by Noah Raford
And it gets worse—because accelerating climate change is intruding into a world fraught with other profound ecological and human problems. Quite apart from any direct impact of climate change, inequality within and between societies has been increasing over recent decades (despite the rise of hundreds of millions from poverty into the lower middle classes in China, India, and other large “developing” countries), as has material and existential insecurity among the billions of poor—particularly in the Global South—in the form of rising crime, social violence, and governmental weakness and dysfunction. Additionally, the world is running short of clean, fresh water and easily accessed and processed stocks of many resources key to modern life, especially petroleum (the current moment of great fracking success not withstanding)—at the same time as population growth continues.4 Moreover, no matter what we do going forward, increasing numbers of disasters related to extreme weather—especially in coastal Asia, Central Africa, and the Caribbean—are already baked into the future, the result of GHG emitted over the last two hundred years (because much GHG remains in the atmosphere long-term).
For the foreseeable future, barring major war or worldwide pandemic disease, the epicenter of social impact will be the megacities of the Global South. Dramatic warnings come from diverse perspectives. In 2010, Left urban theorist Mike Davis wrote, “For thirty years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without counterpart public investments in infrastructure, housing or public health.… Sheer demographic momentum … will increase the world’s urban population by 3 billion people over the next forty years, 90 per cent of whom will be in poor cities. No one … has a clue how a planet of slums with growing food and energy crises will accommodate their biological survival, much less their aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.”5 And counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen writes in his 2013 book Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla.
Four megatrends are driving most aspects of future life on the planet.… These are rapid population growth, accelerating urbanization, littoralization (the tendency for things to cluster on coastlines), and increasing connectedness. If we add the potential for climate-change effects such as coastal flooding, and note that almost all the world’s population growth will happen in coastal cities in low-income, sometimes unstable countries, we can begin to grasp the complex challenges that lurk in this future environment.
This unprecedented urbanization is concentrated in low-income areas of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Cities are expected to absorb all the new population growth on the planet by 2050, while simultaneously drawing in millions of migrants from rural areas.
The world’s cities are about to be swamped by a human tide that will force them to absorb—in just one generation—the same population growth that occurred across the entire planet in all of recorded history up to 1960. And virtually all this urbanization will happen in the world’s poorest areas—a recipe for conflict, for crises in health, education, and governance, and for food, energy, and water scarcity.
Cities are in a state of dynamic disequilibrium … there is no status quo, no “normal” to which to return, no stable environment to police. Think about Dhaka, exploding from 400,000 to 15 million, or Lagos, growing from 3 to 20 million, or Mumbai from 2.9 to 23 million, all in the same time frame. These aren’t stable systems; even if you could somehow temporarily get every city function under control, the frantic pace of growth would rapidly overtake the temporary illusion of stability. In fact, that’s exactly what has occurred in many cities, where planners have repeatedly devised solutions to problems as they exist at one particular moment, only to find these solutions overtaken by events before they can be implemented.… Rapid dynamic change has gotten inside planners’ and political leaders’ decision cycles: they repeatedly develop policies that would have been adequate for a set of circumstances that no longer exists.6
The foregoing gestalt constitutes a constellation of mutually exacerbating “super wicked problems”—impossible to get a firm grip on, much less to bring under control or resolve.7 And this super-wickedness is increasingly compounded by the fact that accelerating climate destabilization means that “stationarity” is increasingly dead. “Stationarity—the notion that natural phenomena fluctuate within a fixed envelope of uncertainty—is a bedrock principle of risk assessment. Stationarity makes the insurance industry work. It informs the engineering of our bridges, skyscrapers, and other critical infrastructure. It guides the planning and building codes in places prone to fires, flooding, hurricanes, and earth quakes.”8 In this super-wicked world, business as usual means that risk becomes increasingly incalculable; everything we do—including doing nothing—increasingly suffused with recklessness. Ultimately, if the alarms of those like James Lovelock are to be credited, the human carrying capacity of the planet will decline drastically.9 Short of global thermonuclear war, modern civilization has never faced a more dire existential threat.
It is this world, not the world of the 1950s or 1960s, into which the effects of accelerating global warming are now intruding ever more powerfully.10 If humanity fails to build up societal capacities for mitigation, adaptation, emergency response, and remediation in advance of this oncoming cascade of disasters, then, as such accumulate toward the middle of this century, all of our attention and resources will be sucked up by disaster management and short-term remediation and adaptation efforts—with nothing left to address longer-term solutions. At that point, the abstract technological feasibility of far-reaching “solutions” would become irrelevant.
