This is part 24 of a series on writing climate change for fiction (and this one’s a long one!).
The phrase “Save the Planet” gets thrown around a lot.
Will recycling save the planet? Will Greta Thunberg save the planet? Can climate fiction save the planet?
Sadly, “Save the Planet” is a meaningless phrase.
Climate change is merely yet another battleground in an endless war of conflicting views and ideologies. There is no such thing as generic eco-goodness. If you want to dive into the fight for the climate, you need to figure out who is fighting and what they are fighting over.
In this next section of the series we’re going to do a quick look at some of the main views and groups fighting over climate change.
Hopefully you’ll get a quick sense of who everyone is. A rough map of some very rough terrain.
Even if you are already familiar with these fights, this might be a good reminder of just how diverse and conflicted this whole thing is. If you’re, say, looking for inspiration for a characters in a story, you might want to take one of these positions as a starting point, and pit them up against some opposing character’s view.
Disclaimer: in reality, all of these views overlap, conflict, and intermingle. This will inevitably be a crude sketch, so please treat it as a starting point, not the final word on the nuanced positions that real people really hold. I will miss stuff. I have my biases and knowledge gaps.
Also note, the world is being shaped by all of these views simultaneously – not just the ones you really like, or really hate. We can fixate so much on our corner that we forget just how many bigger and stranger forces are at work out there. This gets messy.
The stakes of this struggle are extremely high. The winners and losers of this war will decide the future of our world.
Here we go!
THE POWERS THAT BE
This time we’ll look at the influential forces who, in theory, are trying to “save the world” (as opposed to just ignoring everything - we’ll look at them later).
These are the ideas that dominate what we are (and are not) doing about climate change.
Technocratic Bullshit
This first one isn’t a vision per se, so much as the art of obscuring a lack of vision under a pile of spreadsheets masquerading as a vision.
This bullshit in turn complicates everyone else’s attempts to form actual visions. Therefore you need to be aware of this nonsense, or you’re gonna get confused.
Climate change is dominated by technocrats. Academics. Politicians. Bureaucrats. Industry groups. They tend to produce very particular responses to climate change. Those responses come in the form of a report with a bunch of graphs and a motivational Vision Statement. A lot of this is good and necessary. A lot of this is also bullshit.
Models and graphs can hide big assumptions that have been snuck in there for political reasons. Look out for future Gee-whizz-Magic™, no present actions required. Look out for things like data tables that make emissions increases look like emissions decreases. Look out for highly convoluted policy plans that make great headlines but do very little. Look out for schemes with loopholes big enough to sail an oil tanker through, or plans so far in the future they have no present meaning.
Look out for the bullshit.
Ultimately stuff like this exists because powerful groups don’t want to do anything, and the politicians don’t want to upset them, and no one can agree on anything, and no one wants to admit to the awkward facts, and everyone is focused on their careers, so they all fuddle about until the machine spits out some spreadsheet-nonsense-bullshit.
Next throw in the inherent biases that come from being a person who gets to be in power, and you can get unjust and unimaginative spreadsheet-nonsense-bullshit that firmly supports the status-quo.
Guys like Kevin Anderson argue that even the IPCC’s working group III (the part that answers, “How do we fix all this?”), potentially falls into the category of technocratic obfuscation.
“In my view, they have been as damaging to the agenda of cutting emissions as Exxon was in misleading the public about climate science.”
Whether or not you agree, it is safe to say that the scenarios produced by the IPCC are not politically neutral. There is no such thing as a politically neutral emissions reduction pathway.
As for portraying this world, you may wish to refer to something like the Australian TV show Utopia, or good old Yes Minister.
Academics & Integrated Assessment Modelling
Most of our ideas about what climate change might do, and what is or is not feasible for us to do in response, come from scientific modelling.
These models are a form of science fiction. We create scenarios. We tease out the implications of the assumptions built into our scenarios. We consider what is or is not plausible.
When it comes to the physics of climate change this is not exactly controversial. Modelling is standard scientific practice.
