The Collapse of Western Civilization

by Naomi Oreskes

  Baconianism A philosophy, generally attributed to the English jurist Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), that held that through experience, observation, and experiment, one could gather reliable knowledge about the natural world and this knowledge would empower its holder. The fallacy of Baconianism was clearly demonstrated by the powerlessness of scientists, in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to effect meaningful action on climate change despite their acute knowledge of it.

  bridge to renewables The logical fallacy, popular in the first decades of the twenty-first century, that the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion could be solved by burning more fossil fuels, particularly natural gas. The fallacy rested on an incomplete analysis, which considered only physical by-products of combustion, particularly in electricity generation, and not the other factors that controlled overall energy use and net release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

  capitalism A form of socioeconomic organization that dominated Western Europe and North America from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, in which the means of production and distribution of goods and services were owned either by individuals or by government-chartered legal entities called “corporations.” Typically these entities were operated for-profit, with the surplus value produced by workers funneled to owners, managers, and “investors,” third parties who owned “stock” in a company but had liability neither for its debts nor its social consequences. The separation of work from ownership produced a concentration of wealth amongst a tiny elite, who could then purchase more favorable laws and regulations from their host governments. One popular notion about capitalism of the period was that it operated through a process of creative destruction. Ultimately, capitalism was paralyzed in the face of the rapid climate destabilization it drove, destroying itself.

  carbon-combustion complex The interlinked fossil fuel extraction, refinement, and combustion industries, financiers, and government “regulatory” agencies that enabled and defended destabilization of the world’s climate in the name of employment, growth, and prosperity.

  communism A political ideology rooted in the early European industrial revolution that favored workers’ rights over those of financiers and managers, and state planning over market forces. Adopted primarily in Eurasia in the early to mid-twentieth century, it was largely abandoned in the late twentieth century due to its failures to deliver on its economic promises, and its susceptibility to political corruption and human rights abuses. However, it became resurgent in a modified form labeled neocommunism, focused on the necessity of government intervention in response to the crisis of the Great Collapse.

  cryosphere The portions of the Earth’s surface, including glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice, and permafrost on land, that used to be frozen.

  environment The archaic concept which, separating humans from the rest of the world, identified the nonhuman component as something which carried particular aesthetic, recreational, or biological value (see environmental protection). Sometimes the “natural” environment was distinguished from the “built” environment, contributing to the difficulty that twentieth-century humans had in recognizing and admitting the pervasive and global extent of their impact. Radical thinkers, such as Paul Ehrlich and Dennis and Donella Meadows (a twentieth-century husband and wife team), recognized that humans are part of their environment and dependent upon it, and that its value was more than aesthetic and recreational; that the natural world was essential for human employment, growth, prosperity, and health. These arguments were commonly disparaged, but the idea of environmental protection contained at least partial recognition of this point.

  environmental protection The archaic late-twentieth-century concept that singled out the nonhuman environment (see environment) for legal protection, typically in response to damaging economic activity (see external costs).

  eustatic refugees “Eustasy” is a global change in sea level; eustatic refugees are those displaced by rising seas.

  external costs In capitalist economic systems (see capitalism; invisible hand), prices for goods and services were based upon what the market “would bear” (i.e., what consumers were willing and able to pay), without regard to social, biological, or physical costs associated with manufacture, transport, and marketing. These additional costs, not reflected in prices, were referred to as “external” because they were seen as being external to markets and therefore external to the economic system in which those markets operated (see market failure). Economists of this era found it difficult to accept that one could not have an economy without the resources provided by this “external” environment.

  Fisherian statistics A form of mathematical analysis developed in the early twentieth century and designed to help distinguish between causal and accidental relationships between phenomena. Its originator, R. A. Fisher, was one of the founders of the science of population genetics, and also an advocate of racially-based eugenics programs. Fisher also rejected the evidence that tobacco use caused cancer, and his argument that “correlation is not causation” was later used as a mantra by neoliberals rejecting the scientific evidence of various forms of adverse environmental and health effects from industrial products (see statistical significance).

  fugitive emissions Leakage from wellheads, pipelines, refineries, etc. Considered “fugitive” because the releases were supposedly unintentional, at least some of them (e.g., methane venting at oil wells) were in fact entirely deliberate. While widely acknowledged by engineers to exist, the impacts of fugitive emissions was minimized by the carbon-combustion complex and its defenders, and thus went largely unaccounted (see bridge to renewables; capitalism; external costs). Some went so far as to insist that because methane was a commercially valuable gas, it was impossible that corporations would allow it to “escape.”

