As the scientific world comes to grips with the realization that limiting global warming to 1.5°C (previously touted as the point of no return for climate change) is virtually impossible due to political unwillingness to curb emissions, new language is emerging to combat the natural reaction anyone would have to this news—despair and terror. 1.5°C was for many years the magic number, and any heating beyond that would lead to feedback loops and catastrophic, civilization-threatening outcomes. This level of warming is now almost certain to be exceeded, and if current emissions aren’t rapidly reduced, the most likely increase in temperature by 2100 will be a startling 2.7°C, nearly twice the once-touted catastrophic outcome. Climate change and pollution in general are of course not far off threats—millions of people are already dying or losing their livelihoods as a result of pollution, drought, floods, storms, and other damaging weather events which are more likely to occur in our altered ecosystem. The WHO recently found that poor air quality in fact harms everyone on Earth right now:
Almost the entire global population (99%) breathes air that exceeds WHO air quality limits, and threatens their health. A record number of over 6000 cities in 117 countries are now monitoring air quality, but the people living in them are still breathing unhealthy levels of fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, with people in low and middle-income countries suffering the highest exposures.
The findings have prompted the World Health Organization to highlight the importance of curbing fossil fuel use and taking other tangible steps to reduce air pollution levels.
Released in the lead-up to World Health Day, which this year celebrates the theme Our planet, our health, the 2022 update of the World Health Organization’s air quality database introduces, for the first time, ground measurements of annual mean concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a common urban pollutant and precursor of particulate matter and ozone. It also includes measurements of particulate matter with diameters equal or smaller than 10 μm (PM10) or 2.5 μm (PM2.5). Both groups of pollutants originate mainly from human activities related to fossil fuel combustion.
See also the alarming proliferation of microplastics in the human body:
Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.
People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease.
Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.
Climate change and environmental destruction are the most important major threats facing the human race, and the outlook for our civilization’s chance to survive intact is now considered by all the but most anti-science politicians and industry executives to be grim. But though the science is now undeniable, our reactions to this news and how these revelations change our beliefs and actions are not set in stone. For those who accept the terrifying reality of climate change, there are two major schools of thought: the pessimists (or “doomers”), who take a more cynical view that human civilization is in the process of destroying itself and cannot will not act significantly to stop anthropogenic climate change, and the optimists, who see the emerging bad news as encouraging because such knowledge might foster increased action on renewable fuels, carbon capture, and environmental regulation, thwarting at least the worst outcomes and mitigating our collective suffering. A number of recent articles summarize the climate optimist position: that all the so-far minor, insufficient environmental regulations and policies should provide a seed of hope that more significant action is possible. From The New York Times:
Among the headline-grabbing wildfires, droughts and floods, it is easy to feel disheartened about climate change.
I felt this myself when a United Nations panel released the latest major report on global warming. It said that humanity was running out of time to avert some of the worst effects of a warming planet. Another report is coming tomorrow. So I called experts to find out whether my sense of doom was warranted.
To my relief, they pushed back against the notion of despair. The world, they argued, has made real progress on climate change and still has time to act. They said that any declaration of inevitable doom would be a barrier to action, alongside the denialism that Republican lawmakers have historically used to stall climate legislation. Such pushback is part of a budding movement: Activists who challenge climate dread recently took off on TikTok, my colleague Cara Buckley reported.
“Fear is useful to wake us up and make us pay attention,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told me. “But if we don’t know what to do, it paralyzes us.”
This is the most common charge against “doomerism”: that it can cause hopelessness and discourage action on climate change rather than encourage it. If one internalizes the idea that all action is hopeless, it would seem to follow that they wouldn’t waste their time doing anything to save the environment, they’d live their lives regardless of how wasteful and selfish they are, because they know that all hope is lost no matter what they do. A true doomer wouldn’t vote for a Green Party candidate, buy a hybrid, or stop eating meat. A true doomer wouldn’t risk their lives and freedom to sabotage (or even protest) a new oil pipeline. Yet us pessimists are just as likely as optimists to make sacrifices to reduce our personal carbon footprint:
A new Pew Research Center survey in 17 advanced economies spanning North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region finds widespread concern about the personal impact of global climate change. Most citizens say they are willing to change how they live and work at least some to combat the effects of global warming, but whether their efforts will make an impact is unclear.
The argument that doomerism weakens the fight against climate change fails for a number of reasons, primarily the fact that those who have reason to feel most hopeless (those who would suffer the most from catastrophic climate change) are the individuals who have the least ability to change the system. The politicians and heads of corporations who control the levers have little to fear, even from social unrest brought about by widespread starvation or displacement. The range of possible actions the average doomer could take are miniscule in comparison (yet we still take them). Second, it fails to establish that those who feel most negatively about our future are actually failing to act or vote in a way that would most significantly help it. Apathy might lead to systemic disengagement, but this is a problem of politics and not pessimism—the Democratic Party, the US’s only major alternative to the naked rapaciousness and denialism of the Republicans, has proven time and again that they aren’t equal to the task of making meaningful progress on environmental issues. In this case, it isn’t pessimism driving a lack of engagement but rather a very rational distaste for the two party system. Third, it assumes with no scientific or historical basis that the few hard-won climate policies in existence can be implemented on the scale required to significantly alter the course of the coming apocalypse, especially given the many recent failures to meet carbon pledges and goals coupled with the torrent of “worse than we thought” revelations about the environment. Optimism in the face of such blanket ineptitude is unrealistic and insulting to those who are already suffering, as well as counterproductive.