But when it comes to the social and political side of climate change, we do need to take Kevin Anderson’s critique seriously. The models put out by the IPCC and other academics often represent a very particular view of the world, what we might call eco-modernism (see below).
Even if the underlying politics are more radical, the very nature of modelling restricts what you can imagine. Computers are too rigid. For example, your model might have a parameter called Government Expenditure, and another called Private Investment. These are hardcoded into the model. By definition you cannot produce a scenario where nuclear war annihilates humanity, or where anarchists takeover and abolish both the government and capitalism. Any good scientist is aware of these limits. The general public, however, is not.
The result is that these scenarios that everyone focuses on so much are inherently conservative and biased towards the status quo. This bias is then given authoritative status by virtue of being “scientific”.
Similar issues exist in mitigation science more generally. From my own experience research is overwhelmingly dominated by the push for industry friendly profit driven techno-fix solutions. Governments and business have the money. That’s what gets funded.
As for portraying this world, you’re looking at the world of modern corporatized academia. Pop culture representations of scientists are wildly inaccurate here, so consider taking all those mad-scientist vibes and combining it with your dentist (or accountant, or lawyer, or the guy who makes you coffee).
Green Capitalism
“Capitalism – if reformed and made sustainable – can serve the world better than any other economic system in making the difficult but necessary changes to the relationship between the human enterprise and the ecological and biological systems of the Earth. Together, sustainable capitalism and healthy democratic decision making can empower us to save the future.”
- Al Gore, The Future, 2013
To the extent the world is taking action on climate, that action is often coming in the form of Capitalism – that’s where the power is.
Key to this vision are markets and innovation. Here you get things like consumer demand driving the development of vegetarian meat-alternatives, or market dynamics driving down the cost of solar panels.
Central is the idea that we just need to fix the pricing. Get the incentives right and the market will sort it out spontaneously. Internalize the externalities. Put a price on carbon. Turn nature into an asset class. Hence why a lot of climate debate has centered around carbon trading, offsets, and the like. Once the markets work, then, hopefully, maybe, perhaps, will come a technological revolution which will fix everything.
Environmentalists tend to have a knee-jerk disgust towards capitalism. It’s important to note that Green Capitalism is producing some real action.
However, that action is slower than required, and leaves in place the various injustices which threaten to blow up society. If Green Capitalism was working I wouldn’t also have a bunch of notes prepared on Communism and Fascism.
Also, while I am calling this Green Capitalism, truly implementing this Green vision would most likely destroy capitalism (but that’s a long story). For example environmental markets must first be created by governments, not the forces of supply and demand. What we’re looking at here is potentially a post-capitalist world were bureaucracy, science, and markets fuse into a single entity.
As for portraying this world you’ll be looking for things like the CEO of Blackrock’s vision of finance, or the stuff coming out of the World Economic Forum at Davos. It’s a world of businesses and technocrats dominated by wealthy white men turning all of reality into finance.
Sustainable Development & The Conference of Parties
This is the international politics side of the coin, on the flip side from the international business. This world overlaps significantly with the Davos set, only here it’s more focused on doing good in the world.
You will almost certainly have hear of COP (the Conference of Parties), the big global shindig for the world’s governments to get together and agree to... *cough*... ahem... yeah.
Okay, so we did get the Paris Agreement, which has been resoundingly declared “better than nothing”. The COPs themselves have grown over the years, with as much or more action happening on the sidelines than in the conference. This is much the same as more familiar politics at a national level, with lobbyists, and protestors, and everyone clamoring to get in their pitch.
The important point is that this process puts national governments and state sovereignty at the center of climate action. Global action comes from coordinating governments, and from richer governments acting charitably towards poorer governments.
Climate change itself is only one part of a much bigger story here. One of the big things you might run across are the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Goal 13 of 17 is climate change, alongside everything from poverty, to gender equality, to economic growth. The SDGs turn up all over the place as a kind of vague yet detailed vision for the world, a kind of international To Do List.
