The Collapse of Western Civilization

by Naomi Oreskes

  NO: I don’t like “fossil industry.” It makes it sound like they are selling fossils. Agreed, with any luck one day they will be fossils, unless they can transform their business model and become energy companies rather than fossil fuel companies. I truly hope that they can do that. I’m a geologist and I still have friends in the oil industry.

  EC: The Sea Level Rise Denial Bill was all too real.1 The political denial of climate change has gotten so absurd that I’ve wondered if the denialists are being advised by a comedian. Have The Yes Men gone into consulting?

  NO: I agree. This would be funny if it weren’t (mostly) true. The supporters of the Sea Level Rise Denial Bill don’t call it that, of course, but that’s what it is. We figured future historians would call a spade a spade.

  5. Why did you decide to situate the narrator in China in the Second (or Neocommunist) People’s Republic?

  NO: The doubt-mongers we wrote about in Merchants of Doubt were anti-communists who opposed environmental regulations for fear that government encroachment in the marketplace would become a backdoor to communism. They believed that political freedom was tied to economic freedom, so restrictions on economic freedom threatened political freedom. Their views came out of the Cold War—particularly the writings of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek—but the essential idea remains a tenet for many people on the right wing of the American political spectrum today. While rarely stated quite this baldly, the reasoning goes like this: Government intervention in the market place is bad. Accepting the reality of climate change requires us to acknowledge the need for government intervention either to regulate the use of fossil fuels or to increase the cost of doing so. So we won’t accept the reality of climate change.

  Erik and I have pointed out that besides being illogical, this sort of thinking—by delaying action—increases the risk that disruptive climate change will lead to the very sort of heavy-handed interventions that conservatives wish to avoid. Catastrophic natural disasters—particularly those that disrupt food and water supply—are a justification for governments to send in the national guard, commandeer resources, declare martial law, and otherwise suspend democratic processes and interfere with markets. Given this, one can make the argument that authoritarian societies will be more able to handle catastrophic climate change than free ones. So people who care about freedom should want to see early action to prevent catastrophic climate change. Delay increases the risk that authoritarian forms of governance will come out ahead in the end. The nation in which our historian is writing is the Second PRC, because we imagine that after a period of liberalization and democratization, autocratic forces become resurgent in China, justified by the imperative of dealing with the climate crisis.

  EC: Chinese civilization has been around a lot longer than Western civilization has and it’s survived a great many traumas. While I’m not sure the current government of China is likely to hold up well—the internal tensions are pretty glaring—it’s hard to imagine a future in which there’s no longer a place called China. And as Naomi explains, authoritarian states may well find it easier to make the changes necessary to survive rapid climate change. With a few exceptions, the so-called liberal democracies are failing to address climate change.

  Whatever the surviving states of 2393 are called, though, they’ll be writing history from their perspective. So there will be a history of the Penumbra as written from the point of view of Russia, and of the South American confederation, of the Nordo-Scandinavian Union, etc.

  6. In your essay you delineate the period of Western civilization as extending from 1540 to 2093. Can you explain these dates?

  NO: Hmm … Erik, can you recall why we started with 1540? Was it something to do with Copernicus?

  EC: We chose 1540 for Georg Joachim Rheticus’s publication of the Narratio Prima, the first published argument for heliocentrism. It was written as the introduction to Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, published in 1543. Traditionally, historians have taken this work as marking the beginning of the scientific revolution—although most historians today reject that term—and of the ascendance in Western Europe of natural philosophy, with its commitment to understanding the universe on the basis of physical evidence.

  The choice of 2093 is more arbitrary. Neither of us will live to see that year, so it seemed far enough in the future for emotional comfort. On the other hand, there’s no question that sea level rise by then will have become significant and obvious to anyone near the coastlines.

  NO: 2093 felt close enough that it was scary, but not so close that the year would come and go within our lifetimes and people would say—see you got that wrong! And it seemed like a reasonable estimate for when things will start to go badly if we continue business as usual. Roger Revelle [one of the first scientists to warn about global warming] worried a lot about what would happen by the year 2100. So this places the end of our story just before that inflection point.

  7. Certainly one of the more memorable and pungent themes in your essay is the over-reliance of scientists on the 95 percent confidence interval, before they will make a call on causation or recommend any kind of public policy or action. You are stepping on some pretty sacred toes here. Are you worried about the “slippery slope” argument that abandoning long-cherished standards of statistical significance could lead to crappy science and misguided, even dangerous, policy?