  Great Depression The period of pervasive market failure, deflation, and unemployment, in the United States and Europe, from 1929 to 1941, separating the First Gilded Age from the Second World War. Brought on by the collapse of unregulated financial markets, it led to widespread questioning of capitalist theory, and for a period of about a half century, the deployment of social-democratic policies in Europe and North America designed to ameliorate the worst social costs of market capitalism. However, by the late twentieth century, the lessons of the Great Depression had been forgotten, many of the protections put in place dismantled, and a veritable frenzy of consumption (driven in large part by fossil fuel combustion) ensued.

  greenhouse gases Gases—such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and others—that trap infrared radiation and therefore heat the Earth above the temperature that would prevail in their absence.

  human adaptive optimism (1) The belief that there are no limits to human adaptability—that we can either adapt to any circumstances, or change them to suit ourselves. Belief in geoengineering as a climate “solution” was a subset of HAO. (2) The capacity of humans to remain optimistic and adapt to changed circumstances, even in the face of daunting difficulties, and even if the form of “adaptation” required is suffering.

  invisible hand A form of magical thinking, popularized in the eighteenth century, that economic markets in a capitalist system were “balanced” by the actions of an unseen, immaterial power, which both ensured that markets functioned efficiently and that they would address human needs. Belief in the invisible hand (sometimes also called the invisible hand of the marketplace) formed a kind of quasi-religious foundation for capitalism (see capitalism; external costs; market failure; market fundamentalism).

  market failure The social, personal, and environmental costs that market economies imposed on individuals and societies were referred to as “market failures.” The concept of market failure was an early recognition of the limits of capitalist theory (see external costs; invisible hand).

  market fundamentalism A quasi-religious dogma (see invisible hand) promoting unregulated markets over all other forms of human socioeconomic organizatio
n. During the Penumbra, market fundamentalists tended to deny the existence of market failure, thus playing a key role in the denial of the changes that were already under way and therefore in the catastrophes that ensued.

  Period of the Penumbra The shadow of anti-intellectualism that fell over the once-Enlightened techno-scientific nations of the Western world during the second half of the twentieth century, preventing them from acting on the scientific knowledge available at the time and condemning their successors to the inundation and desertification of the late twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.

  physical scientists The practitioners in a network of scientific disciplines derived from the eighteenth-century natural philosophy movement. Overwhelmingly male, they emphasized study of the world’s physical constituents and processes—the elements and compounds; atomic, magnetic, and gravitational forces; chemical reactions, flows of air and water—to the neglect of biological and social realms and focused on reductionist methodologies that impeded understanding of the crucial interactions between the physical, biological, and social realms.

  positivism The intellectual philosophy, promoted in the late nineteenth century by the French sociologist Auguste Comte (but also associated with earlier thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Pierre Simon LaPlace and later thinkers such as Ernst Mach and A. J. Ayer), which stressed that reliable knowledge must be grounded in observation. Statements that could not be tested through observation were considered to be outside the realm of “positive knowledge”—or science—and this included most metaphysical and religious claims. Logical positivists (sometimes also referred to as logical empiricists) stressed the linguistic aspects of this problem and focused on finding theoretically neutral means to articulate observation statements. In the twentieth century, the term was sometimes confusingly associated with the nearly opposite stance: that scientific theories are to be believed come hell or high water. Thus, scientists were sometimes accused of being “positivists” for believing in the truth of their theories, when in fact a true positivist would only believe in the truth of the observations (or observation statements) on which those theories were built.

  precautionary principle “First, do no harm,” a doctrine supposed to descend from the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. The basis of all policies designed to protect human life and health.

  Sagan effect In 1959, U.S. astronomer Carl Sagan identified the greenhouse effect as the cause of Venus’s hotter-than-molten-lead surface temperature; as anthropogenic global warming took hold in the late 2000s, the term Sagan effect was used to refer to the runaway greenhouse effect on Earth.

  sink Place where wastes accumulated, either deliberately or not. Industrial powers of the twentieth century treated the atmosphere and oceans as sinks, wrongly believing them capable of absorbing all the wastes humans produced, in perpetuity.

  statistical significance The archaic concept that an observed phenomenon could only be accepted as true if the odds of it happening by chance were very small, typically taken to be no more than 1 in 20.

  synthetic-failure paleoanalysis The discipline of understanding past failure, specifically by understanding the interactions (or synthesis) of social, physical, and biological systems.

  termination shock The sudden rise in atmospheric temperature caused by the cessation of efforts to cool the planet.

  type I error The conceptual mistake of accepting as true something that is false. Both type I and type II errors are wrong, but in the twentieth century it was believed that a type I error was worse than a type II error.

  type II error The conceptual mistake of rejecting as false something that is true. In the twentieth century it was believed that a type I error was worse than a type II error. The rejection of climate change proved the fallacy of that belief.

  zero-net-carbon infrastructure The technocomplex of non-fossil energy sources, transportation systems, and carbon sequestration technologies deployed to counterbalance the climate effects of the industrial agriculture necessary to sustain the surviving human population (e.g., like the not-very-successful forests of mechanical atmosphere scrubbers deployed between 2100 and 2170).

