Scenes from Our Boring Dystopia
What a climate economics study tells us about misguided hopes for change
What are the “love languages” of disaster?
What is the communication strategy that will serve us best in hard times, to help us feel heard and to cultivate solidarity as we try to combat the major crises of our era?
If the very reference to “love languages” made your eye twitch, good.
Although there is certainly merit in knowing that different people express and receive love in different ways, the notion of “love languages” is easily abused precisely because it presumes that everyone wants to be understood in the first place: that the underlying foundation of all our interactions is a good-faith desire to connect.
But what if it’s not?
In 2015, Voice Male Magazine published an article by Chuck Derry called “Abusive Men Describe the Benefits of Violence”. In it, he described his work in court-mandated counselling for men who battered their partners. What the article really gets at, though, is Derry’s dawning realization that these men weren’t terrorizing people because they didn’t know any better. Quite the opposite! Human beings are smart in terrifying ways, and these people were terrorizing their partners because they understood the benefits. It’s simply that those benefits mattered more than any vague appeals to being “better” for the principle of the thing. This is why Derry ultimately realized the greater importance of firming up systemic protections for victims of violence: waiting on individual change was never going to heal the full cultural wound.
After all, why on Earth would anyone give up a way of being that serves them so well?
To steal from religion for a beat, many of us want to believe that there will be a “Come to Jesus” moment for most people. Clearly if people are perpetuating falsehoods online, or making life hell for others around them, it’s just because they don’t realize how wrong this is. Poor unthinking brutes! If only they could be educated!
This is part of why I never liked Crime and Punishment as much as The Brothers Karamazov. The former story, about a man who commits murder out of an inflated sense of ego and destiny, seems to end in a fairy tale, with Raskolnikov finally realizing what a sinner he is: through personal guilt that eats at him throughout the text; through the love of a good woman; and through a moment of sudden grace.
The latter book, conversely, has someone who’s neither guilty nor innocent flung breathlessly free from prison without having learned much at all. The real killer has already killed himself, and life simply has to find its own, messy way forward in the whole murder’s wake.
The latter feels truer to our world, no?
So much urgency. So much fiercely held conviction about right and wrong.
And so little in the way of worldly justice, in the end.
Meanwhile, how much damage have we done with stories like the former, which contain the myth that a person who does harm just needs someone to love them so, so much that the purity of this person’s patience and constancy will reform them?
It’s not just in the case of individual violence, either, that we find the stereotype of the “beauty” called upon to heal “the beast”. In our approach to societal reform writ large, we are strongly encouraged to believe that the cruelty of whole systems will respond best to our steadfast endurance of them. Yes, yes, “nag” when they err—but politely. Keep your protests to a form that won’t enrage or impede. Express your criticism formally, at the approved upon times and in the approved upon ways, and otherwise shut up about whatever a given corporation or state is doing in your name.
After all, aren’t you “serious” about seeking meaningful reforms? Or are you just a terrorist with your desire to bring it all crashing down? What, do you want to alienate the status quo with your extreme actions? The people doing harm from government and corporate offices are still people, too, you know!
Which brings us to the latest, charming effort to meet one of the “beasts” in our culture on terms it might actually respect—because this “beast” certainly doesn’t respect us when we talk about the consequences of its actions in any other way.
Oh, is climate change worsening human outcomes? Is it increasing resource scarcity and displacement pressures? Is it driving up civil conflicts and ethnic divisions? Is it materially impacting pregnancy outcomes and life expectancies? Is it killing off species, desertifying huge tracts of land, and returning other territories to the water?
Gosh, what a shame.
Qué pena contigo, as the saying goes in Spanish: What a pain for you.
But hey, talk about financial impact, and now maybe you’ve got the beast’s ear.
…Right?
Macroeconomics and environmental disaster
On April 17, Nature published “The economic commitment of climate change”, which is a delicate blend of model-based projection and empirical data sets—but hey, when we’re talking about economics, that’s always par for the course.
Looking at 40 years of data from over 1,600 global regions, the study’s authors concluded that
the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices.
But don’t get your hopes up too quickly.
I wanted to call your attention to this report not because I think it will make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but because I’ve seen versions of this news item bandied about online by people who feel so sure that, since this article is talking in the “love language” of Big Business, Big Business will finally listen. Ha ha! We’ve got them by the profits now! Now they have to take us seriously, and repent, and fall down weeping to their knees like Raskolnikov before his beloved Sonya in Siberia!
(And yes, I’m being a bit hard on Crime and Punishment: it’s a good read, filled with many excellent psychological portraits of people hurting people, and people trying to rationalize why they are the way they are. Do give it a shot if you’re so inclined.)
There are two problems with this fairy tale. The first is in the bolded section above, which highlights that we are already committed to a 19% reduction of income, no matter what companies and governments do next. That’s what the present has already stolen from our planet’s future, with respect to current notions of meaningful economic growth (a concept to be hashed out at greater length some other time).
Specifically, the authors write that
[e]ven though levels of income per capita generally still increase relative to those of today, this constitutes a permanent income reduction for most regions, including North America and Europe (each with median income reductions of approximately 11%) and with South Asia and Africa being the most strongly affected (each with median income reductions of approximately 22%). Under a middle-of-the road scenario of future income development, this corresponds to global annual damages in 2049 of 38 trillion in 2005 international dollars (likely range of 19–59 trillion 2005 international dollars).
Do you see the problem? It’s right there in that fun word “median”. If the whole world is going to be affected—if that fact cannot be changed in full—then why on Earth would corporations and the individually affluent today care about future medians?
