To the historian studying this tragic period of human history, the most astounding fact is that the victims knew what was happening and why. Indeed, they chronicled it in detail precisely because they knew that fossil fuel combustion was to blame. Historical analysis also shows that Western civilization had the technological know-how and capability to effect an orderly transition to renewable energy, yet the available technologies were not implemented in time.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway,
"The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future," Daedalus, Winter 2013.
http://history.ucsd.edu/...
In 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway published Merchants of Doubt, an exposition of the disturbing parallels between the climate change "debate" and other "controversies" in which a spectacularly funded industry has, through its surrogates, deliberately challenged established scientific findings for the purpose of sowing doubt among the public and in the media. Merchants highlighted the disproportionate influence wielded by a small number of politically conservative scientists, funded and cultivated by the fossil fuel industry for the specific purpose of creating an illusion that the actual science of global warming was still "controversial." In doing so, these scientists assisted their paymasters in forestalling any effective political response to continued climate change.
The response to Merchants of Doubt was fairly unequivocal (the few negative reviews largely came from the scientists who were profiled):
In The Christian Science Monitor, Will Buchanan says that Merchants of Doubt is exhaustively researched and documented, and "may be one of the most important books of 2010."
“Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have demonstrated what many of us have long suspected: that the ‘debate’ over the climate crisis—and many other environmental issues—was manufactured by the same people who brought you ‘safe’ cigarettes. Anyone concerned about the state of democracy in America should read this book.” Former Vice President Al Gore, author of An Inconvenient Truth
“As the science of global warming has grown more certain over the last two decades, the attack on that science has grown more shrill; this volume helps explain that paradox, and not only for climate change. A fascinating account of a very thorny problem.”—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Oreskes, a Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and Conway, a Historian of Science and Technology, have now submitted a provocative, unorthodox, and altogether stunning sequel to
Merchants with
"The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future," a short essay appearing in
Daedalus, the quarterly Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The essay is a look back, in hindsight, at a civilization destroyed by climate change ignored, from the puzzled perspective of an observer in the 24th Century. It's not a pretty picture, and it it may very well be the reality of what our children and grandchildren will experience.
The essay is written from the perspective of a future generation attempting to understand why the potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming, though obvious and proved beyond a doubt by scientific evidence, were still ignored despite the prospect of intense suffering and calamity wrought upon society. It is linked above, and will take you about 30-60 minutes to read. The footnotes, all based on current legislation, scientific sources and political events, are particularly effective in creating an atmosphere of immediacy about the subject matter.
As Oreskes and Conway explain at the outset:
Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future.
The essay might be described as part
Silent Running and part Isaac Asimov's
"Foundation." In presenting a "future history" the authors take an undeniable risk by attaching their credibility to a controversial method, and the effort has some weaknesses, mostly due to the fact that neither Oreskes nor Conway particularly excel at this genre or style. Some of the historical references venture close to silliness ("Sagan effect," "Venusian death") and some of the polemical tangents of the piece could have been shortened, but the point is clearly and harshly made. Also (this is probably not a coincidence) the essay serves as a rhetorical reversal of sorts between the environmental movement and the climate skeptics: since nothing of the scenario painted by Oreskes and Taylor can be disproven (having occurred in the "future"), that would seem to shift the burden to the climate deniers to explain why their scenario is implausible.
They begin their postmortem by chronicling the ascendance of the environmental movement in the mid 20th century, describing the expanding sensibility among nations that the environment was actually in need of protection, a sensibility which led to the formation of organizations such as the EPA in the United States, and international groups such as the IPCC and UNFCCC, all tasked with assessing the effects and alerting the world to the reality of climate change. This is the point ( in the 20/20 hindsight of our descendants) that a rational culture would have begun to take steps to combat the problem. That didn't happen:
But there was backlash. Critics claimed that the scientific uncertainties were too great to justify the expense and inconvenience of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, and that any attempt to solve the problem would cost more than it was worth. At first, just a handful of people made this argument, almost all of them from the United States, although in time, the arguments spread to Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe as well.