To moderate the foregoing will require a profound remaking of contemporary industrial modernity. The vast majority of all industrial, agricultural, mining, transportation, and mechanical processes that rely on hydrocarbons for fuel (or that produce substantial greenhouse gases as byproducts) will have to be either converted to clean/green technology or drastically curtailed—on a planet-wide basis. Unfortunately, barring a technological deus ex machina, it is highly unlikely that effective clean/green technological substitutes will be developed and deployed to replace current industrial processes within the time frame required to avoid catastrophe.11 Absent such new technologies—or even with the development of some such technologies—the only choice will be to cut back on our aggregate industrial output (including factory farming). This, in turn, will necessitate far-reaching changes in energy-intensive, high-waste, highpollution lifestyles—not just for a decade or two of “emergency,” but, for all practical purposes, permanently. In other words, irrevocably downshifting our production and consumption patterns is the only route open to us if we want to hold open a long-term future for other prized aspects of our existing civilization.
Much has been written about what might and should be done economically and technologically to mitigate and cope with climate-change issues. What gets less attention, however, is the magnitude of the political requirements for seriously addressing climate change.12 In recent years, a steady accumulation of scientific evidence and opinion has generated a broad consensus among policymakers and informed publics that anthropogenic global warming is both real and a very serious long-term threat to human well-being. This is good news. And yet that consensus has not led to political action; attempts to create GHG abatement policies and protocols have stalled, and the political will to make necessary changes remains nonexistent—especially where it matters most, in the United States, China, and India. Absent a radical revision to the very conception of modern political legitimacy, such political will is unlikely to emerge. That’s not just bad; that’s a potential civilization-killer.
Thus a realistic review of the challenge of climate change, representing the leading edge of a whole series of systemic disruptions and crises, yields the following syllogism: a drastic reduction (80 percent or more) in global GHG emissions by the 2050s is required in order to avoid civilization-killing climate change in the long term (and that reduction needs to be front-loaded, or it will need to get close to 100 pe
rcent before 2050).13 Such a reduction can only be accomplished either by wholesale conversion of the energy system to renewables or by a massive reduction in total energy consumption (really a combination of a whole lot of one and a great deal of the other).14 Wholesale conversion to renewables within the specified time frame is, even if technically possible in the abstract, an unimaginably monumental—and politically impossible—undertaking. The only feasible alternative is a gross reduction in total energy consumption, combined with as much conversion as we can get. And this, in turn, must mean a radical reduction in aggregate production and consumption of most classes of material goods. It means not just smaller and fewer motorized vehicles, but less travel, less heating in winter, less cooling in summer, less light at night, less opulent housing, less electronic gadgetry and entertainment extravaganza, much less meat … the list goes on. In sum, with regard to all forms of material production and consumption, serious emissions reduction boils down to just one word: LESS.
The conditions and inputs necessary to the maintenance of modernity’s “normal” levels of system functioning are, in a word, history. This chapter attempts to move away from the wishful thinking that so often infuses and clouds climate-change debates and instead proposes conceptually coherent and imaginable moves toward a realistic (albeit terrifically challenging) alternative. Rather than join the unrealism of the political hopes and technological utopianism of most environmentalists, we instead find promise in a different direction—one based on the possibility of retrieving, reformulating, and reinstating a once-prominent alternative form of “capitalist” political economy—early industrial “producerist republicanism”—as a constituent element of a forward-looking Green Social Democracy.
