Western Comfort
"Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking."
“The universal reality,” someone observed the other day, “is that we’re fucked. Really and truly, good and hard.”
The author went on:
Not right now. Not today. As bad as things feel at the moment, they’re almost certain to get dramatically worse in the relatively near term—but only if present trends continue. And by “present trends” I actually mean “our present stupidity.”
And yet his message was not a bleak one: expanding on an off-hand reference to Voltaire’s Candide, he explained that “we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, but with surprisingly little effort we could.”
I don’t always agree with this writer, even though he happens to be myself, but I think he makes some decent points that warrant further consideration.
He mentions—I mentioned—that our civilizational difficulties had been the topic of conversation over drinks with friends on Friday night.
I’ll call them Tom, Mike, and Bob.
The topic arose when Tom observed that an employee at his firm had posed an awkward question at one of their big internal meetings that morning.
The meeting had begun with a long presentation from senior leadership. The first half of the presentation had focused on the company’s current performance and strategies for future growth. The second half had concerned itself with the company’s various sustainability initiatives. (The company is deeply committed to the so-called green transition.)
During the Q&A after the presentation, one employee had expressed feelings of cognitive dissonance: how could they simultaneously focus on growing the company—growth! growth! growth!—and reducing their carbon footprint? How could they be counseling their clients on strategies for growth and shrinkage?
“He had a point,” Tom said. “If we really want to reduce our impact on the climate, shouldn’t we all be focused on shrinking rather than expanding our operations? But how can we do that and stay in business?”
“You can’t,” I said, “and you shouldn’t. Everyone should be focused on economic growth of every kind, because economic growth lets you solve problems.”
And we were off to the races.
I enjoy this little quartet because we disagree so completely on so many things but we also all enjoy debating our differences in a civil and congenial way. Voices are never raised, faces are never flushed, tempers never flare.
Tom didn’t feel I appreciated the magnitude of the climate crisis. Entire countries are going to be wiped off the map, he explained. There are going to be droughts and famines and wars, which are going to produce massive human migrations that throw the developed world into chaos.
I said that there had always been droughts and famines and wars and disruptive human migrations. Recorded human history is full of them. Not that long ago, on the geological timeline, the very spot in which we were sitting had been under a kilometer of ice. Wouldn’t we do better to focus on adaptation to our changing climate rather than attempts to prevent it from changing? And wouldn’t it be prudent either way to have more rather than less money at our disposal to address those challenges, however we chose to define and address them?
Tom did not believe a strategy of adaptation was a good idea. He felt I was missing the boat entirely. How do people “adapt” to a planet unfit for human life?
I said that I wasn’t aware of any scenarios proposed by even the most serious climate scientists suggesting the entire planet would be uninhabitable.
“What are people supposed to do when the sea levels rise?” he asked.
“Move,” I said.
This produced laughter: partly at the sheer flippance of my response, but mostly (I suspect) out of their incredulity that I could be taking things so lightly.
“Don’t you understand,” Tom said, “that’s exactly what I’m talking about? What do you think migrations are? It’s people moving.”
More laughter, and I joined right in. I hadn’t been sufficiently specific in my flip response. Fair enough.
I defended my position first by pointing out that people were always moving. Always. Didn’t my friends remember the maps we’d been shown in school of Pangea, or whatever the hell they called that singular landmass that had, over time, separated into our current continents? And that was after hundreds of millions of years during which the earth had been a toxic mess of volcanoes, its oceans a chemical soup, its atmosphere a poisonous fog? Remember all the ice ages? How about all the fossils of aquatic creatures always being dug up in the middle of what are now arid deserts? The world is always changing and all life, not just human life, has always adapted, and will always have to.
(“We need to colonize Mars,” Bob said. “The whole solar system,” Mike added. We all agreed that mankind would certainly need to establish a presence on other planets to ensure its long-term survival. Even if the “climate crisis” doesn’t do us in, there are asteroids and supervolcanoes and other extinction-level events to be wary of. We drank a toast to Elon Musk’s continued good health.)
