So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance…
“So you’re telling me there’s a chance…” is the eternally optimistic response of Jim Carrey’s character Lloyd Christmas to the desirable Mary Swanson (played by future ex-wife Lauren Holly), after she voices that the chances of the two of them “ending up together” are “not good,” around “one-in-a-million.” That was the penultimate scene in 1994’s hilarious and underrated “Dumb and Dumber,” released only a year before the first COP (Conference of Parties) dealing with Climate Change, hosted in Berlin. We are now about to bear witness to COP 27, hosted in Egypt, and the chances that this will result in the climate crisis being solved are about the same as Lloyd’s chances for eternal happiness with Mary. Not good.
The chances of limiting warming from the pre-industrial period to less than 2 degrees Celsius per the Paris Agreement? Not good. To the even lower threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius still aspirationally bandied about by COP attendees? Really not good.
The chances of solving our climate issues with current or yet-to-be-invented technology? Not good.
The chances of our global consumer-industrial complex based on debt-fueled GDP growth continuing to function in the face of ever shrinking energy output and the evisceration of ecosystem services? Not good.
And by “not good” in all these scenarios, I mean it like Mary does.
So that’s the bad news and I’ve written a lot of pieces describing the issues we face related to perpetual overshoot of our planet and attendant climate chaos. Nothing new to report on that I’m afraid — it’s real and it’s happening faster and worse than scientists predicted.
But the good news is that I was inspired recently by a young Gen Z writer who wrote of the need for a more positive narrative to be able to engage in dealing with the climate crisis and for understanding the world that our younger generations have inherited. She swore off “hopium,” which is as bad as sheer climate denial, but made the point that people need to see a possibility for a different way of living on the planet and one that is truly “sustainable,” not just a marketing slogan tacked onto a product that some corporation is trying to sell under the umbrella of greenwashing.
So what’s the positive narrative that is a rejoinder to our need to give up business as usual in every other way? Please imagine with me that there are alternative ways to spend time in lieu of coveting the high-consumptive lifestyles of whatever Influencer du jour is posting Tik Tok videos from their rented McMansion surrounded by bling? Let me posit that it’s a positive development when there’s a drop in consumption and growth, even as vested interests would say that if we don’t have GDP to measure how much everyone in the world is consuming and how many toys to manufacture, source, market and sell to the next generation (while simultaneously trying to wean off of fossil fuels and massively reduce our carbon budget in the next decade or two), how can we possibly continue to function?
Well, it’s not functioning already for a hell of a lot of people, recently exemplified by the 33 million Pakistanis newly homeless from flooding turbo-charged by climate change, resulting in damages totaling over 10% of the country’s GDP. But I’m trying to stay positive here, so let me say that there’s a version of a low-energy future for our world that is more inclusive, with less inequality and one that takes very seriously the role that Earth’s ecosystem services play in our survival as a species. It’s a world that builds infrastructure and housing with that in forefront, not as an afterthought to profit. It’s a world that would see IMF and the World Bank create a plan for unprecedented debt forgiveness for the Global South as de facto “loss and damage” payments to help adapt to radically altered environments, instead of default due to desperation. A world where a significant portion of human labor will be spent remediating industrial “sacrifice zones” or the toxic remnants of mining operations, the pre-cursors of which we can already anticipate through bold projects like the SF bay rewilding of marshland to mitigate against sea level rise or mine remediation as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Bill. These are actual jobs and would be viewed as infinitely more important than a “Mad Men” exec concocting a marketing plan for a luxury product over a three-martini lunch.
In this future world, the energy being used is created from renewables, but even more crucially, it’s a world using only a fraction of the energy that is currently required for our hyper-capitalist system. That’s not something you will hear from Al Gore, but that’s what leading earth scientists will tell you if you drill down on the numbers. We CANNOT and SHOULD NOT continue to pretend that our system will function with the level of resource and energy consumption that it currently uses, simply adjusted to wind down fossil fuels. That’s about as realistic as Lloyd’s hopium — it’s physically not possible on a finite planet with finite resources.
So this is bad news for everyone who is really invested in our current, radically unequal world headed for a sixth mass extinction that will hit the poorest and least responsible the hardest and fastest (as is already painfully evident right now). But it’s good news for everyone else who can envision a different possibility for humanity and particularly for the younger generation that is not already “locked in” on a business model that has, forget “planned obsolescence,” but rather, “planned extinction,” built into it.
It’s going to be far from easy and it’s going to be extremely uncomfortable for a lot of vested interests (frankly they might claim to prefer mass extinction to change of lifestyle) and there’s a high probability that this is a Kumbaya scenario that will never materialize, but I guess what I’m saying is this: I’m telling you there’s a chance…and that’s more than I’ve said for a while.