Why a Technological Fix Is Not in the Cards: Ecological Modernization Theory—Too Little, Too Late
Typically, when arguments such as we make here are introduced, liberals and green pragmatists step forward and say, “But wait, if we can just get the prices right on carbon, this will put in place the incentives that will inevitably push entrepreneurs, scientists, and inventors to perfect and deploy the technology necessary to radically reduce GHG emissions while still generating all the energy we need to maintain and spread our modern way of life.” The hope that many pragmatists place in a technological fix is an expression of high-modernist faith in the unlimited power of science and technology as profound—and as rational—as Augustine’s faith in Christ. The assumption here, often voiced explicitly without much hard evidence to back it up, is that “all the necessary GHG abatement technology already exists”15 and only political gridlock, incompetence, or venality is preventing its deployment.16
Green technocrats, recognizing that most people don’t want to give up their carbon-intensive habits or aspirations, assert that we must—and therefore we can—somehow find a way to reconcile decarbonization of the global economy with people’s consumerist desires. Such self-described “ecological modernization theorists” insist that it is possible to give the modern global political economy an eco-friendly makeover. They promote the idea of making economic growth and affluence “sustainable,” while remediating the environmental damage caused by earlier dirty growth and development.17 The scholars and policy intellectuals in this tradition, it should be said, are not without their own politically audacious proposals, demanding massive public and private investments in the development and deployment of clean/green technology, as well as substantial institutional reform of capitalist political economy (typically in the vein of the “Third Way”18). What this literature shies away from, however, is the need for any fundamental change in culture or politics beyond that held to be already triumphant in the form of the “post-materialist” culture and politics of the “knowledge workers,” the “creative classes,” and the modern middle classes generally.19
Exemplary of this school of technological utopianism are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of the acclaimed 2007 manifesto Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists and founders and directors of the Breakthrough Institute (whose journal and blog serve as a leading platform for technocratic utopianism).20 For them, prosperity, like consumption, is an entirely unproblematic concept. They see nothing excessive or unworthy in the hegemonic version of the American dream. This posture is related to the assumption, central to all earlier modernization theory, that modernization and modernity naturally and necessarily come as a coherent package—and that the materialistic affluence of upper and upper-middle classes is part of the package. The aspiration to share in that affluence, the “psychic mobility” that makes it possible to see one’s own future in those terms, is an essential part of what it means to be modern.21
The “American way of life” is a gloss on that package, dressed up for popular consumption by the twentieth-century advertising industry. This is not to argue that all of the American dream’s satisfactions are inauthentic—far from it. But, contrary to the thrust of both modernization theory and the advertising industry, there is no reason to believe that the integrity of those satisfactions depends on “having it all” or that toned-down, modest versions of such are not as good or better than versions-on-steroids. Work such as that of Nordhaus and Shellenberger begs the question of what constitutes adequate satisfaction of material needs and what constitutes the kind of overindulgence that actually stands in the way of recognizing and cultivating “higher” needs and values.22 In any case, the climate change we now face means that the content of the high-modernist dream must be disaggregated and some heretofore preeminent parts of the package given up entirely—the legitimation of material luxury, the glorification of wealth, the prospect of possession without limit—we must end the orienting and preemptive power of such over the development of human aspiration and human capital throughout the world’s population.23 But for Nordhaus and Shellenberger and their ilk, this is anathema.
The foregoing reveals the pivot of our disagreement with Nordhaus and Shellenberger and with ecological modernization theory more generally. Ecological modernization theory remains wedded to the assumption that the post-WWII form of modernization was not a wrong turn, but rather a positive development that generated some unanticipated externalities. By contrast, we assert that we now know enough about the nature and consequences of those externalities—and of planetary sensitivities and limits—to realize that they put the nail in the coffin of modernization theory and its glorification of industrial productivity and high-tech mass consumerism. We must face up to the reality that the last thirty-five years of “turbo capitalism” has been the culmination of a grand, historical wrong turn that began in the last third of the nineteenth century and reached hegemony in the twenty years after World War II.24
Of course, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are well aware that their vision of modernization spreading from today’s materialistically privileged minority to a much larger segment of the population through the application of current (fossil fuel) technology will have the unfortunate consequence of boiling the planet. Knowing this, Nordhaus and Shellenberger fall back on the classic high-modernist magic of the “technological fix.” They assert, without any real basis, that clean/green technology will allow us to have our high mass-consumption cake on a global scale and yet eat it in a low carbon-footprint manner. To be sure, Nordhaus and Shellenberger recognize the magnitude of the technological investment and innovation that they are calling for and relying upon. But at the end of the day, their way out of the GHG emissions quandary is to assert that technological breakthroughs can and will lead the way through the coming travails to a new postmodernity that is simultaneously affluent, green, and global. Indeed, they seem to believe that the new technology will not only limit the damage from the climate change (which they acknowledge to be already baked-in) but also make it possible to restart and complete the spread of near-affluence throughout the world population without further exacerbating global warming. They can cite no persuasive evidence for either of these positions. Their p
rogram is as much a matter of quasireligious faith as is new age environmentalism for its acolytes.
To realize the futility of hoping that a technological fix can solve our GHG problem without requiring a massive reduction in energy consumption, one must understand the dimensions of the global energy system. The current global economy requires the regular availability of about sixteen terawatts of electrical power generating capacity. Reducing GHG emissions by 80 percent over the next twenty-five years or so (and that target is an artifact of now outdated science—as of early 2014, it is clear that we need even greater reduction in that time frame25), can logically mean only one of two things: either we need to massively cut energy consumption (which necessarily will entail drastic cuts in aggregate economic output) or else we need to generate approximately thirteen terawatts of electric power from renewable sources.26
