Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Twenty One

In this excerpt, Mikhail sums up the case against the apologists for climate denialism---.

&&&&

Final Summations and Verdicts---The Climate Trials and the End of Fossil Fuels, by Dino Payhas, from The Academic Journal of Restoration Ecology, vol 23, # 7.

When the final summations were delivered in the Climate Trials, it’s viewership had ballooned to become the largest audience in human history. The site by that time had amassed 20 billion clicks and was obviously being followed by a huge fraction of the world population. Even if Mikhail Bookchin hadn’t been so eloquent and logical, his last words would still be important to follow. To paraphrase Churchill, this wasn’t the “end of the beginning”, but rather “the beginning of the end” for the fossil fuel civilization.

It was like the old “unresponsive bystander” experiments that psychologists did during the 1950s. They would hire actors to fake something like a heart attack on a busy urban street. Often people would just walk by---even though when interviewed after the fact they had mostly wanted to do something. The key point was leadership. If someone stepped up, decided that the actor was having a heart attack, and, started saying things like “are there any medical professionals here?”, “can someone call for an ambulance?”, etc, people routinely jumped into action. But there had to be that first step.

Most people wait for someone else to take initiative. That’s because people take their cues from each other---it’s that old “wisdom of crowds” thing. But if everyone looks at each other to take the first step, often no one does, and, nothing happens---even though everyone wants it. Well, in this case politicians kept waiting for someone else to do something---young people, NGOs, etc. But there was such a tremendous power imbalance between the state and the large corporations---and everyone else---that no matter how much the environmental movement fought to be taken seriously, inertia always seemed to win out.

The Climate Trials seemed to create the “critical mass” needed to finally convince the governing classes that people would follow if they would lead. Moreover, it scared the rational egomaniacs into realizing that even if they didn’t give a damn about future generations, they would lose power unless they did step up and “get with the program”. The irrational psychopaths who still refused to do what was necessary quickly found themselves being sidelined---and ceased to be important.

Problems are impossible to fix until they aren’t. That’s how societies change.

&&&&

If you can afford it, why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Patreon or Pay Pal.

&&&&

Wilson Gillespie gave the summation for the defence. He didn’t try to justify the continued use of fossil fuels. Nor did he defend their use well past the point where they were causing huge, long-lasting damage to the global climate. Instead, he asked for mercy in the court of public opinion. He said that the people who defended the industry were afraid that many gains humanity had made over the past two hundred years would be lost if the carbon economy was eliminated.

“Traditional societies were based on controlling the allocation of intrinsically scare resources. People don’t understand the lived reality of our ancestors. People starved while aristocrats spent scarce resources on great works of art and fought wars. There was rarely much of any provision for the sick, the disabled, people without skills, etc. They simply fell by the wayside and disappeared from history.”

“It’s true that many ancient societies lived in harmony with nature. But it was a harsh, brutal harmony where populations routinely expanded beyond their carrying capacity and were beaten back down to size by famine, plague, or, war over things like arable land and access to water. Fossil fuels changed that. Mining coal allowed people to smelt metals without destroying all the forests to make charcoal, and eventually to replace all the wood that was used to build things like ships. First coal and then oil allowed steamships to circle the globe and saved sailors from routine death whenever unfavourable winds drove their sailing ships onto rocks.”

“I’d like to draw people’s attention to a couple observations Henry David Thoreau made in his writings. First, while on wilderness excursion he mentions that it didn’t matter how wild and remote a place seemed, all that remained of the giant, old-growth white pines were the stumps---and this was before the civil war! Second, while in Cape Cod he went out onto a beach after a storm and saw the locals with wagons collecting the bodies of drowned sailors and passengers. He states that this was such a routine occurrence the cost of paying people to bury the drowned was a serious drain on the local government. That was two of the prices paid for using wind-based transportation---a ‘sustainable method’---before fossil fuels replaced it.”

“The ‘dark Satanic mills’ that William Blake railed against were built on vicious colonialism and slavery---but they also extended democracy to the newly-emerging middle class. And eventually, they dramatically raised the standard of living and extended the franchise to British workers too.”

“It’s simply an undeniable fact that fossil fuels have raised the standard of living and helped grow an equitable society for billions of people. Is it any wonder people would be terrified of the prospect of weaning our economy off the fossil fuels? Where an ecologist sees climate change and disaster, the denier sees freedom and prosperity.”

****

Bookchin’s response was to ask people to not take Gillespie’s psycho-analysis too far.

“It’s certainly true that my colleague’s explanation of why people fought against doing something to prevent and then mitigate the Climate Emergency can be found in many apologist’s writings. But I would suggest that there are layers of moral culpability, and Mr. Gillespie’s analysis lacks any discussion of those. He spoke of climate deniers at their best---let me speak to what that really means.”

“Many years ago I had a conversation with an old man who’d been a railway worker in Switzerland during the Second World War. He said that as a young labourer he’d been working on the track next to a stopped train filled with sealed cars. He took a break and because the wind was making it hard to light his cigarette, he leaned against one of them to have a smoke. To his surprise, he heard voices inside speaking in Italian. He was afraid to tell anyone---because he’d been given strict orders to stay away from the trains. Later he found out that there were rumours that Switzerland allowed German trains to ship slave labourers and Jews out of Italy through the St. Gotthard Pass in Switzerland once the allies had bombed the Austrian Brenner pass in 1943 and put it out of action.”

