Nov 2, 2021
Spare Me Your Learned Helplessness, Suburbanites
Your world is ending, not mine. And the more you whine about it, the worse it will be… for you, not me.
I know where to live to avoid the worst impacts. And as climate change bites while world leaders dither, where you live is everything.
The bitter truth about climate change and all its very real, incredibly destructive impacts is that these aren’t felt the same globally.
They are and will always be directly felt regionally, and some places will do better than others. Certain hazards, like wildfires and water stress, can be managed. Others, like hurricanes, and sea level rise, generally can’t.
In the English-speaking world, it is becoming fashionable to talk about the future in apocalyptic terms. Extreme weather, natural disasters, water and food shortages — it is all the rage among educated types to declare the end of the world is nigh.
They aren’t entirely wrong. That being said, the doomer position on climate is… well, it’s wrong. Dangerously wrong.
Planet Earth is not going to die in your lifetime or mine. Human civilization will not disappear this century. Life will change, but it won’t end.
The bitter truth about climate change is that it won’t be the epic catastrophe too many green advocates imagine. It will cause massive disruptions — but the dirty little secret of the thing is that most of these will be felt not by well-off American suburbanites, but poor folks in Bangladesh and Indonesia and Oceania.
Too many self-described environmentalists have adopted an unscientific view of global systems that ignore the real impacts climate change will have on people’s lives. They embrace a fearful vision of the future that is, when you get right down to it, utterly self-centered.
The trouble with American suburbs is that they are a wholly artificial landscape. Wherever you grow up and live, the environment around you fundamentally shapes how you see the world.
For most of history, humans lived either in rural or urban settings. Both evolved naturally, and despite the differences in how rural and urban folks tend to perceive the world around them both perspectives are rooted in something ancient.
Suburbs in the modern sense were created to house surplus labor after the Second World War. The model of the single-generation nuclear household spammed on television is a delusion that trains suburbanites and anyone exposed to their culture to misunderstand the reality of life.
Because suburbs are so artificial, life in them is a kind of perpetual game where everyone is trying to both stand out and not stand out at the same time. Suburban communities rely on sameness alleviated with a tiny bit of flavor, their residents learning that life depends entirely on keeping their neighbors happy.
This artificiality creates a dangerous problem when suburbanites have to cooperate with rural and urban people on big issues. Most suburban American cultural patterns are derived from an imaginary past where everyone went to the same church on Sunday, share the same basic values, and fight over superficial stuff tied to prestige within the community.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this way of living — it only becomes a problem when suburban culture is also wealthy culture in a place as broken as America. Suburban values are pushed on everyone else through the media, which habitually pretends all Americans are suburbanites going through a narrowly defined life cycle where their primary role in society is as docile consumers.
People ought to be free to live as they choose — the problem with suburban culture is that it militates against independence and diversity. People are always expected to assimilate — naturally, to a standard set by well-off white suburbanites. If you can’t, you are a target for the bullies that love this kind of fake community.
This pseudo-religious obsession has led too many so-called green advocates to insist there is a narrow path leading to a better future that relies on everyone, everywhere, voluntarily changing their behavior in the same way.
To beat great threats like climate change, suburban Green culture insists, we must all do our part to manage our personal carbon footprints. Just as every religion since the dawn of time has encouraged individuals to conform with a set of rules created by a ruling elite to secure their position, so the new Green religion creates a faith-based system where our personal actions and beliefs are all the matters.
This worldview critically relies on something that has escaped humanity for all its history: a global, universal ethic that elevates austere living as the only remedy for global disaster.
And just like any other religious movement, it is doomed to fail. The real purpose of the Green worldview now is to convince everyone to do their best and shame those who are not publicly conforming to the faith.
This, more than any other factor, is why climate change activism isn’t working. The new Green faith ignores basic science in favor of a utopian vision of humanity united in the face of a global threat. This ideology, in turn, is derived more from a Disneyfied view of life as being about choosing the correct moral team than any real desire to fix what’s wrong with the planet.
Suburbanites are trained through high school and into college to be a particular kind of “good citizen,” which boils down to being seen to behave in a certain way. The Atlantic as a magazine utterly relies on using moral arguments to bully those trained in suburban ways to think theirs is the only way.
They call it liberalism, but it is really just a secular mode of American Christianity, dominated with the cowardly fatalism of its weirdly inverted worldview. A few priests seek to tell the rest how to live, but for all the moralizing little ever seems to change — all part of the package.
I am not a suburbanite. I am a rural person who grew up with the kind of close connection with nature and my native landscape suburbanites can only dream of when they go camping near my home to try and reconnect with nature even while their presence harms it.
I’m also a trained scientist. I’ve actually designed and taught my own (very well-received) course on sustainability at a public university. I hold two graduate degrees and have published research focused on energy and deforestation. I spent a decade of my life immersed in the science of climate change, both on the natural and human side of the equation.
And the hard truth I have learned is brutally simple: only planned global redevelopment driven by new technology and accountable to democratic elections can avert the needless deaths of tens of millions of people.
