acted upon. That’s the insight I try to bring to the attempts to tackle climate crisis in terms of climate politics and justice. And it involves a criticism on my part of attempts on the part of some to employ science to legislate or dictate truths to politics, governments, and citizens. There is a subtle, but hugely important, difference there, and I make the point to aid the cause of environmentalism as politics, not to reject it.
Most of all, environmentalism needs to be united in common cause, since there is increasing evidence that the activities of scientists and campaigners over the years is now beginning to have an effect. Researches are showing that the environment, which always tended to drop off the list of priorities, is now ranking highly in voters’ priorities. And this is having an impact within the conventional political sphere. In one of her final acts as prime minister, Theresa May committed the UK to a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It isn’t all that it seems and doesn’t go far enough, mind. But hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. If we’re all environmentalists now, then we are in a position to ensure that politicians walk the walk in office, making them back their words and commitments with effective policies. If not them, then others.
The argument is being won. All things being equal, in the long run, this argument is entirely winnable. But there’s a dangerous paradox in play – the more compelling the case for climate action becomes, the more intractable the climate problem to be resolved will also become. When people finally start to accept the need for radical action is when the threat of climate catastrophe has become so obvious as to be unavoidable.
Decades have been wasted by governments and citizens, and politics-as-usual has been characterised by complacency, diversion, and denial. This has been an active denial by some, who gained an importance far beyond their numbers, and who kept us confining the issue to science, instead of moving climate firmly into the field of practical reason (ethics and politics, government action and policy frameworks, economic systems). But it has been passive denial in the main, as in postponing the need to address the issue until it becomes more pressing, as in too late … We are almost there. Hence my insistence on effecting the transition from theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, the natural sciences, the realm of fact) and practical reason (ethics and politics, the world of value and motivations). Science does not and cannot tell us what to do. Science, as a check against physical reality, informs all that we think and do, but it cannot pronounce on questions of value, meaning, and significance, and it cannot ‘tell’ us what to do in politics, cannot 'tell' us how to order our economic systems - that's where politics and ethics come in (and if they don't then nothing will change). Hence my objection to the tendency to use science as an authority, invoking the spirit of the ancient and mythical Lawgiver. Laws of nature are not the same thing as moral laws or laws of politics, and to state that the former override the latter is to ensure that environmentalism remains ineffective, making eco-catastrophe all but inevitable. It is not a choice between the one or the other which matters, but establishing the relation between them, putting physics and politics together. This requires that we bridge the gaps between scientific knowledge, technological know-how, forms of governance and policy frameworks, will and action.
For all the hopeful signs that people are starting to take environmentalism seriously, we are still far short of doing what is required. My great fear is that we are about to enter an age of a new climate denialism, one that is even more dangerous because it gives people the feeling that they are engaging in effective environmental action when they most assuredly are not. We should know that we cannot address the environmental crisis as individuals making personal lifestyle choices. That’s not to say that those things shouldn’t be done, but that they are insufficient and can never scale up and sum to the level of the global changes required. Fall short of that system-wide transformation, and climate catastrophe will be upon us. We still lack the numbers of politicians and citizens firmly committed to action on anything like the required scale. More than this, numbers alone are not enough – we need to concentrate force. I studied business at the local Chamber of Commerce. In training we were given an exercise that taught us how to make the most of our materials. We were tasked with building a bridge strong enough to carry a vehicle carrying a weight between two points. There were just enough little plastic strips to clip together to form a bridge, and everyone did precisely that. In other words, instead of seeing the object as that of getting the vehicle from A to B, people got absorbed in the task of building the bridge, despite the paucity of materials. They thought they had succeeded when they just about managed to piece together the strips to form a long, thin, and hopelessly fragile line. Then they stood and watched as the vehicle was drawn across on string. The mid-point of each bridge was too weak to support the weight, promptly gave in, sending the vehicle crashing to the floor. The solution is to concentrate force. Instead of spreading the material thinly, apply it strategically to double the strips up at either end, thus securing the main points, accept the existence of a weak middle, and move the vehicle steadily at either end, and power it with enough speed and force to get it over the short middle. It works, too - concentrate force, and act with sufficient vigour to reach your goal.