In this world you’ll also get a bunch of quirky stuff, like billionaire philanthropy, celebrity spokespeople, obsessions with Big Ideas that get dumped on unwitting poor people, and all the good and bad that comes from powerful people trying to improve the lives of people they’ve never met.
As for the underlying vision driving this work... the definitions of Sustainable Development get fairly vague. You can almost substitute in the word “good”. We want a good world, not a bad world. We can all agree on that, right?
When you get to the implementation of Sustainable Development, it starts feeling very similar to the “capitalism if reformed” quote from Al Gore above. Both Green Capitalism and Sustainable Development are born out of the growing recognition that the status quo just is not viable in the long run, and yet we still believe in the utopian promises of universal prosperity contained within our ideas of progress.
As for portraying this world... it’s not a space I’ve yet explored firsthand. What I’ve seen so far suggests a world in which idealism goes to die. This is the world of international politics in all its brutal mess, and grandeur, and utter strangeness, doing its best to “save the world”.
If you’re a masochist, the UN does in fact live stream the Conference of Parties. To quote from the Live Chat:
”This reminds me of Eurovision. Nil points.”
- Nick C (random internet commenter)
Institutionalized NGOs, Think tanks, & Consultants
While their visions might be radical, I’m counting these guys as part of the status quo. They are a well established and familiar part of the ordinary scene.
I’m talking about the kinds of organisations which, in pursuit of their mission to “save the world”, have adapted themselves to things as they are. They have an HQ. They have a telephone. You can get a job there. These people are at the table. These people are part of the conversation. They’re helping out, and being helped out. Because that telephone costs money.
We can mostly ignore the actual vision of these organisations. What we’re looking at here is a strategic choice which has implications for what vision actually gets implemented.
That choice is to focus on reform, to squeeze out concessions from the status quo, to become institutionalized in a way that resembles that status quo. If you want to influence power, then you need access to the powers that be, which means you need to adapt. The net effect is that their victories are often victories for Green Capitalism.
At their best they fight hard for real change. However, this kind of organisation can also get fully absorbed into the status quo.
They might become a de facto branch of law enforcement. They might become a seller of certificates to aid ethical consumer choices – an adjunct to marketing. They might just end up fulfilling the vision of Davos. Again, they don’t necessarily want to be doing that, they might be aiming for better, much better, but this compromise is a result of just trying to get results in the real world.
As for portraying this world, its much the same as above, only this time it’s people from the fringes, people who used to believe in things (and maybe still do), who are now wearing the suits and handing out business cards. They’re probably overworked, and trying their best.
Green Parties
These guys are in much the same position as the NGOs.
Green Parties are a global movement, and have been in government in various places. Again, they might be radical, but they’re an established part of the scene. I’m splitting them off here, because in theory they could get control of a government and actually implement the actual vision they actually want.
In theory.
In practice Green Parties are a strategic choice: focus on electoral politics.
That means in practice they have to compromise with electoral politics. The results are mixed. Occasionally they get real wins, other times it’s wins for Green Capitalism. Much of the time it’s a dark valley of eternal frustration.
Again, it’s important to remember there is no such thing as generic green eco-goodness. The Global Green Charter outlines the following values:
Ecological Wisdom (e.g. humans are part of nature, indigenous knowledge, etc)
Social Justice (e.g. equality, ending poverty, etc)
Participatory Democracy (e.g. more power at a local level)
Non-violence (e.g. global cooperation instead of militarism)
Sustainability (e.g. planetary limits, quality of life over consumption, etc)
Respect for Diversity (e.g. indigenous rights, multiculturalism, etc)
All of this is fairly commonplace in environmental spaces, but this is a very specific view of reality.
Green Parties are aiming for a world radically different from the one we live in now. Not everyone agrees with this. Here in New Zealand (where we have one of the oldest Green Parties) the Greens occupy the space of a far-left party. A typical voter is likely young, educated, wealthy, and female.
Again, we need to consider the issue of compromise. Green usually means left-wing, but it doesn’t have to. Some “green” ideas can be applied in ways that are mere Green Capitalism, or can even slide towards far-right fascism. Principles can also be moderated, or abandoned in the pragmatic pursuit of power.
