The emperor has no clothes

First published in the Berthoud Weekly Surveyor, Thursday, September 12, 2024

During the recent political conventions, we were subjected to an array of rousing and inspiring speeches from luminaries across the social spectrum. Yet, for all their posturing, no Republican or Democratic speaker defined policies to address a crucially important topic: managing the effects of the ongoing climate crisis on America and the world.

The Republican position is to deny that humans affect climate change and assert that a climate crisis does not exist. Their policy is to push ahead with even greater oil and gas production as a strategy for US energy independence. The Democratic position is to acknowledge that climate change is happening but that the only reasonable management approach is to expand renewable energy. Their position overlooks the fact that renewable energy technologies, even if deployed at scale, cannot provide enough power for energy-intensive industrial processes such as manufacturing concrete and steel and don’t yield substitutes for plastics or nitrogen fertilizer.

Neither Democratic nor Republican platforms address how to manage the impacts of climate change effectively. Our industrial civilization requires the vast amounts of energy found in fossil fuels for electricity generation, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, construction, and mining. The bottom line is that, given our present situation, there are no practical substitutes for these fuels, yet their use emits large amounts of pollution and is making climate change worse. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place: we are enjoying the benefits of highly developed material existence while at the same time slowly poisoning ourselves and destabilizing the long-term climate anchors that support life on our planet.

A significant barrier to managing climate change effectively is the human inability to sustain our societies over long periods. The evidence of this failure is clear: every human civilization throughout history has collapsed and its population has dispersed throughout the globe. There are no guarantees that our industrial civilization will survive, especially since we are degrading the geophysical processes that support life as we currently know it.

The breakdown of our life-support systems due to chemical pollution from fossil fuel use makes social collapse more likely. We can expect more unpleasant and dangerous weather patterns that may become permanent. Imagine Canada and the United States covered in ice two miles deep as they were several hundred thousand years ago. Or imagine the planet as it was 50 million years ago, with most of the land being deserts sweltering in 150+ degree heat with tropical forests at the poles.

The core leadership conundrum is that we don’t know how to create a society that preserves the benefits of fossil-based materialism while protecting the long-term geophysical processes that comprise our planetary life support systems. Thus, we get vague policies, misinformation, and propaganda from both Republicans and Democrats. We continue to emit carbon and produce toxic chemicals that are slowly destroying the planet. We have become arrogant from using the seemingly unlimited power of oil and gas and have forgotten our role as humble stewards of the earth and its living beings.