You don’t need to convert everyone, you don’t need 100% support, and you don’t need continuous time-wasting engagement with active deniers. You need to convert as many of the passive deniers as you can. You also need to be aware that little has been gained if you merely convert passive deniers into passive accepters. Nothing will change if the mass of people remain passive. You don’t all the people on board, though, only a critical mass that you concentrate strategically to engage in effective action.
With the news covering extreme weather events, record temperature rises, and continued emissions increases, there is evidence of a growing environmental concern among the public, and attempts at the level of government to frame serious policy responses. The radical wings in left of centre parties are embracing the Green New Deal. There are some signs of change in the right direction. There is also much evidence of the same old complacency and mediocrity. The ‘moderate’ elements in such parties consider the idea of a Green New Deal spendthrift, irresponsible, and extremist. I would express my own doubts with respect to a Green Keynesianism here, arguing that the problems are systemic and structural, requiring that we uproot the entire logic and dynamic of capital rule. The problems are now chronic and cannot be saved by Keynesian reformism, Green or otherwise. I think the Green New Deal falls within the limitations of the old liberalism and reformism. But it at least points us in the right direction. I criticise the Green New Deal not because it is radical but because it isn’t radical enough. The ‘moderates’ reject it because they are hopelessly wedded to a timid incrementalism that changes nothing with respect to fundamentals. When the times demand serious change, a slow driver is more of a menace than a speeding driver. The moderates seem to have reached a dead-stop.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz has recently argued that we should look upon climate change as our “third world war,” in which we are all called upon to serve.
The climate crisis is humanity’s greatest ever challenge, one that threatens the existence of not only civilisation, but of the human species itself. That may be true. But I would argue that there are better ways of framing this challenge than survival and necessity. Such things lack motivating power and smack too much of a coercive approach to politics. Short of a Green authoritarian state – and I think we should all fear the priorities of such a state in the context of a misanthropic obsession over human population and a constantly negative attitude towards human activity – then the action required will not be taken.
Stiglitz challenges those critics who say that we cannot afford the Green New Deal by saying we have no other option but to pay. To those who ask whether we can afford the Green New Deal he says we can’t afford not to, since civilisation is at stake. He also goes on to argue that the war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy.
I’ve grown sceptical of all such talk. What if we actually lack the financial resources to address climate change and what if addressing climate change is actually bad for ‘the economy’, would we not then take the action required to secure the ecological conditions necessary for a civilised life? And I would also like to know more about the precise character of ‘the economy’ that we are looking to wed the ecology of the planet to.
Stiglitz emphasizes the urgency in addressing the climate crisis to give his support to the Green New Deal. My concern is not with how much such a deal would cost or whether it would be good or bad for ‘the economy,’ but whether it would actually be effective in addressing the crisis in the climate system. My fear is that it is merely a Green Keynesianism that is principally concerned with reflating a moribund capitalist economy. The problem with Keynesian reflation is that if there is no value to be realized in the first place, then all the pump-priming in the world, green or otherwise, cannot put it there. I think this is where we are at: the capital system is no longer adding value. In effect, we would be spending large amounts of money in an attempt to breathe life into a corpse, equipping the capital system with a clean energy infrastructure to enable it to engage in another burst of environmentally destructive expansion.
Stiglitz picks up on the reference to ‘New Deal’ and affinities with Roosevelt, and proceeds to say that an even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.
Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.
Yes, we can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. The climate emergency is our third world war. Our lives and civilization as we know it are at stake, just as they were in the second world war.
It’s difficult to disagree, but there is a need to qualify and clarify. Addressing the crisis in the climate system is necessary to preserve the conditions of civilized life. We can’t afford not to do this, it is simply something we must do to survive. We could not afford not to fight the second world war, and the same goes for the climate crisis, as Stiglitz argues.