Most of them won’t be from developed, wealthy countries. They will disproportionately live in places like South Asia, Africa, and Central America. American poor along the Gulf Coast and in the Midwest will suffer more than those living in the Pacific or Northeast, but it’s countries in South Asia and Africa that will get hit worse and first because they lack the resources they need to protect their people. Another legacy of European colonialism — like the bulk of historic carbon emissions.
Suburbanite Americans and Europeans don’t have the first clue how to actually protect these people — hell, we’re not even getting them Covid-19 vaccines fast enough even when that protects us in the long run. Voluntary emissions reductions by rich countries will do little to prevent the 1.5C of warming Earth is now committed to, absent reductions in atmospheric carbon.
And you know how the world is being wracked by climate disasters right now? Yeah, that’s with only 1–1.3C of warming. Barring truly radical action, this is the new normal.
This disconnect between global outcomes will ensure that people living in the nicer places never have to fully address the consequences of their consumption. No amount of moralizing or consumption taxes will be enough to stop carbon pollution.
Anyone who believes that enough people can be convinced to reduce their consumption to save the planet is a fool. No religion on the planet has ever been able to get the majority of people to agree on not killing each other over ideological nonsense.
The new suburbanite green religion is no better. It’s purpose is not to stimulate meaningful action, but to maintain a social hierarchy where those wealthy enough to perform as green crusaders become the high priests of a new faith.
They won’t actually solve climate change. Net zero by 2050 is a nice way of saying that nothing is going to happen. The COP26 greenwashing extravaganza will change nothing — none of the leaders there will be around in 2050 to punish if they fail.
And that’s the point. Suburbanites don’t want to pay for the simple solutions — building renewable energy systems literally everywhere as fast as possible — they want to be able to shame their neighbors for not being publicly green enough.
Ever notice how the tactics and rhetoric of green activists mimic those of religious orders? How consumption is spoken of in moral terms?
Welcome to every church ever founded since the beginning of time.
The vast majority of talk about climate change in America and Europe is nothing but hot air. People strive to be seen as pro-green, but few are willing to articulate the hard truths about the future that has already been written.
Nothing short of a global reboot of all energy, construction, and land management is going to blunt the edge of rapid climate change during this century. There has been too much delay — upwards of a billion people will have to move to safer ground and global systems will have to be actively managed to make sure there is enough fresh water and calories for everyone.
This won’t destroy the world. It will simply reshape it.
American suburbanites voluntarily reducing their consumption will make almost no difference in the long run. Climate change is happening right now because all the places Europeans colonized all burn coal, oil, and natural gas to produce the energy gain that allows rapid development in the modern economy.
It will continue because the rest of the world has no option but to do exactly the same, Asians and Africans having no less right to prosperity and leisure than others. Most people have no ability to reduce their consumption or choose green options because they are poor. Being able to buy green stuff is a mark of privilege and power — which is why American suburbanites are attracted to stuff like hybrid cars.
Unless people have access to inexpensive sources of green energy, until they are wealthy enough to be able to pay for environmental action, they will emit carbon. Unless you are willing to leave half the world’s population in miserable poverty, totally vulnerable to the climate change already guaranteed to take place thanks to the emissions of the past hundred years, there is no hope for fixing the environment through reducing consumption.
Every effort will be swamped by reality.
Reducing consumption benefits only your own bank account, and it is arrogant to pretend that the new green ethic is anything but a way to avoid dealing with the hard truth that the Digital Generations are on track to be less well off than our parents. Take it from me, someone who chose to work for starvation wages through a decade of education — hard work alone brings weak returns in modern American society, who you know matters far more than pure skill or effort.
Attacking fossil fuel companies for taking advantage of the fact that people need cheap energy is futile, just another way to try and escape the hard bitter truth that there is no magic green wand to wave that will suddenly make everything better. Global temperatures are certain to exceed the 1.5C limit envisioned by the Paris Agreement before 2050 unless atmospheric carbon levels decrease — which they can’t until long after net zero is achieved.
2C of warming by 2050 is likely, reaching 3C by the time people now under 40 are senior citizens.
But where you live will make all the difference in what this means for you and your family. There are numerous climate refuges around the world where conditions will be markedly better no matter how bad things get in the mid-latitudes. Wealthy, more secure regions will be able to engineer their way to a more secure, prosperous future. Those who can will move there — the poor will be left to their own devices.
And nothing any so-called Green climate advocate is pushing will change this cruel truth. Unless a global democracy is built capable of establishing the alternative global systems we need to successfully manage Earth’s biosphere.
That’s where your efforts need to be directed, Greta Thunberg. Existing governments are too broken to get the job done. Without a global organization that can pool trillions of dollars and use it to directly build community-owned green infrastructure, there is no hope.
When the world is struck by one of its inevitable recurring crises, whether pandemic or natural disaster or war, American suburbanites retreat into debate clubs each dedicated to proving the other is ruining everything for the rest and must be forced to change. They are driven to embrace a vision of the future that sees no hope for the future except through forcing their neighbors to live like them, trapping themselves a perpetual high school where certain cliques matter more than others and get to decide what life is about.