In Oreskes and Conway's "future history," the backlash, encouraged by the fossil fuel industry and abetted by the media, fostered a culture of active and passive denial among the world's populations, all while the planet continued, inexorably, to warm. The temperature shifts turned out to be higher than more than predicted, due to a confluence of factors such as massive investment in shale gas production under the false assumption that this would ameliorate CO2 emissions. In fact (the authors posit) the opposite occurred, due to fugitive methane emissions and the abandonment (due to the influx of shale-based fuels) of alternative energy development. Oreskes and Conway directly blame the fossil fuel industry and its chokehold on our governmental and economic institutions for the seemingly inexplicable inertia among nations in responding to a patently obvious transformation of the environment. But they also blame what they see as a naive reliance on positivism and neoliberal, economic attitudes ("free-market fundamentalism") which assume positive, favorable outcomes inexorably follow the march of the market:
As a result, the 1990s and 2000s featured a wave of deregulation that weakened consumer, worker, and environmental protections. A second Gilded Age reproduced concentrations of power and capital not seen since the nineteenth century, with some of the accumulated capital used to finance think tanks that further promoted neo-liberal views. Most important for our purposes, neoliberal thinking led to a refusal to admit the most important limit of capitalism: market failure.
* * *
A key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels. Historians have labeled this system the carbon combustion complex: a network of powerful industries comprised of primary fossil fuel producers; secondary industries that served fossil fuel companies (drilling and oil field service companies, large construction firms, and manufacturers of plastics and other petrochemicals); tertiary industries whose products relied on inexpensive fossil fuels (especially automobiles and aviation); and financial institutions that serviced their capital demands. Maintaining the carbon-combustion complex was clearly in the self-interest of these groups, so they cloaked this fact behind a network of “think tanks” that issued challenges to scientific knowledge they found threatening.
Of course, these are the same "think tanks" addressed in
Merchants of Doubt. But this essay goes well beyond placing blame. Rather, the point here is to clarify the causes of the widespread
denial, the futile attempts (too late) to rectify the situation, and its devastating consequences, culminating in a single, catastrophic climatic event occurring after years of continually avoiding the problem:
Then, in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heat
waves scorched the planet, destroying food crops around the globe. Panic ensued, with food riots in virtually every major city. Mass migration of undernourished and dehydrated individuals, coupled with explosive increases in insect populations, led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and, strangely, AIDS (although a medical explanation for the latter has never been forthcoming). Surging insect populations also destroyed huge swaths of forests in Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil. As social order broke down, governments were overthrown, particularly in Africa, but also in many parts of Asia and Europe, further decreasing social capacity to deal with increasingly desperate populations.
The authors describe this as a tipping point, followed in quick succession by the collapse of the Antarctic shelf and the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, as the climate reacted to failed manmade attempts to regulate temperature by injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere. The Arctic permafrost began to rapidly thaw, releasing unprecedented amounts of methane. Extinction of species began to accelerate, and diseases began to decimate the human population as the global mean temperature spiked to five, and then another six degrees Celsius. Ultimately twenty percent of the world's population was displaced by rising sea levels, leading to the migration of a more than a billion people, with all the attendant political and social disruption that followed.
I will leave it to you to see how the essay concludes.
The most disturbing aspect of the essay is its contention that the same "Western" values that have sustained our culture up to the present day are likely the ones that will end up destroying us--that it is not simply a matter of what we do, but who we are. For that reason alone this piece should continue to occupy a unique place in the developing literature of climate change.
How real are Oreskes' and Conway's projections? Writing for the New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben had this to say (subscription req'd):
This account, I am sure, was finished before the events of January 2013, when a heat wave of completely unprecedented proportion baked the entire continent of Australia day after day, and required the country's meteorological agency to add two new colors to its charts to reflect the unheard of heat. The Aussies have taken to calling this record year, which also featured towering wildfires and huge floods, the "angry summer." It sounds both biblical and like something out of science fiction, but it is painfully real. What remains to be seen is whether reality still has any traction in our public life