The real question for such thinkers now becomes: how do I continue to leverage the markets for my own dynasty’s survival in this changing world? How can I make sure that my income is on as skewed a side of that future median as it already is today?
The other problem also relates to demographic outcome. As the study authors note,
On average, the quartile of countries with lower income are committed to an income loss that is 8.9 percentage points (or 61%) greater than the upper quartile, with a likely range of 3.8–14.7 percentage points across the uncertainty sampling of our damage projections (following the likelihood classification adopted by the IPCC). Similarly, the quartile of countries with lower historical cumulative emissions are committed to an income loss that is 6.9 percentage points (or 40%) greater than the upper quartile, with a likely range of 0.27–12 percentage points. These patterns reemphasize the prevalence of injustice in climate impacts in the context of the damages to which the world is already committed by historical emissions and socio-economic inertia.
In other words—and to absolutely no one’s surprise—the countries that contributed the least to climate change, and are already enduring worse outcomes in the global economy, are going to be hit the hardest by coming losses in economic growth.
And so, I couldn’t help but laugh (is that the sound that crying makes now?) at Bloomberg’s attempt to spin this hard fact as if it will mean a darned thing for how Big Business decides to comport itself in the economy ahead. The following is from their Earth Day article, “Climate Change Is Stunting Our Economic Growth”:
Fossil-fuel companies and people who want to keep cashing their political-donation checks insist economies can’t thrive without the dirty stuff. This is especially true in the developing world, they often argue, which is coming late to a party that started long ago in the US and other developed countries. To play catch-up, the thinking goes, these lower-income countries will need to burn fuels that have traditionally been cheap and abundant.
…
But nothing drives demand for fossil fuels quite like economic growth. And as the Potsdam study notes, the impacts of climate change will fall most heavily on lower-income countries, sapping their income by more than 30% in extreme cases. Their energy demand should follow suit. Some developing countries will still burn a lot of fuel trying to adapt to brutal heat and extreme variability in temperatures and rainfall, Kotz notes. But they would have to run a lot of air-conditioning to make up for a 30% hit to GDP.
It really is an adorable sleight of hand.
The author here is trying to impress upon financial watchers that they should really care if the two-thirds-world loses out on economic growth, because if it can’t grow, then it can’t spend more on the dirty products that underpin most of the profit models of giant multinationals in the first place. And then what will poor Big Business do?
If I sound impatient, or severe, it’s only because we can’t afford false hope—and because I strongly feel that average citizens deserve better coverage of the problem.
Last year, the Centre for Climate Reporting posted an undercover story detailing the ways in which Saudi Arabia was actively pursuing growth in its fossil fuel industries—despite all its front-facing affectations to the contrary, and in large part by preying on lower-income regions under-served by other global green energy initiatives.
Legacy media wrote about this report as if it were shocking, when it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that a country enjoying great power on the world stage thanks to fossil fuel profits would do whatever it took to keep its political position intact.
The real problem here, though, is that like Chuck Derry back in that counselling session with men who battered their partners, a great deal of our media conversation is predicated on the idea of good-faith operators. If only these major players knew the truth about the impact of their actions, they’d behave differently! If only we could shine a light on their transgressions and bring them to repent and reform, we’d be on track again! All we need to do is show them a little more tough love, and then the whole world will finally be joined as one in the great climate fight ahead.
What civic participants the world over deserve is a media context that will own up to the blunt, difficult reason why it is so hard to see anything even resembling a step in the right direction from corporations involved in extraction, energy, and transport—let alone from the public partnerships that many of them have in state governments.
Countries are not prominent on the world stage because of moral superiority.
The most important nations in global affairs enjoy these positions because of the economic resources they’ve been able to leverage to political ends.
So if we ever want the “beast” to give up its power when it comes to climate change, we have to acknowledge that it’s never going to do so willingly. Countries and corporations that have benefited from harmful industry actions to date will look at the impending losses to global economic growth from ongoing climate change disaster not with a sudden “Come to Jesus” moment—but with the same calculating eye that served them well to this point.
They will figure out how to leverage the coming world for sustained or even greater market share, no matter what.
They will be even craftier in their forms of socioeconomic and environmental abuse, and echo all the language that our “counselling sessions” (international climate conferences) have taught them how to use to show us that they’ve changed.
And they will find ways to avoid getting “caught” again, of course—
Unless, by some miracle, we find a way to reform the whole culture.
I’m a die-hard lover of The Brothers Karamazov, though, so I don’t expect much to happen that will magically transform all of society.
All I strive for, instead, is a world in which more of us are wiser to the ways in which real power is held, and in which we don’t let one another be lured by false hopes that “they’ve changed this time, honest, they have!”.
Because when it comes to the private industries and state relationships that got us into this environmental mess in the first place: no, honey, I’m sorry—they haven’t, and no matter how sweetly you try to talk to them in their love language, they won’t.
It’s up to us to lean into good-faith actors wherever they still exist, and to work on climate mitigation and acclimation efforts with those fellow poor wretches instead.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
Really fine essay - there’s a sister one today at counterpunch: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/24/how-to-not-get-along-with-apocalypses-in-other-countries/
“About time” is my brain’s refrain, since “boring dystopia” has been my intellectual mantra since the Carter era when everything else was post-60s boosterism, but it’s still rough sledding. “Good-faith” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your essay, when it’s all but impossible to have good faith in “good faith.” The violence and power is all on the other side, with marches and good intentions and selective outrage a pitiful squeak in response.