There are problems with the analogy, though. Before coming to these, let’s underline where Stiglitz is absolutely right. He notes that we are already experiencing the direct costs of ignoring the climate crisis. These costs will, in time, escalate and become prohibitive. The more money we spend now, the less we will have to spend later. In recent years the US has lost almost 2% of GDP in weather-related disasters, which include floods, hurricanes, and forest fires. The cost to health from climate-related diseases in the US is just being tabulated, but it, too, will run into the tens of billions of dollars. Cost is not an argument against climate action. Climate inaction will incur much greater costs. Climate breakdown will impose costs one way or another, and these are unavoidable. ‘So it makes sense,’ states Stiglitz, ‘to spend money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until later to pay a lot more for the consequences – not just from weather but also from rising sea levels. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ A stitch in time saves nine, as the old adage goes. In its generality, the logic is unanswerable. It’s worse than this, though, since every delay and postponement comes with a procrastination penalty. The problems don’t just get worse, they get progressively worse. We have delayed that long, we probably have to sew four or five stitches, to save a hundred or so in time.
But there’s a problem with such general observations. There is no humanity in general, there are a lot of human beings whose lives, as individuals and groups, are structured and patterned within asymmetrical social relations. Some people are richer than others, some more powerful than others, some more privileged. There is no ‘society’ that can decide that climate action is a price worth paying. The idea of what is fair changes between different groups. Sooner or later, somebody somewhere at sometime will pay. This is where politics enters the scene. The human impact on the environment has come with a huge bill, and politics is caught up in the struggle between humans over the terms of repayment. If we can’t pull politics out of that contest over responsibilities and liabilities, then there will be a self-cancellation that prevents effective climate action, thereby ensuring self-annihilation. The question has nothing to do with political notions of fairness and everything to do with justice.
Stiglitz goes off into proposals for a Green Keynesianism:
The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy – just as the second world war set the stage for America’s golden economic era, with the fastest rate of growth in its history amidst shared prosperity. The Green New Deal would stimulate demand, ensuring that all available resources were used; and the transition to the green economy would likely usher in a new boom. Trump’s focus on the industries of the past, like coal, is strangling the much more sensible move to wind and solar power. More jobs by far will be created in renewable energy than will be lost in coal.
What Stiglitz writes here is actually a paean to Green capitalism. He states that ‘the war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy.’ For ‘the economy’ read capital. Trump’s thinking may be backward, but this Green Keynesianism is also wedded to the very expansionary economic system that is driving climate crisis. It is revealing that at a time when environmentalist economists are writing of the degrowth economy, Stiglitz is extolling the virtues of New Deal economics for delivering the ‘fastest rate of growth in history.’ We need to uproot the growth dynamic at source and reclaim ‘the economy’ in terms of its original meaning with respect to the earthly household.
Stiglitz proceeds to detail what can be done in reordering economic priorities, you can read the article for his eminently practical suggestions. He presents these as the advocates’ ambition for the Green New Deal. He’s right to argue that it is ‘not unrealistic one.’ Stiglitz is evidently having to counter the claims of critics that New Deal economics is unaffordable and utopian. He does this effectively, but the fact that he has to go to these lengths merely serves to underline the utterly mediocre quality of thought and imagination possessed by far too many in conventional politics. Because what Stiglitz writes is itself pretty tame compared to what we need to do. You see, Stiglitz’s insistence that not only ‘can’ we afford to pay the costs of climate action, we simply ‘must,’ applies also to his modest proposals. The case against the Green New Deal is not that it is radical, but that it isn’t radical enough. Instead of trying to fuel the capital system with clean energy so as to increase growth rates, we need to stop wasting money and resources reflating a corpse, uproot the accumulative logic, and put the economy on a sustainable basis. We can’t afford not to, after all.
I come now to the analogy with world war. Others have made the comparison before, arguing for a climate mobilization along the lines of the response of the allies in the Second World War. And I am, indeed, a member of the Climate Mobilization. I’m not quite sure the analogy to war quite works, though, because we are not actually fighting an external enemy, we are fighting ourselves and our own behaviours. To a great extent we are fighting our own governments, wedded as they are to an economic system based upon an expansionary accumulative dynamic. We, too, as workers, consumers, and citizens depend upon the health of that dynamic – economic growth in a more neutral idiom – for income and expenditure, to pay our bills, buy our houses, consume the goods and services we consider integral to the good life. It is effectively our own relations and our own actions externalised in the form of climate change that we are being called on to fight. We know the enemy, and it is neither climate nor nature, it is us, our own selves and our relations to others.