All that said, I said, the sea isn’t going to rise ten feet overnight. It’s not going to be one massive sudden tsunami in which the coastlines of the world are suddenly submerged. It’s a very slow and gradual thing.
When I said people can move, I said, I didn’t mean that everyone in Denmark would have to scramble like hell down to Germany or up to the mountains of Norway and Sweden all at once: I meant that even in the worst case scenarios, people who live along the shore will one day say to themselves, hm, the water seems to be eating into my property. At this rate, my yard will be entirely underwater in just twenty, thirty, forty years. So they’ll sell their houses to people less averse to that risk and move a block or two inland.
I didn’t mention the $12 million waterfront estate that the climate conscious Obamas purchased on Martha’s Vineyard but I probably should have. Who would buy a waterfront home on an island if they genuinely believed the sea was going to up and swallow it one of these days? That’s a hell of an investment to make on a doomed property. Follow that link and take a gander at their estate, which appears to be about six inches above sea level.
I was not persuasive.
Portions of my argument were endorsed by Mike and Bob, and even Tom conceded many of my points. But Tom remained adamant that unless we did something drastic the climate was going to change in ways catastrophic to human affairs. He wasn’t going to budge on that, any more than I was going to budge on my own belief that that the changing climate was a challenge, as it always had been and always would be, but not an existential crisis.
The argument was therefore abandoned and we focused on the question of what to do.
“We need to keep our economies humming and make more babies,” I said.
This, too, elicited laughter, so I elaborated. I began drawing charts in the air.
“Here’s population growth,” I said, drawing an imaginary upward curve. “We’re up to seven billion or something now.”
No disagreement.
“Here’s the percentage of humanity dying of preventable disease,” I said, this time drawing a downward curve.
“Here’s people starving to death. Dying in childbirth. Killed in war. Living in extreme poverty. Illiteracy.” One slash after another, starting as high as I could reach and plunging down toward the floor.
“Even today, right here, right now, with seven billion of us on this rock, when we’ve just been through a global pandemic and there’s a hot war in Europe, we’re still living better lives than any people have at any other point in history. If there’s any correlation between population and economic activity and human welfare, it’s that the greater the economic growth and the larger the population, the better off we all are.”
This was received with general assent, even from Tom, but someone—I forget who—reminded me that past performance was no guarantee of future results.
“And there’s another big problem,” Mike said. “I hate agreeing with Putin, but one thing he’s got right is that we’ve gotten decadent in the west.”
There was unanimity on that: things have gotten so good for so many of us that we’ve begun to take it for granted. We’ve begun to consider our prosperity a birthright rather than a gift bequeathed to us by forebears who struggled against all odds to achieve it. We love all the stuff but we’re not so keen on the struggle.
“So why not keep our economies blasting at full speed,” I asked, “so we have the money we need to keep improving our quality of our life and to deal with whatever nightmares the universe throws at us? Or whatever nightmares our own stupidity causes? And whatever the solution to our problems turns out to be, it’s surely got to come from a human being, so why not tilt the odds in our favor by making as many as we can? How can we solve anything by making ourselves poorer or by creating fewer potential problem solvers?”
(One good counter argument nobody made: while one in a hundred million people might have the genius required to solve otherwise intractable problems, history suggests that a much higher ratio of people are capable of creating enormous problems for the rest of us.)
This was the same argument I’d been making all along but it seemed to be better received, maybe because we were a couple of drinks further along.
Tom was still concerned, though. The climate crisis in particular, he believed, was of a magnitude like nothing we’d ever faced before.
“Let’s say it is,” I said. “Let’s say even the worst predictions are off by an order of magnitude in terms of how bad things are going to get. And let’s say volcanoes start blowing their lids and earthquakes break out all over. Even then, shouldn’t we be hedging our bets by at least throwing, say, half as many resources at adapting to these crises as we do at preventing them, especially since we still haven’t come up with any way effective way to prevent much of anything?”