  Interview with the Authors

  1. How did you originally come to write The Collapse of Western Civilization (CWC)? How do you see it in relation to your recent title Merchants of Doubt?*

  Naomi Oreskes (NO): I was invited to write a piece for a special issue of Daedalus on social scientific approaches to climate change. The specific invitation was to write on why we (collectively) were failing to respond adequately. At the time, I was pondering why scientists’ attempts at communication were proving so conspicuously ineffective, but I was having trouble thinking of how to answer the question without rewriting Merchants of Doubt on the one hand, or sounding like a scold on the other. As a historian, I also felt uncomfortable trying to answer such a present-tense question. Then the thought came to me: what will future historians say about us? How will they answer this question? And when Erik didn’t object …

  2. Naturally, contemplating the collapse of a civilization and the planetary environmental disaster you describe is pretty grim stuff. How did you wrestle with the overall mordant quality of the writing?

  NO: Writing from the perspective of a future historian solved that problem. Viewing things in hindsight gives you emotional distance.

  Erik Conway (EC): Yes—and I would add that I’m not sure “mordant” is really the right term. Many people on the activist end of the climate change “debate” seem to believe that climate change will result in human extinction. But that’s not what looking back at previous episodes of climate change in human history has to offer. Our social, political, and cultural organizations change in response to climate. Sometimes governance structures survive, sometimes they don’t. But people will—although if we continue down our current fossil-fueled path, there will be a lot less of us in a few hundred years. Not that I will live to see it!

  To me, CWC is hopeful. There will be a future for humanity, even if one no longer dominated by “Western Culture.”

  3. How have fiction and science fiction informed your thinking and your writing in CWC?

  EC: Science fiction has explored issues of climate change and disruption for decades. The first fiction author I’m aware of who looked seriously at the role of ecosystems in human activities was Frank Herbert. His 1965 work Dune was a fascinating study of the way a single planet’s ecosystem affected an entire galactic empire. The work most personally influential to us was Kim Stanley Robinson’s two trilogies—his Mars triology, and his climate change trilogy (the latter is the one we mention in the book). They are both complicated stories, but the basic narrative in the Mars story is conflict over how to change the climate to make it inhabitable for Earthlings, while also trying to deal (badly) with climate disruption on Earth. The climate change trilogy is written in a realistic vein, so some might not consider it science fiction at all, but it is closely based on science, as is our story.

  There are numerous advantages to working in a fictional mode. One is that you can address themes in ways that are very difficult for historians, because you are not so strictly limited by sources. Robinson, for example, deals very effectively with various strands of environmental thinking. For a historian to do that, he or she would need access to a very large quantity of material, including business records, and it’s very difficult to get access to corporate records. History tends to be skewed toward topics and people who have left extensive, and open, records. Historians also have to stay close to their source material, which sometimes gets in the way of telling a good story. Fiction gives you more latitude, and here we try to use that latitude in interesting and thought-provoking ways, but always with the goal of being true to the facts: true to what science tells us could really happen if we continue with business as usual, and true to what history suggests is plausible. Nothing is invented out of whole cloth.

  NO: In my talks, I like to remind folks of Robinson’s wonderful line: �
��The invisible hand never picks up the check.” That’s market failure in a nutshell. Stan was one of the first people to get the connection between neoliberalism and climate change denial and the first to work that theme into fiction, at least as far as I know.

  It’s interesting to me that he is very influenced by history of science. I suppose it’s the sense I got from his work of a blend created by honoring the factual constraints of nature—as illuminated by science—with the creative opportunities offered by fiction—that helped to inspire this piece. I didn’t realize that when we first started writing, but partway into I did. I’m also inspired by Margaret Atwood. Alias Grace especially.

  4. One of the features I enjoyed is the satire in your essay. Can you tell us a little about the “carbon-combustion complex” and the “Sea Level Rise Denial Bill”?

  NO: Merchants of Doubt tells the story of a particular group of people who sowed doubt about climate change (and several other issues), why they did, and how. But it left (mostly) unanswered the question of why selling doubt has been so effective. One part of the answer had to do with the large network of people who benefit from the production and use of fossil fuels. It’s not just the fossil fuel companies—although obviously they lay the crucial foundation—but it’s also the automobile industry, the aerospace industry, the electrical utilities, the folks who supply asphalt for roads … you get the picture. At the same time we were writing this piece, Erik and I were also working on a volume on Cold War science. You can’t talk about the Cold War without talking about the military-industrial complex. The carbon-combustion complex was a natural analog.

  EC: The carbon-combustion complex, as Naomi describes, was a convenient formulation for dealing with the intersecting political and economic interests surrounding fossil energy production and use, though my own tendency is to refer to them as the fossil industry complex. They’ll be extinct once the oil runs out, after all. But Naomi won that argument.