To put the point that way underlines the profoundly psychological dimension of the climate crisis. The transformations that are required are not merely social and structural – as incredibly difficult as they will be to effect – but deeply human. I try to avoid utopian thinking, and instead argue that this is an age of practical idealism. By this, I mean that we need ideals to inspire hope and activism, to encourage individuals to associate together in common cause, and obligate them in the commitment to the common good. But these ideals need to be attached to their means of realization. Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing inspires more than the power of example. We need to foster the inner motives, draw in increasing numbers, mobilize support, turn passive denial into passive acceptance and then into active campaigning – we need momentum.
The alternative is continued political and institutional failure in the context of increasingly destructive climate impacts, fostering a sense of hopelessness, paralysing the public with fear and panic. Hence my emphasis on the motivational economy, involving a deep psychic and moral dimension that cuts to the very core of our being.
There are significant differences between the environmental problems confronting civilisation now and the problems that have beset civilizations before. The most obvious different is that there is no obvious split between good and evil, in the sense that the principal decision makers are mere personifications of political systems and economic categories. You can challenge and change the decision makers, only to find that the decisions they have been taking have been forced upon them. You have to change the categories and systems. (This way my central point in my introduction to the thought of Istvan Meszaros, references below).
Yes, there is an enemy in the shape of the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who are its paid backers. We have indeed tried this politics of 'us and them' in relation to such enemies in business and government, highlighting the activities of the likes of the Koch brothers. The enemy remains hard to publicize precisely because they seem an integral part of ‘the economy’ upon which all depend. If they are an enemy, then they are the enemy within, not without. And they are a part of an entire system, a system based on exponential expansion. We have heard the slogan which divides people between the 1% and the 99%. In Britain, the Labour leader repeats the line that the Labour Party is 'for the many and not the few.' This kind of thinking doesn’t work in politics. It encourages people to think they are on the side of the majority, and fails to see that there are layers of dependency linking top to bottom. The loyalty becomes weaker as we go down the layers, certainly, but very many who are not members of the few, will nevertheless stand with them, for reasons of immediate self-interest, than join with those seeking radical change. We need a class analysis, and we need to develop the subjective factor to ensure that the working class transforms itself from being a class in itself to being a class for itself. Hence my emphasis on social change as coincidental with and conditional upon a self-change.
All of this is much more difficult than mobilizing against an external enemy in a world war. But that’s where we need to go. Because there is no safe passage through the environmental bottleneck we are entering in the coming decades that does not entail a radical reorientation of institutional, economic, and social priorities. Those in politics who are lamenting the growing extremism, fanaticism, and fundamentalism in the world need to understand quickly that the moderate middle ground they yearn for no longer exists. It has been hollowed out from within, and the challenge is to identify, isolate, and eliminate the forces that have been sending the world to extremes. In other words, in typically superficial manner, the ‘moderates’ are objecting to the personifications of extremism, and failing utterly to identify the forces for extremism. There is the bitterest of ironies in the fact that it is these self-styled centrists and moderates who, in high office, have themselves surrendered to these extremist forces, bringing about the populist backlash we now see. Obama promised us Main Street, but gave us Wall Street. Blair and Brown, and Clinton, did the same earlier. And still the moderates want us to stand on the centre ground that is now thoroughly colonised and occupied by capital, in financial and corporate form. That kind of centrism is a dead-end.
Big changes are in the offing. Prime Minister May’s last act in government may well be her most important legacy. But it requires big changes. To meet the 2050 net-zero target, for instance, the UK will have to plant almost 3bn trees. At a time when green belt land is being opened up for further ‘development,’ this target means not merely a change in policies but a complete reversal. We have to recognize here that councils have been finding it well-nigh impossible to resist developmental imperatives. We need to shift to electronic cars, develop a new relation to the land, make big changes in the political economy of food.
In one line, we have to devise systems in which human values prevail over the economic imperatives of capital. I will write no more than that here, for the simple reason I must have written well over one million words on it since the 1990s. This is key. This is the message I have tried to bring to the environmental movement, only to be told – repeatedly – that socialism is the same as capitalism, socialism is just a species of industrialism, that such talk is extremist and will put people off, and that, as I was told in criticism of my views, 'left-wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism.'
