Nov 4, 2021
Only Global Democracy Can Beat The Climate Crisis
The disgusting lie everyone is being told about the climate crisis is that world governments are ever going to do enough to fight it.
They won’t. At least, not fast enough to matter.
That is the conclusion I’ve been forced to draw from many (too many, honestly) years of studying the science behind human organization and institutions. Sadly, we are all being lied to by politicians and pundits who claim to care about the climate crisis.
The latest IPCC report confirms that all efforts to mitigate climate change so far have failed — and that those world governments have agreed to make are wholly inadequate to meet the challenge, to put it politely. The recent COP26 meetup in Glasgow— Greta Thunberg summed it up aptly as “Great North greenwash festival” — achieved far too little, if anything at all.
In the best possible scenario science can foresee — the one where humanity manages to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 — the planet warms by a dangerous 1.5C this century, and probably a catastrophic 2C.
For reference, the planet is today about 1 degree Celsius warmer than it was before carbon emissions spiked with the discovery that burning coal, oil, or natural gas releases a lot of energy. Exactly as even crude climate models going back more than fifty years predicted, increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere has altered the Sun-Earth energy balance.
More heat is getting trapped under the blanket of insulating greenhouse gases that prevent Earth from getting too cold. This imbalance is intensifying weather patterns globally, leading to more frequent extremes and less predictable conditions.
The catastrophes people are pointing to today as evidence of climate change are set to become normal if carbon levels do not decline. Net Zero by 2050 is akin to abject surrender, writing off hundreds of millions of human lives and leaving the global economy on a precipice.
Agriculture, water, and natural ecosystems all rely on stable climate patterns — availability of sunlight, hydration, and vital nutrients are tied to the weather. When it changes, habitat ranges, cropping conditions, and rainfall all do too.
No matter how technologically sophisticated humans may be, we still have to work with nature to produce most of the basic essentials that let us live. Farmers may know how to get as much yield out of an acre of crop as scientifically possible these days, but if all of a sudden rain doesn’t come on schedule their entire world is thrown into chaos.
Most of the unhelpful climate change panic that is being generated to convince people they need to buy green products fails to address the most fundamental threat climate change poses to humanity. Earth can produce enough calories and water to support around ten to twelve billion people if these are efficiently spread around — but newsflash: they aren’t, which is why there are local shortages.
Climate change is going to savage efficiency across multiple vital global systems, because doing things more efficiently is mostly a function of being able to accurately predict future conditions. Farmers plant crops based on what the history of local weather implies about the chance of an unexpected frost or spring storm destroying all their hard work.
So it’s kind of a big deal that we will soon have no reliable data from past times in Earth’s history when greenhouse gas concentrations were this high to tell farmers and water managers how to cope. Predictive models will be wrong more often, leading to losses that wouldn’t have happened if the climate was shifting at its natural slow, almost imperceptible pace.
Wealthier people will feel the impact as an increase in the prices they pay for things. Poorer people will bear a far greater burden for a slew of reasons must mostly a lack the resources needed to cope. Their desperation will mean chances are higher they will be pursue illegal, even violent actions that wind up hurting everyone.
When you have this kind of problem operating alongside deeply entrenched systems of inequality all but willfully blind fools understand dominate our lives, conditions are ripe for an absolute disaster. A systems collapse that leaves everyone worse off, even those who can ride out the calamities reasonably intact.
It is these political, economic, and social inequalities, reified in the form of the modern nation-state, that are directly responsible for impeding real climate progress.
Failure to reform them, which requires minimizing the power of nation-states over our lives, is what will ultimately doom the Earth to rapid and severe climate change.
Make no mistake — the wealthy and privileged will weather the storm. Humanity won’t be extinguished by climate change, life will simply become unbearable for billions. The global elite is consuming the planet’s resources, not them, but they are set to pay the ultimate price because of disparities of power.
Every world leader who just made the pilgrimage to Glasgow for COP26 to greenwash their country’s reputation represents a nation-state — and the elite interests that dominate their particular example of that most cruel form of human organization. Each nation-state represents an elite group’s claim to sovereignty over territory — a polite way of saying that they are the only entity with the right to use violence within it.
The United Nations, as cool as it might be, is critically hampered by the fact it is an organization of nation-states who all (mostly) agree to respect each other’s sovereignty. Their right to do what they want within their own borders, free from outside interference.
This 400-year old pact between gangsters is why world leaders will ultimately do too little to fight the climate crisis. No organization exists that can penalize a sovereign nation-state for not meeting its carbon reduction targets, and as U.S. President Joe Biden’s pathetic closing remarks attacking China and Russia at COP26 prove, climate action is already being subordinated to the cancerous geopolitics of the world’s dominant powers.
Just as a group of friends going to dinner will always discover each person underestimates their portion of the bill when the check arrives, even those world leaders who do genuinely care about fighting climate change will wind up doing far too little because of the way the system is structured. Political scientists call this a collective action problem, cognitive scientists recognize it as a function of the way people process information.