“The reason I raise this is because that old man felt tremendous guilt because as a young man he’d been too afraid of losing his job and ‘making waves’ to look into what was going on or to even tell the shop steward of his union. Roman Catholic theologians would call this behaviour a sin of omission. Existential philosophers would call it bad faith. The former is when you sin by what you don’t do instead of what you do do. Letting a child fall into a well when you could have stopped it from happening is a sin---although you haven’t actively done anything. The latter is when someone refuses to look into something because they are afraid that doing so will reveal evidence undermining their assumptions. When the Pope refused to look through Galileo’s telescope he was exhibiting bad faith.”

“Most people labour with the delusion that they are ethical people if they just do what society tells them to do: they don’t steal, they follow the laws, they don’t act disrespectfully towards authority figures, are nice to their family, etc. But that isn’t being ethical or moral, that’s being conventional. Ethical people don’t just avoid doing things that everyone else says is wrong. They actively try to learn what it means to do the right thing, and do it no matter how unpopular it may make them with others. Being ethical require curiosity, courage, and, self-sacrifice.”

“I accuse the people who organized and paid for the fight against dealing with the Climate Emergency of being at best conventional. They had the benefits of an education, wealth, and, privilege. They were intelligent men and women. They could have been curious about whether or not climate change is a real thing---instead, they put their careers first. They could have taught themselves that what humanity was facing is an existential crisis, but instead they distracted themselves with learning the “finger exercises” of their profession and applying what they’d learned to create disinformation campaigns. Ethical people use the gifts the universe has bestowed them to become better people, leaders who make a better world for everyone. Conventional people squander these gifts to constrict themselves into beings who follow others in order to avoid conflict, become wealthy, and, raise their status among other conventional people.”

“Confucius understood conventionality thousands of years ago when he said that in a just society it is a shameful thing to be unsuccessful---but in an unjust one, one should be ashamed of his success.”

“It’s true that many people over the last several hundred years have advanced humankind by inventing things like the steam engine, plant breeding, the blast furnace, etc. But it does a profound disservice to them to suggest that the people who inherited their technologies and used them to make money at the expense of future generations are cut from the same cloth. People didn’t build steam engines by lacking curiosity or ignoring the implications of their inventions. They just didn’t know what would happen a hundred years or more after they had unleashed their inventions on the world.”

“The real innovators right now are the ecologists who discovered the processes that are damaging our ecosystem and the activists who are mobilizing the human race to prevent the problem from becoming a catastrophe. They are the people designing solar panels, wind turbines, more efficient and less destructive farming methods, etc. These people are the inheritors of the mantle created by the innovators of past age---not the conventionally-minded “enablers” who benefit from preventing society from dealing with a clear and present danger. That’s the people at their best.”

“Let’s not forget the folks who fight to preserve the fossil fuel economy because of the worst motivations. Studies by people like Hare and Altemeyer have shown that top corporations and conservative political parties have a disproportionate percentage of psychopaths in positions of authority. These people make up only 1% of the general population but as much as 15% of CEOs. That’s because psychopaths want power much more than ordinary people and they have no internal sense of right or wrong that would stop them from doing anything they believe is necessary to get it.”

“The defining element of psychopathy is the lack of a sense of right or wrong, or, obligation towards other people. This diminished sense of social responsibility means---almost by definition---that they will not feel any obligation towards the environment, the poor, or, future generations. All these people want and care about is their own wealth and power.”

“Unfortunately, another key aspect of psychopathic individuals is their ability to mimic normal human concern---when necessary. That means that they are very good at finding plausible excuses for their behaviour. (Indeed, they are such fast studies of the human condition that prison officials forbid their access to psychotherapy. Not only do they not benefit from the experience, but it helps them become more adept at manipulating other people.)”

“When you contemplate the people who fought so hard to prevent society from making the necessary changes to prevent or mitigate the Climate Emergency, ask yourself the following question. ‘Are they conventional people who avoided taking any personal responsibility to make the moral choice? Or, are they psychopaths who simply cannot understand why anyone would do something to help other people instead of amassing wealth or power?’”

“I’m not saying that either group of people are ‘evil’ or ‘bad’. I’m saying that they are dangerous. We don’t say that a tornado or a cougar are ‘evil’ or ‘bad’. But that doesn’t mean that we ignore them. We take measures to limit the damage that they can do to us. It’s the same thing with conventional and psychopathic individuals. We need to limit the damage that they can inflict on us, the environment, and, future generations. We don’t do that by getting angry. There’s no sense punishing either group---no matter what you do to these people, they won’t change. But what we can do is change the way our institutions, our businesses and political parties operate so a small group of these sorts of damaged people don’t get to amass so much power over everyone else. That’s what these trials are all about. They are a ‘wake up call’ for people to stop handing over power to others who don’t give a damn about who they hurt.”

&&&&

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!