To which I say, are you people serious? There is a need to engage in analysis at the level of social forms and relations rather than talk in broad brush strokes. If you think you can present the demand for radical root-and-branch changes in such a way as to make people think the necessary changes we need to make will be effortless and ‘moderate’, then feel free to try. I call it cowardice and evasion, and would caution people against the blandishments of ‘independent’ ‘third way’ thinking, since it always collapses into surrender to the dominant forces of a very unreformed status quo.
Stating the science, declaring a climate emergency, and demanding action is the easy part, and I continually urge environmentalists to move quickly past this first stage to the next stages of practical engagement. We know what the problem is and we know where we need to be, it’s how to get from here to there that is the main problem. And this is not merely a technical or institutional problem, something resolved within effective policies within effective policy frameworks (crucial as that is). It is a problem of winning and retaining active support for change on the part of the citizen public. Without a mass movement of citizens, you are effectively a powerless elite challenging entrenched and very powerful elites. You won’t win, and the people won't back you.
We need to be clear and honest about what is entailed in the process of getting from here to there. I do good work on meeting the alternative institutions requirement in my Meszaros piece. There, I focus on forms of governance and economic provision. There is a need to do the same thing at the level of specifics, showing how, for instance, we can recalibrate the economy to end waste and deliver a circular and real materials economy or, to take another instance, rethink our relation to food and the land to radically transform our agriculture and our forestry. All of these changes are made with the end of stabilizing the climate in view.
This is an immense civilizational and psychological challenge. We are being called to change entire modalities and mentalities. (see my The Coming Ecological Revolution).
Individual choices and lifestyle changes matter. We need to fly much less, preferably not at all. We need to build towns, villages, and communities where everything we need is to hand, within walking distance. It’s possible. I have never driven a car in my life. I feel no need to. There is some evidence that air passenger numbers are beginning to fall in various countries. Individuals are choosing not to fly. In terms of what you need, learn to value what is close to hand and, if something is missing, see if you can supply it. I tend not to write too much on this aspect of environmental change. It can sound a little holier and worthier than thou, a little sanctimonious, and a little dull, too. I do emphasize personal moral effort, as part of my emphasis upon alienation as a self-alienation; the personal dimension is required to give active moral content and motivational force to the big changes we need. But lifestyle choices can trick us into trying to resolve collective problems as isolated individuals. It can’t be done. Failing to make a connection with the bigger picture, a lifestyle politics – which is effectively culture substituting for real politics – can become a distraction. Here is the danger of a new climate denialism, well-meaning people who, eschewing the radical demands of climate justice and politics, engage in veganism, or campaigning against plastic bags, or making some personal sacrifice (which often turns out to be something they were going to do anyway, to save money that they continue to spend elsewhere) that makes them feel good about themselves. It’s a continuation of self-absorption with a little green halo attached and it is worse than useless for the reason that it allows people to be comfortable within a passive acceptance that does no good. Such activities can never sum to the effective climate action required to keep us this side of eco-catastrophe.
I hesitate before writing this next line, because it is precisely the kind of general claim I have come to loathe: we need to ensure the ecological transformation of ‘the political’ to bring our actions and decisions in line with planetary boundaries.
That’s true and, as single sentences go, is a good start. I remember writing some such thing a few years ago, only to be asked ‘how do we do that?’ Everything depends upon being able to answer that question. Far too much time has been wasted in stating the obvious, as if the day will come when there will be big changes attendant upon mass passive acceptance. There won’t. There will be big changes when we have integrated knowledge and know-how within the means and mechanisms – moral and psychological as well as institutional and economic – enabling big collective action. That’s the ‘how’ part. And it involves much more than increasing the numbers of climate voters. I’m looking at the Greens hitting 20% in Germany, and the optimistic view that we could have a Green Chancellor in the new future. My view here is that the old reformist parties are exhausted and hopelessly split, so people are looking elsewhere. But to the extent that they gain office within the capital system, Green Parties will find that they are working within the same constraints of those old reformist parties. Those looking forward to a future of parliamentary ecologism need to look back and draw the right conclusions from the failures of parliamentary socialism. Reformists make the mistake of seeing capital as a public domain amenable to persuasion by the democratic will of the people (or scientific reason and moral appeal), whereas in fact capital is a regime of private accumulation centred on the constant expansion of monetary values. Accumulate is Moses and all the prophets, as Marx told us.