We all have biases and misconceptions that color our analysis. Recognizing and mitigating them is a difficult job, made harder by the common habit of asserting bias whenever someone dislikes a thing another person said. But there is a big difference between bias adopted because it profits you in some way — this is the heart of political spin — and native bias that stems from your individual perspective.
The former is not fixable because it is strategic — Tucker Carlson is actively cribbing Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda to earn money, and will not change his behavior until it isn’t profitable. The latter, by contrast, is totally normal — and a working political system can handle it, even if many people hold insane beliefs, because everyone tends to balance each other out.
I am naturally biased in favor of reducing suffering wherever possible, particularly when it is being experienced by those least able to bear the pain. This bias you can always recognize in my writing, and ought to balance it against the natural bias of other folks — off the top of my head I’d suggest reading indi.ca, Jessica Wildfire, Lucy M., and Michael Arceneaux (and they’re just a few among many!).
The other kind of bias I avoid to the best of my ability. Even if, to keep people’s attention, I do have to use inflammatory speech in my web writing, I don’t invoke it the way most writers do.
American writers are trained by the market to use the rhetoric of a particular group or side. The American school system teaches students to mimic powerful people when they reason and avoid real critical thinking at any cost.
I’m not insulated from market pressures myself, but I’m not writing in order to pursue a career as a writer. I think of myself more as a scout, applying my military and academic training to help whomever I can comprehend the weird world we live in so they can make their own choices about how to act.
This is what lets me write without the profit-seeking bias and shed the rhetoric of all sides. I affiliate with no one, and my only aim is to try and help make the world an easier place to live in for all of us.
So in this vein, here’s some harsh truths that will bug most well-off American and European suburbanites wherever they fall on the political spectrum:
- Individual actions are good, but inadequate, because we are all too immersed in deeply broken systems that demand carbon
- Governments around the world are not democratic enough to make voluntary carbon cuts fast enough to slow the climate crisis
- International conflicts and geopolitical competition will subvert rapid climate action because fossil fuels remain a vital strategic asset
The first truth is unpopular especially among wealthy types who want to push the burden of climate change mitigation on the rest of us, but also with a set of green high priests who preach austerity and anti-consumption as the only True Way. These, unfortunately, cluster in the education system, training millions to believe in what amounts to a psuedoscientific utopian myth of radical transformative social change.
Reducing consumption by the world’s wealthiest billion is a laudable goal, but any success will be swamped by the inevitable increase in consumption by the world’s other seven billion once the entire planet fully industrializes. This is an unstoppable process, and the reason it is entirely possible Earth will see 3C or even 4C of warming this century, levels associated with truly catastrophic impacts.
This is not because of overpopulation, but of inefficient global systems. Legacies of European colonialism and global conflict that still linger, not yet fully extinguished.
Fighting climate change by reducing global consumption is just not possible, no matter how much you try to shame privileged people into reducing their carbon footprint. This is only a sort of moral greenwashing, a way for privileged suburbanites to evade their collective responsibility for screwing up the global climate while feeling good about themselves.
In a similar vein, COP26 was nothing more than a moral greenwashing opportunity for global governments. Elected officials who won’t be around long enough to be held accountable for their failures make grand promises, but all that might happen is carbon emissions getting shifted around so a few rich countries can look green while retaining the ability to shame poorer ones for not pulling their weight.
The simple hard truth of the climate crisis is that humanity has no choice but to actively manage the composition of the atmosphere. Not only must we stop carbon emissions, we must also find a way to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. This is costly, as a major Icelandic effort shows, but there is now no alternative.
Why? Because C02 hangs around up in the sky for nearly a century. Global heating and consequent rapid climate change that is already unsustainable at 1 degree C above pre-industrial levels are the new baseline for humanity barring real action to manage the atmosphere.
Limiting warming to 1.5C-2.0C is a tourniquet on an amputation. About a billion people will be forced to move to higher, cooler, and/or wetter places. Trillions of dollars of economic productivity will disappear as natural and social disasters batter one region after another. There will be more pandemics, more wars, more countries collapsing altogether, armed factions using nuclear weapons on blood-drenched battlefields.
And this is the good scenario that many of us will live to see even if two hundred squabbling governments ever do manage to cooperate and avoid the kinds of traps that typically befall great efforts even where everyone totally agrees on what to do.
Which leads to a derived truth: There is a single basic prerequisite for stopping climate change from destroying our future, and that is a global democracy, truly accountable to the people. An Earth Democratic Federation empowered and funded to take the simple actions required to save the planet from the climate crisis.
This is not meant to be a global world-state with the power to crush all opposition. The only people who want something like that to exist are rich technocrats with delusions of being smart enough to rule a world of billions of independent people. People like Matt Yglesias and most of the people who read The Atlantic or New Yorker.
The Earth Democratic Federation must be a voluntary global democracy capable of pooling the resources of the willing to directly fund green nation-building wherever they can do the most good. Not all parts of the world will be involved, at first — the task is to build a global organization with such immense popular support and a track record of success that people clamor to join up.