As for portraying this world, you’re looking at an overlap between the worlds of election campaigns, Machiavellian political machinations, and on the street activism.
The Green New Deal
Potentially this is quite radical, but I’m putting it here because this is the stuff you might get a guy like Joe Biden to do. Indeed, the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act 2022, has some steps in the direction of a Green New Deal.
So what is this?
An argument can be made that our current neo-liberal era is a re-run of the original 19th century liberal era.
That first run resulted in the apocalyptic hell that was the first half of the 20th century. In short, “market fundamentalism” is a seriously bad idea that will annihilate your society with economic crashes, Nazis, revolutions, wars, and plagues.
The way the USA got out of this mess last time was the New Deal, i.e. Social Democracy. That meant stuff like: social welfare, state housing, universal healthcare (sorry USA – the rest of us did get that one), government investment in infrastructure, regulation of finance, and Keynesian economics.
The basic idea of a Green New Deal is to do a re-run of the this original New Deal, only now with extra “green” stuff.
Key point: this is a vision in which national governments play the central role.
In a Green New Deal, the government would get off its ass and start using the power it has to spend, act, and regulate, rather than just relying on “innovation”, “market solutions”, and “incentives”.
The green stuff would also be paired with serious efforts at alleviating poverty and inequality, and undoing the social damage caused by neo-liberalism. At a global scale these policies would be spread by various geo-political moves, like trade deals and treaties and soft power. Again, this is a vision where national governments lead the way.
A Green New Deal is probably the most pragmatic near term solution to climate change in Western developed nations. Green Capitalism isn’t moving fast enough and keeps breaking things. Many of the other visions we’ll look at range from terrifying, to naive, to requiring full on revolutions. A Green New Deal could actually happen in the near future with broad support by actual people actually in power. This is a feasible and positive outcome.
That said, a Green New Deal is still very much a messy real world compromise. The original New Deal had serious problems, like enforcing racist segregation. Using the institutions of the status quo means getting caught up in the evils of the status quo. Worst of all, after some decades the whole order the New Deal created stumbled and fell over, which is how we ended up with neo-liberalism.
The New Deal also required several decades of preparatory work: theorizing, educating, organizing, and agitating. That same work also gave rise to anarchism and communism. The original New Deal passed in a context where the world was in chaos, Communist and Fascist takeovers were a serious possibility, and the USA was gearing up to fight a world war.
Radical changes don’t just come out of nowhere.
As for portraying this world, again you’re looking at an overlap between the worlds of Machiavellian political machinations and on the street activism.
Chinese Communist Ecological Civilization
With the end of the Cold War we’ve all tended to forget that Communism still exists.
China is officially Communist. China has a ruler who’s giving off serious Mao Zedong vibes, who espouses the fundamental correctness of Marxist-Leninism. This has significant implications for climate change. China is big.
The Chinese response to climate change is Ecological Civilization
The term “Ecological Civilization” has specific meaning in the world of Communism. It turned up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Since then it has found its way into Chinese Communism. Ecological Civilization has recently made it into the Chinese constitution.
“Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the important thought of Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, the Chinese people of all nationalities will continue to adhere to the people's democratic dictatorship and the socialist road, persevere in reform and opening to the outside world, steadily improve socialist institutions, develop the socialist market economy, develop socialist democracy, improve the socialist rule of law, implement the new development concept, and work hard and self-reliantly to modernize the country's industry, agriculture, national defense and science and technology step by step and promote the coordinated development of the material, political, spiritual, social, and ecological civilizations, to turn China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, powerful, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful and achieve the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
What exactly is an Ecological Civilization?
For a moment we will leave aside certain questions of regarding authoritarian hypocrisy and propaganda. As far as I can figure it out, Chinese Ecological Civilization goes roughly like this:
A linear view of development. Agricultural Civilization becomes Industrial Civilization becomes Ecological Civilization. This carries with it all the WTF-is-civilisation-anyway? baggage we saw in Part 13.
