Dystopia by degrees

For decades, we’ve been sold an idea that taking action on climate change is simply about making the world a better place. It’s that old 2009 USA Today cartoon: a crowd at a climate conference listens to a speech on green jobs, clean water, energy independence and healthy children, and asks: “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

Climate campaigners play to this, stressing the “co-benefits” of climate action: reduced meat intake and travelling by foot or bicycle are good for your health, electric vehicles cut air and noise pollution, the oil industry has too much power anyway. They’re not lying to you – there are plenty of reasons to quit fossil fuels, quite apart from global warming. But this vision of a cleaner, fairer world hides two other truths which will dominate climate politics as we move further into the middle of the 21st century.

Firstly, there are multiple ways to tackle climate change. As more people become engaged with the climate crisis,we’re not all going to agree on everything. A greater diversity of ideologies will shape how we confront the issue. Secondly, at this point, even the most heroic of mitigation efforts can only limit warming up to a point. We can build better defences against the coming storms, but they are coming either way. In many parts of the world, they have been more than obviously present for decades already.

Too many still approach the climate crisis with a sense that we can solve it. But you can’t solve a problem like the climate crisis. Recognising this is still a long way from “doomism” – giving in – because it’s not game-over either. Climate change isn’t a win-or-lose event; it happens by degree. Not just degrees of warming, but of risk, pain, courage. We need to get used to calculations in those in-between places, taking time to recognise what’s been lost and damaged whilst remembering there is still so much we can save; so many ways we can limit suffering and protect each other. It’s going to be hard, but how hard, for whom, and how well we help each other survive, is still very much up for grabs.

The right kind of climate action

Calling out “bad” climate action, as opposed to just something you disagree with, can be slippery, especially when so much of the decision-making is a matter of weighing up relative risks and is coloured by political position. One campaigner’s “false solution” is another’s sensible choice. Still, we can and should be actively questioning whose lives climate policies are being built for, and who profits from them. The climate crisis was birthed in inequality and exploitation. We mustn’t let our reaction to it play out in such a context too.

As climate justice campaigners have argued for years, the poorest half of the global population contributes just ten per cent of global emissions, but overwhelmingly bears the brunt of climate change impacts. There’s an inequality when it comes to studying those impacts too. One of the most important areas of climate research in recent years has been attribution studies: work to identify links between specific extreme weather events and climate change. Most of these studies have focused on weather events in Europe and North America, due to long-standing inequalities of data collection and global media attention. As climate scientist Sjoukje Philip told Climate Home News last year: “I don’t think we’ve ever done a heatwave attribution study over Africa because we never hear about it.”

Meanwhile, eco-capitalism has already reached the dystopian sci-fi heights of luxury “green” airship tours to the North Pole being sold to look down on polar bears before their habitat melts entirely. And all the time, in the background, global climate policy continually gets stuck in debates over “climate finance”; policy-wonk speak for fights over how much (or rather, how little) richer countries will give the rest of the world to help tackle the climate crisis.

In 2010, rich nations pledged $100 billion per year at the Cancun UN climate talks. The figure might seem large, but it was always way below what’s needed, and despite all the promises, these nations have continually failed to stump up the cash. Moreover, as Jocelyn Timperly noted in a feature for Nature ahead of the 2021 Glasgow talks, such “climate finance” tends to be weighted towards profit-making projects, like solar farms or electric cars, rather than work to protect frontline communities from the impacts of climate change.

But even if climate studies remain skewed to the rich, we have made important strides in our understanding. Perhaps most remarkably, humanity has built a whole system for collecting research on climate change and sharing it with politicians, via the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the reports they publish every three to seven years. As one of their latest reports, published in February, made clear, we should be worrying more about “maladaptation”. Broadly, this refers to projects designed to help people “adapt” to the impacts of climate change, but which have backfired in some way. Such maladaptation might have been caused by policy-makers forgetting or ignoring social and political contexts, not
listening to local expertise – or, in some cases, creating a false sense of security.

In their explainer for the Carbon Brief website, a group from the University of Oxford give the example of a flood barrier project around the Jamuna River in Bangladesh, which ended up encouraging greater development in flood-risk areas and increasing mortality rates. They also describe agricultural modernisation in the island of São Tomé and Príncipe, which was only offered to those who had land, ignoring the landless – thus causing a group already especially vulnerable to climate change to be further marginalised.