Members of the Earth Democratic Federation — whether countries, cities, or companies— will agree to pay a fixed percentage of their gross revenues or domestic domestic product to a fund managed by a democratically elected Assembly. Money will be allocated to large-scale projects designed to create self-sustaining, independent, climate resilient communities wherever existing governments have failed to get the job done themselves.
Which is, obviously, pretty much everywhere — but in some places far more than others. That is why the EDF must take on the hard challenge of going into the most destitute or war-torn regions and building locally-owned green infrastructure that creates peaceful, secure refuge communities.
The technology needed to shift the vast majority of power production and transportation to low carbon energy has been around for decades. Solar panels, wind turbines, biomass boilers, and small-scale run-of-river hydroelectric plants can be built out all across the world to replace coal, oil, and natural gas.
Fossil fuel companies are often scorned as climate villains, but what many people conveniently forget is that all companies are artificial constructs made by governments. A corporation is just a legal cover meant to shield its investors from liability if it takes on debt and goes bankrupt. Governments everywhere could require corporations they charter to behave differently, embrace social responsibility as being equally important as shareholder dividends.
They don’t, because companies are seen by our wealthy global elite caste as essential to preserving the nation-state. Governments have long subsidized fossil fuel companies for the simple fact that coal, oil, and natural gas are extremely valuable. Those with control over abundant sources tend to be wealthy and powerful (even if their people aren’t), those that lack it take great care to secure long-term access to a stable supply.
This is a function of the energy density of fossil fuels — put a little energy int and you get a whole lot more out thanks to aeons of geological pressure acting on formerly living, carbon-rich tissue (thanks dinosaurs!). Human technological development — all civilization, ultimately — has always been driven by the basic principle of energy gain — organized agriculture created food surpluses thousands of years ago, which is what triggered rapid population growth and the emergence of identifiable persistent city-states.
That’s energy gain in action. A farm means one doesn’t have to walk as far to get food. The time saved, even if you have to re-invest a lot of it in maintenance, is also energy saved. And there are useful economies of scale to exploit on most landscapes, which is why farm families are so big —each added unit of labor brings in more energy than is required to sustain it to a certain point.
Energy gain leads to population growth, which eventually leads to some mind working out how to access a source of energy with even more gain. Fossil fuel energy gain powered European colonialism and global dominance for five centuries — and increased atmospheric carbon levels, which now drives climate change. The rest of the world is catching up fast, accelerating the damage Europeans wrought getting rich — and who can blame them? No one wants to be poor.
Green energy is relatively low-gain, but makes up for this by being available nearly everywhere and effectively inexhaustible, unlike coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. The more demand for solar panels, wind turbines, and the like, the faster costs for them fall, so the more you commit to build the better.
This kind of mass-scale investment is only happening in a few countries, and nowhere anywhere near the pace it needs to occur worldwide to have any hope of limiting global warming to 1.5C. Look at any of the official plans released by any country with fossil fuel reserves and you’ll note that most aren’t planning to really phase out their extraction for decades — if ever.
Net zero pledges are both meaningless and set to arrive too late to matter. Our only hope in the global fight against climate change is to pool resources globally and apply them to build new green infrastructure on a massive scale where it can do the most good.
If this doesn’t happen, the people living in these places will still develop their way out of poverty — the same way Europeans did, by burning coal. No amount of global shaming will stop them, because, again — few people want to be poor.
Only organized global action can support the universal local-scale efforts needed to lower the humanity’s impact on both the climate and Earth’s environment more generally. This is only going to happen if a global democracy is built capable of securing participation from hundreds of millions of people.
Not impossible — but certainly expensive. Relying on existing institutions simply won’t get the job done — humanity has none designed to handle global problems.
The world economy generates at least a hundred trillion dollars annually. Military spending consumes about two percent of that — a tragic and frankly criminal waste.
It is both affordable and frankly sensible to expect every major political entity on the planet, whether organized as nation-states or independent democratic communities, to contribute 1%-2% of their gross revenues to defend us all against climate change. There are additional security benefits to consider as well — to fight climate change requires green nation building, which produces regional stability that keeps people from having to flee and become refugees.
If you truly care about dealing with climate change, global democracy is what you must help build. The first step is to get the most democratic countries around the world, the smaller countries ignored by the big powers, to embrace a common vision of a working global democracy.
Structured as a federation, members can remain independent, though they must conform to collective rules. A directly elected Global Assembly has to be set up to provide democratic accountability. Actual staff need to be hired to maintain the accounts members will send funds to. Each participating member of whatever geographic size will elect its own Councillor who will be responsible for overseeing projects in their area.
And as soon as it can muster the funds — likely in the ten billion dollar range — it must begin deploying to places where people need and want help from an outside source. They will receive direct investments and technical support to help build collectively owned green infrastructure managed by a local democratic government. Locals will be trained and shops established to make sure all maintenance and repairs can be done locally as well.
Earth’s material systems have got to be rebuilt green and efficient from the ground up. There is no real alternative in the fight against climate change. And to make this happen, Earth needs a global democracy.
If it doesn’t get one soon, millions of people will die who don’t have to and all our lives will be worse than they otherwise could be.
Forget your carbon footprint. Embrace global democracy.
That’s our best hope for a better future.