In actual fact, climate pessimists are likely to be more environmentally conscious rather than less, if for no other reason than to avoid feelings of hypocrisy and contributing to a problem they understand to be catastrophic. A doomer knows that their actions have consequences; each mile they drive, each hamburger they eat, each new life they bring into the world is an act of violence against others. The last point is particularly important, because hesitance to have children is the one thing optimists cite as evidence that one’s climate pessimism influences their life in a negative way. Indeed, the US birthrate is plummeting:
Recently released official U.S. birth data for 2020 showed that births have been falling almost continuously for more than a decade. For every 1,000 women of childbearing age (15 to 44), 55.8 of them gave birth in 2020, compared to 69.5 in 2007, a 20 percent decline. The “total fertility rate,” which is a measure constructed from these data to estimate the average total number of children a woman will ever have, fell from 2.12 in 2007 to 1.64 in 2020. It is now well below 2.1, the value considered to be “replacement fertility,” which is the rate needed for the population to replace itself without immigration.
The outlook for Earth’s future is no doubt playing a major role in this downturn, but this is not an example of “doomism” harming environmental efforts. Children being born now are going to be subjected to a life of unprecedented climate-driven suffering (and, it seems, repeated infections by coronaviruses), a fate they’d surely rather be spared. The biggest danger of climate optimism in fact lies in its encouragement of reproduction. Children have a towering carbon footprint, far exceeding even the richest American’s frequent private jet trips. In order to preserve quality of life for those already born, an important part of decarbonization is the reduction of population growth, especially in the West. From The Center for Biological Diversity:
A 2009 study of the relationship between population growth and global warming determined that the “carbon legacy” of just one child can produce 20 times more greenhouse gas than a person will save by driving a high-mileage car, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs, etc. Each child born in the United States will add about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent. The study concludes, “Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle.”
…
The size of the carbon legacy is closely tied to consumption patterns. Under current conditions, a child born in the United States will be responsible for almost seven times the carbon emissions of a child born in China and 168 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.
The globalization of the world economy, moreover, can mask the true carbon footprint of individual nations. China, for example, recently surpassed the United States to become the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter. But a large portion of those gases is emitted in the production of consumer goods for the United States and Europe. Thus a large share of “China’s” greenhouse gas footprint is actually the displaced footprint of high-consumption western nations.
What other options besides going childless are realistically available to the average climate pessimist? Another important point missed by the optimists: only a systemic change from free market capitalism could ever meaningfully alter the course of our environmental degradation. Urging us to cling to hope in a system which, through an obvious tragedy of the commons outcome, got us to our current cataclysmic precipice is not only unrealistic but outright harmful. A doomer knows the system is unsalvageable and works to change it (insofar as this is possible in 2022); an optimist provides bread and circuses to keep the population mollified and maintain that system, like a clown leading concentration camp inmates to their deaths.
There is a sinister element to this forced optimism as well: climate change is so distressing that many are now seeking therapy to cope with it. What would we call someone who tells a patient that their depression isn’t real, or that they need to suck it up and get happy? We would call this person a bully, or worse.
A doomer’s relative inaction on this point might be excused if even discussing forceful opposition to, or organization against, the capitalist order is questionably legal and likely to result in brutal punishment. This is the rhetorical prison that has been built for those who would fight for a better future: in order to be consistent, we should all be illegally protesting or committing acts of sabotage, but polluters are so powerfully well connected that even peaceful protesting and organizing is met with repression. See human rights lawyer Steven Donziger’s case for example:
What if I told you that a multinational oil company allegedly polluted the Amazon for almost three decades? And that the oil company has spent even more years refusing to accept liability? Or that a US attorney who agreed to represent thousands of Ecuadorian villagers in a lawsuit against that oil company has lost his law license, income, spent hundreds of days under house arrest in New York, and in 2021 was sentenced to six months in prison?
From 1964 to 1990, Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, allegedly spilled more than 16m gallons of crude oil – “80 times more oil than was spilled in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster”, according to Gizmodo – and 18bn gallons of polluted wastewater in the Amazon rainforest. The pollution allegedly contaminated the ground and waterways with toxic chemicals that the plaintiffs – mostly Indigenous people and poor farmers – say has causedcancer, miscarriages, skin conditions and birth defects. (Chevron has said that Texaco’s operations were “completely in line with the standards of the day” and told the New Yorker, in 2012, that “there is no corroborating evidence” for the health allegations.)
In 1993, Steven Donziger, a recent Harvard law school graduate and human rights attorney, began working on an environmental case on behalf of Ecuadorians allegedly affected by Texaco’s drilling. The case eventually became a 30,000-person class action lawsuit against Texaco in New York federal court.
Texaco/Chevron did notdispute that pollution occurred, and “freely admits that large sludge pits still dot the Amazon”, the New Yorker reported. The company argued that the Ecuadorian government released it from liability after paying for an earlier cleanup, and that Ecuador’s state oil company, Petroecuador, was responsible for the remaining damage. The plaintiffs argued that the earlier cleanup was woefully insufficient; that Texaco, not Petroecuador, directed actual operations in the area; and that Chevron’s earlier agreement with the government of Ecuador did not bar lawsuits by individuals. (The government of Ecuador also disagrees with Chevron’s claims.)
Finally, whether or not a belief leads to positive or negative outcomes has no bearing on its truth. All good science points to a very dark future for the Earth, and if this causes stress and feelings of despair among society’s vulnerable, then so be it. All the more the reason to fight on their behalf, as leftists have always done and will continue to do. But we will do so in a realistic way and not comfort ourselves with trite platitudes and false hope which only serve to prolong and deepen the suffering.
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