Climate and energy writer Ketan Joshi suggests that we should talk about “mal-mitigation” too (though both problems need a better name): these are projects aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but that similarly backfire. Take the case of hyperscale data centres, which help store information in the cloud or stream video and music. These centres are often built in states like Arizona, because solar and wind resources provide cheap low-carbon electricity. The data centres’ intense thirst for water, to help cool equipment, is further drying out already parched land.

Then there is “greengrabbing”. Guardian journalist John Vidal coined the term in 2008 to describe aggressive interests taking land, using the justification of environmental protection. Vidal refers to wealthy Americans buying up acres of Patagonia, and the case of the Bambuti Ba’twa tribe, who lived in forests on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo until the 1990s, when their lands were designated a national park in order to protect gorillas. He could easily have pointed to the history of National Parks in the United States too, where Indigenous Americans were actively removed. More recently, Morocco has been accused of greenwashing colonialism, building renewable energy developments on contested land in Western Sahara.

Development scholars Ian Scoones and Camilla Toulmin raise similarly sceptical eyebrows over the “Great Green Wall”. In many respects, the Wall is an awe-inspiring project. Launched in 2007 by the African Union, it aims to grow a stretch of forest across 8,000 km and 22 countries over the widest part of the African continent – acting as a symbol of environmental action and, more practically, protecting against desertification and creating millions of green jobs, while sequestering hundreds of millions of tons of carbon.

However, Scoones and Toulmin argue that the very idea of desertification in the area has shaky roots, based on faulty colonial science and framed by doomsday ideas of environmental degradation. Moreover, as is the case with many other large-scale forest projects, the glamour of planting new trees risks overriding the preservation of existing trees and shrubs, and could be used as an excuse to keep polluting elsewhere. As Scoones and Toulmin emphasise, if massive projects such as these are going to work, they need to listen to local needs and expertise.

Climate campaigners can be defensive when it comes to discussing such problems. Negatives can be seized by those who want to delay climate action, blowing up critiques way beyond what is fair or necessary. But we do still need to talk about the cons as well as the pros.

Take renewable energy. For decades, solar in particular has been pushed as a symbol of the bright new future that could be ours, if only we grasp the opportunity. It’s brilliant, space-age science. We’d be running directly on sunshine. But while often paraded as “clean”, no energy tech is without its risks and impacts.

The earliest attempts in the 1870s were tangled in colonialism, with French solar-preneur Augustin Mouchot sent by his government to Algeria to experiment with the abundant sunlight found there. Nearly a century later, the US Army would take solar power into space, with the launch of Vanguard 1 in 1958. Military research and development helped pave the way for domestic solar, but was ultimately rooted in Cold War displays of power.

When solar technology finally made its way to Earth, it was initially used by the oil industry, providing power to remote oil rigs. Today, glistening solar panels are often featuredin oil industry adverts, despite the fact that these companies invest a tiny percentage of their capital expenditure in green tech. More troublingly, last summer, an investigation found forced labour from China’s Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province being used in the production of panels. This follows years of concern from human rights groups over the supply chain for batteries – technology that renewables like solar rely upon.

None of this is to dismiss solar, any more than raising concerns over tree-planting is a reason to dump those projects. No technology is a neutral good, and denying the problems won’t help us solve them. The challenge is to avoid replicating the political and economic problems of fossil fuels as we decarbonise the energy system. We must use the opportunity of change to reform so much more.

An ideological battle

People often put Margaret Thatcher’s climate campaigner moment in the late 1980s down to her scientific training, but it’s just as likely she grasped the politics before most others. She knew that to tackle climate change seriously would require a massive economic shift, and didn’t want to concede that space to the left. So she got in early, telling the UN in November 1989, “We must resist the simplistic tendency to blame modern multinational industry for the damage which is being done to the environment. Far from being the villains, it is on them that we rely to do the research and find the solutions.”

Fast forward to the 2020s, and many worry about a potential rise in something much further to the right: eco-fascism. This is not a new problem. As historian of eugenics Garland Allen argues, several founding fathers of the American conservation movement weren’t just racist and environmentalist, but saw the two as intimately connected. Madison Grant is perhaps the most extreme example. His 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race is often described as the “bible” of scientific racism (Hitler certainly saw it as such, saying so when he wrote to thank Grant for writing it). Grant was also a leading conservationist, convincing friends like Rockefeller, the Vanderbilts and J. P. Morgan to help fund his dream project of the Bronx Zoo.

For Grant and many of his friends, conservation and eugenics were part of the same project. He once said to his friend and co-conspirator, Henry Fairfield Osborn (the man who named both the Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor) that both were “attempts to save as much as possible of the old America”. Post-war environmentalists would distance themselves from overt fascism, including Fairfield Osborn’s son, Jr, whose foundation
organised the first international climate change conference in 1963. But that doesn’t mean that this politics disappeared entirely, or that it doesn’t continue to exist in parts of the environmentalist movement today.