A similar belief in high-tech solutions and economic development as occurs in Green Capitalism and Sustainable Development.
A holistic view, in which humans are part of nature. Specifically, the “Unity of Man and Nature” drawing on Taoism and Confucianism. The aim is harmonious development of man, nature, and society resulting in both material and spiritual achievements.
Individual lifestyles that favor low consumption and simplicity, with hints of pastoral nostalgia.
A greater willingness to use state intervention and the strictest of laws (because they’re authoritarian Communists after all).
In classic Communist style, that intervention could involve a greater willingness to sacrifice those alive today in order to build our glorious utopian future (watch this space). That future will be beautiful and harmonious, and well worth the wait.
A global Ecological Civilization that will come about via global cooperation, in which China will play a significant role.
Many of these ideas aren’t particularly unique to Chinese Communism. Just like the Capitalists, the Communists are also having to wrestle with the fact that what they’ve been doing isn’t exactly viable on Planet Earth. China is a polluted mess.
However that whole nationalistic totalitarianism thing does open up a world of future possibilities that just don’t exist elsewhere. Like, imagine if Chairman Mao had been way more into planting trees.
As for portraying this world... that’s going to involve a lot of time studying China. 祝你马到成功 !
World Eco-Religion
People typically ignore the role of religion when it comes to scientific matters like climate change. However, most people in the world have some kind of religious affiliation. That religion routinely gets fused with their politics.
Pope Francis notably called upon the Catholic world (>1 billion people) to embrace an “Integral Ecology”. This view lines up surprisingly closely with non-religious environmentalists. The difference comes when we get deep down to root causes and solutions. In Catholic-world, climate change exists because of rebellion against God. The answer is Jesus.
‘“The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast”.[152] For this reason, the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion. It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent. So what they all need is an “ecological conversion”, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.’
And thus we have the Pope trying to convert Catholics.
2015 was a good year for religious climate statements (no one wants to be outdone by the Pope). Similar to Laudato Si’, we had an Islamic Declaration on Climate, a Buddhist Declaration on Climate, a Hindu Declaration on Climate, a Rabbinic Letter on Climate, A Church of England statement, and more.
Each of these is fairly similar. They bring mainstream environmental thinking into the fold of their religious tradition, then attempt to diagnose the deep root causes in spiritual terms. For our purposes, that is the key point: climate change is a spiritual problem with spiritual solutions.
“The four noble truths provide a framework for diagnosing our current situation and formulating appropriate guidelines—because the threats and disasters we face ultimately stem from the human mind, and therefore require profound changes within our minds.”
- Buddhist Declaration on Climate, 2015
While there is a lot of Jesus and Buddha in this stuff, the overlap with mainstream environmentalism is considerable. These religious messages are near identical to the messages coming from environmentalists who are critical of consumerism, believe in the simple life, and want us to see humans as part of nature.
“Today we call on all Hindus to expand our conception of dharma. We must consider the effects of our actions not just on ourselves and those humans around us, but also on all beings.”
- A Hindu Declaration on Climate Change, 2015
As for portraying this world, you’re looking at every other viewpoint we’re discussing here, only now transplanted into the context of Bible quotes, karma, and the Qu’ran.
We also need to note, most world religions probably have similar dynamics going on here – internal fights over just how ecologically converted they’re all going to be, or not. We’ll look at the dark side next time.
The Media & The News
Again, this one isn’t really a vision so much as a lack of vision that interferes with everyone else’s ability to form a vision. Watching the News can make you stupid.
In theory the nightly news should just report the facts. In practice the very nature of reporting muddles things considerably. The media tends to fall into certain habits.
So we get things like the following:
Framing climate in terms of political fights & electoral punditry (e.g. Democrats vs Republicans).
Presenting the basic science as contested (i.e. “showing both sides”), and getting way too caught up in manufactured propaganda (e.g. “climate-gate” scandals).
A bias towards the present moment (e.g. climate is relevant to the extent it relates to some other hot-topic).