“I don’t know about half. . .” Tom said, but he seemed amenable to the idea of rerouting at least some of the monstrous effort we’ve been putting into prevention into adaptation. (I’d tossed in a few references to Bjørn Lomborg, which probably helped.)
“At the very least,” Mike suggested, “if we were really serious we’d be going balls-to-the-wall on nuclear instead of building all these wind and solar farms. We need more and more energy year and there’s no way wind and solar can keep up.”
Bob agreed instantly (unsurprising: he’s a nuclear physicist).
“People don’t understand how safe it is now,” he said.
“People don’t understand energy at all,” Mike said. “They have this car, this physical object right in front of them, and they say, ‘Look at me, see how green I am? I don’t have to put fossil fuels into this thing to use it!’ They don’t even think about the fact that that clean and pretty little plug they’re jamming into their car is getting its energy from something way over here”—he waved toward distant parts unknown—“and that the minerals in their battery are being dug up by little kids and slaves way over there”—another wave in another direction—“as if as long as it’s green right here, it doesn’t matter what happens over there.”
I was going to jump in with a question about the massive rare earth mineral deposits recently discovered up in Sami territory, but the lads had gone off on a tangent. Mike and Bob are light years ahead of me scientifically, and they’d already taken an off-ramp from the larger question of public ignorance about energy onto a particular story involving the popular and entirely mistaken notion that uranium is always radioactive. They were having a good laugh tossing around jokes about half-lives and isotopes and god knows what else, which this moron humbly acknowledges went entirely over his head.
All I could really get out of their merry exchange was that Putin had accused the west of going nuclear because it was providing Ukrainian tanks with uranium-tipped shells.
“They’re not tipped with uranium to poison people with radiation,” Mike explained to me patiently. “Depleted uranium isn’t radioactive. They use it in anti-tank shells because it’s so fucking dense it can smash right through a tank.”
“Ah,” I said, which is my particular way of saying, thank you for providing me with valuable information that I’m unfortunately not sure I understand.
My friends know me well enough to know my sounds, so conversation quickly turned into (yet another) effort to Help the Moron Understand Nuclear Physics After His Third Drink.
After that endeavor failed, as it was always doomed to, Mike and Bob rewound their own line of conversation back to the war in Ukraine. Was Putin just accusing the west of having gone nuclear (with its non-nuclear depleted uranium anti-tank shells) in order to justify Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons?
Suddenly we were discussing what it would take to end the war in Ukraine, and what could be done to prevent the war from spreading.
It wasn’t much of a discussion, really: we all agreed on the basic facts: Russia’s not going to quit until it’s holding eastern Ukraine (at the very least); Ukraine will not relent until Russia has been driven completely out of its territory; the west will back Ukraine with money and arms “for as long as it takes”; the only conceivable winner in this conflict is China.
“We are all fucked,” Bob finally said.
He wasn’t just talking about the war.
Tom laughed.
“We are,” he agreed.
“Totally fucked,” Mike added.
There was nothing left for me to contribute so I just gulped down the rest of my drink.
I thought about this conversation a lot the next day and ultimately decided that we’re not all fucked.
That was the whole point of my post on AmerikanskeTilstande.dk.
As paradoxical as it sounds, the reason I no longer believe we’re not all fucked is that people seem to be waking up to the fact that we are only well and truly fucked because we’ve been fucking ourselves for years. Decades, even.
It was always an elective, never a requirement, that we fuck ourselves so thoroughly.
Russia may be fucking the hell out of Ukraine, but it’s not fucking the west: the west is fucking itself over Russia. The climate isn’t fucking us: we’re fucking ourselves over the climate. Even the pandemic didn’t fuck us: we fucked ourselves over the pandemic. Social media didn’t fuck up our kids: we fucked up our kids by letting them on social media. The economy, energy, the cultural insanity: it’s all entirely self-inflicted.
Patient: Hey, doc, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor: Stop doing this.
That’s it. That’s the cure for western civilization in a stale old joke.
Not the whole cure, but certainly the most important part of it.