In the end, all the caterwauling and moralizing is just a smokescreen for not actually doing anything about climate change. Suburbanites in America in particular are trained to believe that if they express themselves loudly enough, make people hear their voice, all will be well.
This is functional insanity, backed by a saccharine popular culture exemplified by Disney propaganda, the House of Mouse being nothing but an entertainment machine that survives by convincing suburbanites of their own innate specialness. It is this self-delusion, not polluters or politicians or any other Captain Planet villains, that is responsible for twenty wasted years of insisting “we” (whoever we even is, it certainly doesn’t include me) have less than a decade to fix climate change.
For American suburbanites, learned helplessness has become a critical survival skill —that culture’s primary concern is responsibility avoidance. Suburbanites are taught that when things go wrong someone is to blame and must be punished, even if responsibility is in fact diffuse and collective. The goal is to never be the one caught out in the open when the hammer falls.
Everyone fights to be on the right side. As long as their number doesn’t come up, they’re happy to watch others get destroyed when the more privileged among their neighbors pick a victim to sacrifice whenever the time comes. American political culture all but deifies the suburbs, creating a false consciousness around the hard realities of climate change that lets suburbanites wring their hands and mourn all those other people who ruin the world for everyone else.
The suburbs are where the money is, and American politics and society are just as much about money as the American economy. It’s a fake nation full of liars who survive the endless game of musical chairs so long as they’ve got a sucker to screw over.
And so our thought leaders and politicians are endlessly pushing us into doomed crusades, against terror, against fascism, against climate change — yet nothing truly changes. We’re still taking off our shoes at the airport and fighting over skewed interpretations of America’s wicked history.
In 2050, I expect the exact same people will still be out there insisting there is a decade left to prevent a global disaster. One will already have happened, but suburbanites won’t care — until one comes for them.
The hard truth is that a better world will only come if it is built.
That is, if we build it.
Humanity is never going to stop consuming, the only option is to make consumption less harmful. People are never going to be able to connect their actions to concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, alternatives to pollution must be made.
One of the cruelest lies American suburbanites are told is that their individual actions are all they are supposed to worry about. Whether pandemic or climate crisis, we’re atomized and individualized, made to believe so long as we say our prayers and shop correctly, we will be saved.
750,000 lives lost to Covid-19 ought to be all the proof you need that America is a lie and no one is coming to help you. It is up to us to help ourselves. Any better alternative that might exist, we have to construct.
The simple truth about the climate crisis is that it is only solved once more carbon is leaving the atmosphere than entering it. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has to go back below 400ppm (it’s presently almost to 420) by 2050 — net-zero policies mean these levels are set to blow past 500ppm, beyond which 2C or warming is guaranteed, by mid-century.
No government working alone can get the job done. No amount of consumption reductions in rich countries on their own will stop carbon dioxide emissions soon enough to matter.
Why? Because they know most of their citizens will survive. The planet itself isn’t doomed — there was plenty of life in the dinosaur’s time, when C02 levels were around 2000 ppm — only the configuration of human society that depends on a more or less stable climate is in danger.
So when suburbanites whine about having no future, I have to roll my eyes. All this climate doom obsession does is discourage people from seeking out real solutions instead of accepting the futile palliatives offered by greenwashing suburbanites.
Spare me your learned helplessness, suburbanites. Your pathetic obsession with living Instagram-worthy lives and embracing a white savior complex achieves nothing, helps no one but yourselves.
If you really care about fighting climate change here’s what you do. Forget the technocratic nonsense of carbon taxes, cap and trade, pricing carbon, and the rest of the pseudoscience “solutions” pushed by the wealthy.
You want to make a difference in the fight against climate change? Build solar panels, wind turbines, run-of-river hydroelectric plants, and second-generation biomass farms as fast as you can, wherever you are. Shift transportation to electric and biofuel sources. Manage forests to reduce wildfire risks. Cultivate healthy soils. Give ownership of productive assets to communities instead of massive corporations.
The irony of climate change action is that all the stuff we need to be doing we ought to have done twenty years ago. There’s no point in Americans or Europeans burning coal or oil or natural gas when we could make every community energy independent using green sources. There’s no point in moralizing at anyone when carbon emissions are a material mass balance problem solvable only through technological change.
In fact, if you really care about the climate, you should consider actively increasing your carbon footprint. In truth, individual action just leaves room for power polluters to avoid making cuts. Better we all refuse to act until they do than try to change and suffer all the costs, like we usually do.
Climate change is a brutally simple problem. Too much carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere by people who don’t suffer the bulk of the consequences of this pollution. The world’s poor will suffer while the rich greenwash themselves out of any responsibility.
Nothing will change. And the creatures that, unlike humans, can’t adapt to new conditions will suffer the most.
I’m done with suburbanite morality. You want to actually build a working system, we can talk.
Otherwise, quit your whining and die in peace.
The world will go on whatever happens to you or I. Life will continue in some form. Even a nuclear holocaust or gamma ray burst from a supernova won’t wipe out humans — we’re as survivable as cockroaches if forced to be.
The challenge lies in making sure life itself isn’t a perpetual misery for most of us. That, and not morality, is why humanity must fight to defeat climate change.
