Money is the Missing Link

Bill McKibben tells us in his most recent post to Substack, What Democrats Do and What Democrats Don't,

“The default is always the status quo.”

There is comfort in staying with what we know.

Even when we know that what we know is not working.

This is true about all social change, including climate action.

What we know in climate activism is the politics of protest. This is the status quo that is our default.

We cling to this default even when we know it is not working.? Indeed, the more we know, from lived experience, that the status quo of what we know is not working, the more irrationally we double down on making what we know work, even as our redoubled efforts provide redoubled evidence that what we know is not really what we need to know.

Learning is hard.? Inquiry for insight in search of new learning that can inform innovation for evolving prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes is difficult.

It can even be terrifying.? Because we do not know.

And nothing is more terrifying to human beings than what we do not know.

Also, nothing is more world-defining.

To be human is to live on the creative edge of change. And to thrive there.? By learning about what it is we do not already know.

Always there is the need to inquire, to learn new, and the desire to stay with what we know now.

Being a success at being human requires mediating this tension between the new, and the now.

Climate change is challenging our ability to be successful at being human. It is testing our ability to by mediate the tension between the new and the now.

Ian Edwards of The Cape Cod Center for Sustainability tells us, “Nature is a bank.? Climate change is an eviction notice.”

When we take money from a human bank, there is always a cost, and terms.? If we choose not to pay that cost, or honor those terms, there are consequences, according to our human laws.

The same is true with Nature.? When we take from Nature, there is always a cost. There are always terms.? And there are always consequences according to the Laws of Nature if we choose not to pay that cost, or honor those terms.

But that is not what we know, and find familiar.

That is not the status quo in our relationship with Nature. That is not our default narrative.

We are heirs in these opening decades of the 21st Century to a social narrative we inherited from the closing decades of the 20th Century that frames the economy as the production and distribution of goods and services through markets for allocating scarcity using price.

This narrative supports a sociology of social choosing as the sum total of our individual choices made either in the markets, or through politics.

It also supports a social contract that calls on each of us, and all of us, to produce and consume more, so the markets can give us more, on the promise that more will always be better, and that as freely self-determining market participants we will each always be free to freely determine, each for ourselves, our own personal and individual fair share of that more that is better.

This social contract is failing.

Climate change is proving that more is not always better.? It depends.? More of what? Better for who? What are the costs? Who suffers the consequences?

Climate science is learning, through inquiry into lived experience, that extracting more energy from hydrocarbons to fire the technologies through which we form the world in which we live is diminishing the longevity of habitats on earth within which that world is built.

This is because Nature already has a job for that energy.? Nature is already using that energy to set and sustain the habitats on earth as places that we humans can inhabit.

When we extract that energy to use it for some other purpose, it is no longer available to Nature, to use for Nature’s purpose.? The cost and consequence to us of that redirection of energy away from Nature’s purpose is that Nature can no longer achieve its natural purpose, of keeping the habitats on earth inhabitable by us.

The process works like this.

• There is carbon on earth.? Some of that carbon exists in earth’s atmosphere.
• The density of carbon atoms in earth’s sky chemistry determines the rate at which energy escapes from earth, out to the universe, through radiant cooling of the earth.
• The rate of radiant cooling is balanced against the rate of solar heating by energy that the sun sends to the earth all the time.
• This balance between radiant cooling and solar heating regulates the overall average temperatures of land, sea and sky on earth.
• Those overall average temperatures regulate the large scale, long term patterns of wind and weather around the world that we call climate.
• Climate regulates the habitats on earth in which life can live.
• Human life can only live within temperate zones that are characterized by enough, but not too much, heat; enough, but not too much, water; enough, but not too much, other life.

Enough, but not too much.? This is essential for our human way of being.

More heat is not always better.? More water is not always better.? More life is not always better.

The right balance is always best.

Because the consequences of too little or too much can be catastrophic.

We will die.

And yet, the social narrative that we default to as the status quo of what we now know is not a narrative of "enough, but not too much".? It is a narrative of "never enough". Grounded in scarcity. Terrified of insufficiency.

But our lived experience is actually of abundance.

We grow vast quantities of food. We weave an infinite variety of clothes. We build large and comfortable homes complete with hot and cold running water, heating and air conditioning, and a host of labor-saving devices.

We have no trouble creating surpluses.

We do have trouble sharing them.

Which brings us to the next flaw in our default status quo social contract: people do not make choices in the markets. Money does.

Or, rather, people make choices in the markets using money. The more money you control, the more choices you can make.? If you control enough money, you can make choices for other people, as well as for yourself. The less money you control, the less you are free to choose for yourself.? If you have too little money, your freedom is only an illusion.? You are, in fact, trapped. In poverty.

And yet our prevailing popular social narrative, the status quo to which we default, tells us that money does not matter.

That’s crazy.

But it’s true.

It’s not true that money doesn’t matter. Money does matter. A lot.

It is true that our prevailing sociology of social choosing tells us that money doesn’t matter. Even though it does.

That makes money the missing link in our chain of reasoning about how we, as humans, make choices in society, about the economy.

And climate change is all about the economy, and the choices that we make, as society, for how we are going to supply our technologies with energy to shape the world in which we live.

So the missing link to climate action is money.

Climate + Money.

That is the formula we need for mediating the tension between new and now for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner” per COP28, for energy sufficiency complete with habitat longevity and social equity on a planetary scale in the 21st Century, and beyond…

Where will we find that money?

That question is the opening chapter in a new narrative for climate action.