  NO: This is a really big issue. There is a lot I’d like to say about that, but, as you note, we are stepping on hallowed ground. Maybe there is another book there. But no, I am not worried about the slippery slope argument. For one thing, slippery slope arguments are generally illogical. Just because you say some element of a system should be reexamined doesn’t mean you are burning down the house. The argument against accepting the scientific evidence of climate change that we tracked in Merchants of Doubt was a slippery slope argument: today we control greenhouse gas emissions, tomorrow we give up the Bill of Rights. One of our protagonists said this explicitly, in defense of tobacco: that if we allow the government to control tobacco there’s no limit to what the government may try to control next. It’s a foolish argument. Actions should be based on their merits or demerits. Anything can be foolish if taken too far. Tobacco kills people, and it is addictive. It makes sense to regulate it, just as it makes sense to regulate heroin. It also makes sense to regulate driving, and air traffic control. But that doesn’t mean we should regulate soda. Each question has to be debated on its merits. Regulations that made sense in the past, such as in telecommunications, might not make sense today, and regulations that make sense today may need to be revised or repealed in the future.

  The challenge is always to determine what is needed in any given situation. It’s the same for science. Scientists have changed their standards in the past, and they will do so again. It’s high time we had a serious discussion of where the 95 percent confidence limit came from, and whether it makes sense in the nearly indiscriminate way that it is currently applied.

  EC: Plus—we have crappy science and dangerous policy despite the existence of the 95 percent confidence limit convention!

  NO: Good point!

  EC: That’s why journals have retraction processes, for one thing. The 95 percent confidence limit is a choice—just like our choice of 2093 as the end of Western civilization—but it’s not entirely arbitrary: it’s designed to provide a high hurdle against one specific kind of error. As we explain in the piece, and in Merchants of Doubt, it provides no defense against many other kinds of error.

  8. So what about the “precautionary principle”—the idea you describe in CWC, that we must take early action to prevent later disaster? Critics of this notion argue that the precautionary principle is more of a rhetorical and advocacy tool than a responsible way to explore and develop policy options. Do you think a market-based, neoliberal political and economic regime can act with long-term caution?

  EC: The claim is nonsense. In terms of anthropogenic climate change, the pr
ecautionary principle is moot. Precautions are taken in advance of damage, not after it has already begun. We have overwhelming evidence that we’ve already triggered a rapid rate of oceanic and atmospheric warming. We’re currently reacting to climate change already in progress, not deploying precautions against warming that might or might not happen in the future.

  NO: I love Erik! I was going to say the same thing. The precautionary principle deals with what one should do when there is evidence that something may be a problem, but we’re not quite sure, or not sure of the extent of it. We are sure that climate change is happening—we already see damage—and we know beyond a reasonable doubt that business as usual will lead to more damage, possibly devastating damage, as our story tells. It’s way too late for precaution. Now we are talking about damage control.

  EC: Insofar as the larger issue of policy beyond climate change, the argument is still wrong. U.S. law requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to perform toxicity testing on new drugs, which is a form of precaution. But our laws, unlike those of the European Union, do not require testing of industrial chemicals. Why do we deploy the precautionary principle against drugs, but not pesticides or plasticizers? Politics. The chemical industry succeeding in preventing precautionary regulation where the pharmaceutical industry did not.

  Here’s another example. I live in California. There’s a large, active fault known as the San Andreas running within twenty miles of my condo. We have both geological and historical evidence that the San Andreas has caused great earthquakes. Because of that evidence, the state has taken the precaution of imposing seismic design requirements in its current building codes. It also holds emergency response drills—my employer, a private technical college, participates in them too.

  Those precautionary requirements cost us all money, by increasing the cost of our structures and in productive time lost from work. Yet we don’t know when, or where, the next fault rupture will occur. They’re unpredictable.

  Is the argument here that we shouldn’t take these precautions? I doubt you could pass a referendum in California repealing them. Most of us don’t really want our buildings falling down on us in the name of protecting “free markets.”

  Can we deploy the precautionary principle without strangling the economy? Yes, we do it all the time. Precautions are everywhere. A stop sign is a precaution!

  Can a neoliberal regime act with long-term caution? No, because the neoliberal worship of deregulation leads directly to the poisoning of ourselves and the rest of the world.

  NO: That might be a bit strong. But Erik’s basically right. Neoliberalism in its pure form fails to recognize external costs or to provide a mechanism for preventing future damage. There’s no market signal from the future, or from birds and bats and bees (until the damage is so great that we actually see it, for example, in the cost of honey, but even then, most consumers won’t know why the cost of honey is rising).