We can pick and choose numbers. Younger voters between 18 and 24 seem to give the environment more priority than older voters. I always seem to remember this being the case. I have no numbers here, I’m just going by my own experience. It makes sense now, seeing as the people who are young now are the ones who will be facing any climate catastrophe that is to come. They have the most to lose by a moderation that clings to a failing status quo. Greta Thunberg and others led a children’s strike and it gained a lot of publicity. I hate to be critical, not least because of the attention such actions has received. But I’m cautious. In moving to the next stage, Thunberg is calling for adults to join the children on 20 September in a global general strike. I’m greatly worried by the wildly utopian nature of such a call, because it indicates a detachment from realities so chasmic as to make clear the extent to which environmentalism still doesn’t have an effective political identity. A global general strike like this has to be prepared properly. I argue for what is called a ‘just transition,’ something that involves trade unions and the organised working class in the conversion to the ecological society. Here is where we can put social and environmental justice together in the one cause. The working class has the structural capacity to act, it has the power to subvert global capital. And it is this force that will give environmentalism a material futurity. This is why I am an eco-socialist. But this is very different from a liberal reformist environmentalism that feels entitled to call upon the working classes to do its bidding, being wheeled on to put pressure on governments to act, before being wheeled off stage by the liberal elite. Marx wrote scathingly on ‘would-be universal reformers’ who feel able to issue orders to the working class in support of their own agendas. (Marx Manifesto 1973: 30). From first to last he affirmed that the emancipation of the working class is an act of the working class themselves. We can argue about class, and who and isn’t included. These are issues of common concern, and I dislike exclusion. But I retain an emphasis on the self-activity and self-organisation of marginalised, exploited, subaltern classes, and see them as much more than tools to be used in external political agendas. If the working classes are being called upon to go on strike globally, then I want a more explicit commitment to a class politics on the part of those making the call. It is the unrealism of the claim that strikes me most of all, though. It is as though some environmentalists, in the singular focus on climate, really don’t understand the realities of politics in a class system. Trade unions the world over are subject to legal obligations and constraints, party to agreements with employers, subject to systems of industrial jurisprudence, or just flat outlawed as independent movements. Workers cannot just go on strike, not even for reasons of immediate sectional concern. If people don’t know that then they know nothing of social and political realities. I’d suggest, seeing as they are making big demands with respect to changing our entire way of life, they took the trouble to acquaint themselves with those realities. It’s called real life and real people.
Below I supply references to some of my key works relating to the above, providing links to full copies I have made available in free public access.
The following engage in systemic and structural analysis to emphasize the need to uproot the accumulative dynamic at the heart of the capitalist economy. Those who employ the slogan ‘system change, not climate change’ need to engage in such analysis, instead of addressing their degrowth demands to governments who function as capital’s political command centres.
The following develops an integral, holistic ecology based on natural dependency, relative moral independence, and social interdependency.
The following sets out my views on the Paris agreement, Trump’s withdrawal, and what needs to be done to effectively engage in the politics of climate justice
The following sets out the terms of a moral ecology.
The politics of a social and moral ecology, establishing the terms of the ecological transformation of ‘the political.’
A critique of ecological modernization as the techno-capitalist appropriation of ecology.
The following volumes collect my writing and reporting on the environmental crisis in the decade from the mid-2000’s to 2013, before I took to spreading the climate message on social media:
My past work on Lewis Mumford setting out the architectonics of the future ecological civilisation:
As you can see, I’ve been busy over the years. I’ve been stung lately by suggestions that I have repudiated the environmental cause. I have not. I have simply strengthened my consistent emphases on moral and political dimensions, arguing that environmentalism is badly deficient in both areas, hence its practical weakness and political failures. I make my critical comments to strengthen environmentalism as a movement with real force in the field of practical reason.
You can check out my work on either my Academia or Humanities Commons sites.
I have organised my posts thematically on my Being and Place site.
I have made my work available in free access. My concern all along has been to spread ideas, share ideas, and inspire ideas. I have worked for free and have never charged for my time and talent. My reward is to have worked with academics, campaigners, students at all levels, and to have had my efforts acknowledged and my work praised. A little thanks goes a long way when you work alone for long stretches.