The Most Radical Solutions Are Needed to Solve the Climate Crisis
If we take it seriously
After I published my latest article Climate Change: Why We Are Fucked, I wondered what should I publish next. I have a couple of writings that I would like to publish, many of them not being related to the climate crisis. Today, however, after I woke up, an article that I wrote a year ago came to my mind.
I wrote that article after I attended a talk about climate change. At the end of the talk, after the speaker presented some interesting data to us and taking into account some other data that I had in mind, I raised my hand and asked the speaker:
“It seems to me that the most radical solutions that someone can ever imagine are needed to actually solve the climate crisis. And not just on a local level, but globally. Do you agree with this assessment or am I missing something? Without taking into account, of course, the possibility that some breakthrough super technology will be invented”.
His response was: “I completely agree with you”.
But what are those radical solutions? the reader might wonder.
While writing about it, I came across an article by the anthropologist Jason Hickel, entitled What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency?. This article, I thought, is quite comprehensive, and thus I did not have to write my own — the reader should give it a read! I might have some disagreements with it, but I think it is illuminating.
Of course, as I wrote in my previous article, I cannot see how things could actually move towards the necessary direction. This is also why I think that the two most likely scenarios about the climate crisis are, unfortunately: disaster or new super technology.
But things are not as gloom and doom as they might seem! Despite the inevitable pessimism that occurs by knowing what is going on, it is probably still worth trying for the best, because we can never know with certainty how life unfolds. Human beings are surprising, after all. Besides, as Diana Stuart puts it in her excellent book What is Environmental Sociology?:
“A 2°C warmer future and a 4°C warmer future by 2100 will be dramatically different, with vast moral implications. None of the crises we face represent an ‘all or nothing’ situation, that would support giving up. In each case, we can either do very little and experience tremendous loss, or we can do as much as we can to create the most sustainable and just future possible.”
The single best move against climate change, counterintuitively, is to accelerate global economic growth (the accumulation of knowledge).
As I have written many times before, many of the ills that face humanity appear to follow a Kuznets curve. CO2 emissions are dropping in wealthy countries as they find ways to growing without using more fossil fuels.
We are on the right path, we just need to move faster.