  Business and political leaders who have been swayed by the arguments for deregulation need to realize that while the basic idea of invoking competition to good ends is a powerful one, it only works in the full sense when tempered by the need to address market failure and external costs. Neoliberalism is an ideology, and like most ideologies, it hits potholes and speed bumps when put into practice; even Adam Smith recognized that you have to regulate the banks. Climate change is a really, really big pothole. But here’s an interesting point to note: von Hayek explicitly invoked pollution as an external cost that can legitimately justify government intervention in the marketplace. I suppose that might be why some people on the right deny that CO2 is a pollutant …

  9. One of the great ironies you describe in CWC is that, ultimately, it is the neoliberal regimes that fail to act in time to avert climate change disasters and it is China, the epitome of the command-and-control political culture, that can make the huge institutional moves to save its population. This scenario is pretty breathtaking speculation! Just how much do you hate the American way of life? What gives you the intellectual chutzpah to make these kinds of projections?

  EC: What is this “American Way of Life” you speak of so blithely? Is it the America of one-room schoolhouses on the prairie? Of small-holders, shopkeepers, and family farms? That’s what it meant in 1930. But that “American way of life” is gone, and its departure had nothing to do with us. Its vanishing had a great deal to do with the growth of industrial capitalism and the drive for efficiencies of scale. The funny thing about “efficiencies of scale” is that they tend to concentrate wealth—and therefore power—in the hands of a few, and those few can thwart the will of the majority pretty easily. Theodore Roosevelt called this class of men “malefactors of great wealth” in a 1907 speech in Massachusetts. There are simply more of them now (and they’ve allowed a handful of women into their club).

  The wealthiest businesses the world has ever known are part of the carbon-combustion complex, and they’ve been enormously successful at preventing most of the liberal democracies from doing anything meaningful about climate change. I don’t see any reason to believe they’ll suddenly throw in the towel and play nice.

  NO: Our story is a call to protect the American way of life before it’s too late. Speculative? Of course, but the book is extremely fact-based. All the technical projections are based on current science. Chutzpah? You have to have chutzpah to write any book. Or to stand in a classroom and expect students to listen. Strangely enough, they do, and sometimes they even thank you. Readers, too.

  10. What do you hope that readers take away from your essay?

  EC: Readers tend to take out of a text whatever it was that they brought in. At best we can hope to have helped them think more clearly about the climate of the future.

  NO: Hmm … you can’t predict what your readers will take away. Books are like a message in a bottle. You hope someone will open it, read it, and get the message. Whatever that is.

  * Interview conducted by Patrick Fitzgerald, Publisher for Life Sciences, Columbia University Press.

  Notes

  1. The Coming of the Penumbral Age

  1. See http://www.quaternary.stratigraphy.org.uk/workinggroups/anthropocene/.

  2. Ronald Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 535–666; Naomi Oreskes, Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

  3. Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). See also “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization be Avoided?,” Paul R. Ehrich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Proc. Royal Society B, 2013.

  4. On the various forms of Chinese population control, see Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

  5. See http://unfccc.int/meetings/copenhagen_dec_2009/meeting/6295.php.

  2. The Frenzy of Fossil Fuels

  1. Michael Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

  2. See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/bp-scientist-emails/.

  3. Seth Cline, “Sea Level Bill Would Allow North Carolina to Stick Its Head in the Sand,” U.S. News & World Report, June 1, 2012, http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/01/sea-level-bill-would-allow-north-carolina-to-stick-its-head-in-the-sand. Stephen Colbert made a satire of the law (see Stephen Colbert, “The Word—Sink or Swim,” The Colbert Report, June 4, 2012, http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/414796/june-04-2012/the-word-sink-or-swim).

  4. Government Spending Accountability Act of 2012, 112th Cong., 2012, H.R. 4631, http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/WALSIL_032_xml.pdf.

  5. Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting (New York: Spectra Publishers, 2005–2007).

  6. Naomi Oreskes, “Seeing Climate Change,�
�� in Dario Robleto: Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens, ed. Gilbert Vicario (Des Moines, Iowa: Des Moines Art Center, 2011).

  7. See Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010), http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/; and Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

  8. For an electronic archive of predictions and data as of 2012, see http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/. An interesting paper from the University of California, San Diego, addresses the issue of under-prediction; see Keynyn Brysse et al., “Climate Change Prediction: Erring on the Side of Least Drama?” Global Environmental Change 23 (2013): 327–337.

  9. David F. Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1992); and Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2007).

  10. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), chap. 5, esp. 157 n. 91–92. See also Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An Analysis of the Conservative Movement’s Counter-claims,” Social Problems 47 (2000): 499–522; Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 1163–1172.

  11. Justin Gillis, “In Poll, Many Link Weather Extremes to Climate Change,” The New York Times, April 17, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/science/earth/americans-link-global-warming-to-extreme-weather-poll-says.html.

  12. Tom A. Boden, Gregg Marland, and Robert J. Andres, “Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions,” Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (Oak Ridge, Tenn.: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2011), http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/overview_2008.html.