A tendency towards apocalyptic & pessimistic framing (Five years to solve climate! The Amazon is dying! Are your children doomed? Find out when we come back...).
A tendency towards sensationalism & click-bait (e.g. tipping points, and terrifying floods, and anything that can use the prefix mega- or super-).
A tendency towards things happening in exotic places (e.g. those tipping points will be in the Arctic).
Something has to be happening or it doesn’t count. It needs to be the hottest year on record, or a catastrophe, or a international scandal. If nothing dramatic and easily understandable is going on then it’s not newsworthy.
A tendency towards sound-bites, and human interest over analysis (e.g. you’ll get 30 seconds of footage on those mega-floods, and it’ll be a man-on-the-street saying, “Blimey, me cat can’t swim!”).
Failures to make what an expert would consider obvious connections (e.g. reporting an unprecedented heat wave without ever mentioning climate change.)
A focus on controversy, villains, threats, and exposing evil-doers. You ought to feel angry and afraid. I mean, don’t you just hate Trump?
A lack of diversity. The news will mostly tell you about people like the intended audience for that news. Huge events can happen without you ever hearing about them, because they’re in the wrong place. If you speak English, you’ll learn far more about the USA than you ever wanted to know.
A lack of things such as actual policies needed to solve problems, any positive not-bullshit actions happening right now, and deep causal explanations for the who-how-why.
Put all this together and you get a vision of the world which is wildly unstable and incomprehensible. Climate change is terrifying, far away, about to destroy you right now, possibly not real, the apocalypse, all the fault of bad people, priority number three under healthcare, and just another political mud fight.
Plenty of journalists are trying to do a good job here. Specialists can do excellent work teasing out causes and connections. But that good work takes place against an overwhelming backdrop of copy-paste click-bait.
Devoid of any over-arching sense making climate news presents a vision which is primarily emotional. Those emotions are primarily fear and anger, mixed with apathetic voyeurism. Other actual political visions which are themselves fueled intensely by emotion can then draw on this energy, while everyone else gets derailed by the melange of apathy and panic.
As for portraying this world, Don’t Look Up had a go at satirizing parts of this process. I’ve yet to find something that gives a decent inside look at climate journalism, so if you know of something please leave a comment.
Celebrities and Other Fun (including novelists)
A lot of people want to “save the planet”. Some of these people have significant real world influence. They might be, say, a sexy pop star, and whatever dumb nonsense they say gets heard by 1000000 times more people than your average IPCC report.
The actual visions they’re expressing could be literally anything. Nevertheless it’s important to keep in mind that most people are getting their ideas from pop-culture, from influencers, from public intellectuals, and yes... even from writers.
As for portraying this world, I believe that’s called a Mary Sue.
Conclusion
A substantial chunk of what we’re seeing here could more or less be summed up under the label Eco-modernism. This view rejects Club of Rome style “Limits to Growth”, and is fundamentally committed to the ideas of progress that emerged from colonialism and industrialism.
This is the viewpoint that rules the world.
To the degree to which there are fixed physical boundaries to human consumption, they are so theoretical as to be functionally irrelevant. ....
Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a range of long-term trends are today driving significant decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts. ....
By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends. ....
... modern technologies, by using natural ecosystem flows and services more efficiently, offer a real chance of reducing the totality of human impacts on the biosphere. To embrace these technologies is to find paths to a good Anthropocene. ....
Climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world's people. Nor should they be. ....
Meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge. ....
This view focus overwhelmingly on economics and technology, and mostly leaves aside social issues. This is a world committed to a utopian growth in human living standards through technological expansion ( a view which has long been present in Science Fiction).
Meanwhile we have a bunch of other people, from the Pope to Green activists who very much do focus on the social side, even the spiritual side. However they are restricted in exercising that influence. In the game of power, as it stands right now, Wall Street trumps the Pope.
The result is electric cars, driven by people experiencing eco-Catholic guilt.
Next time we’ll look at an uglier group of suspects. Oh boy. Oh god. Oh my… that one could get complicated.