As the windows of opportunity for climate action close, we might also predict an increase in violence. Notwithstanding the recent vogue in Britain for slashing and deflating SUV tyres, thus far environmentalists have tended to stick resolutely to non-violence. Extinction Rebellion (XR) has built a movement based strongly on the rhetorical appeal of disobedience and disruption, controversially championing the idea of arrest. Still, although they’ll happily annoy people by stopping a tube or blocking a road, they draw an important distinction between damaging property and hurting people.

Back in early 2001, the FBI named the environmental group the Earth Liberation Front as the leading domestic terrorist threat in the US. An action in 1998 wracked up an estimated $26 million of damage – however, like XR today, they never threatened violence towards other people. Political attitudes to the word “terrorism” would change dramatically following 9/11. Still, we now know that state concern over climate activists hardly disappeared.

Take Mark Kennedy, the Metropolitan police officer employed to spy on environmental activists in the UK between 2003 and 2010. By the time of the 2008 Climate Camp by Kingsnorth power station in Kent, some activists had started to call him “detective” behind his back. Meanwhile, the Climate Campers were acutely aware that they were being falsely depicted to the public as violent – not just to property but to people. At one point they marched behind a banner declaring: “We are armed only with peer review”, copies of the latest IPCC report stuck to their hands.

UK ministers had justified spending £5.9 million on policing the Kingsnorth protest by saying that 70 officers had been injured. However, a freedom of information request later showed that of the 1,500 officers deployed at the camp, there were only 12 reportable injuries, none came from direct contact with the protesters, and all were of the lowest level of seriousness. Reported injuries included “stung on finger by possible wasp”, heatstroke, and “used leg to open door and next day had pain in lower back”.

More extreme iterations of protest may well become part of the future of climate politics, but we should ensure that fear-mongering doesn’t get used to limit climate protest, or distract from the very real and pressing violence of climate change politics as it already exists – be that water scarcity in Syria, maladaptation projects in Bangladesh or the multitude of ways in which the legacies of colonialism continue to skew the global response.

The climate crisis as a security issue

One of the challenging things about climate change is that it creeps up gradually over time, squeezing already squeezed systems, exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and inequalities, heating up everything from gentrification to domestic violence. In California, it intertwines with the prison-industrial complex, as prison inmates are sent to fight wildfires at a fraction of the minimum wage. This has been happening since the 1940s, but as wildfires get worse, the state relies increasingly on this cheap, captive workforce.

In December, the UN Environment Programme warned that Isis was exploiting water shortages in Iraq and Syria. Climate change isn’t the cause of conflict there, but can easily help sustain it. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it, “Climate change is not the source of all ills, but it has a multiplier effect and is an aggravating factor for instability, conflict and terrorism.”

The intelligence community is well aware of the problem. In 1974, the CIA penned a report on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”, which warned of new geopolitical risks coming with the emergence of a new climatic era, especially with regards to food shortages and migration. The report argued this new era was well underway, but had started in parts of the world that tended to be ignored. It predicted that soon, these poorer countries wouldn’t just be paying attention, but would try to fight back with weapons aimed at returning the weather to how it was. Crucially, the report warned, the weather doesn’t keep to lines drawn on a map. Once modified by one nation, weather events might spill over to
another country and ignite conflict.

The idea that people could find ways to deliberately change the weather has been around for centuries, enjoying particular popularity just after the Second World War. As Jacob Darwin Hamblin notes in Arming Mother Nature, by the mid-20th-century military scientists had weaponised medicine, chemistry and even nuclear physics, so why not use the Earth itself against your enemies?

Several high-profile attempts have been made at changing the weather. In 1945, secret research went public when a team at General Electric led by Nobel Prize-winner Irving Langmuir appeared to make it snow in Massachusetts, after “seeding” clouds by throwing dry ice into them. Five years later, Langmuir made the cover of Time with work using silver iodine to create rain. It made such an impact on the public imagination that when, in the early 1950s, mainstream media like the New York Times and Scientific American started to discuss early signs of what we would now call the climate crisis, they were keen to stress that man-made climate change wasn’t just Irving Langmuir at it again.

Today, although stories of cloud-seeding still circulate on a small scale, the CIA report reads as ageing sci-fi. But they weren’t alone in their analysis. In 1975, anthropologist Margaret Mead also got an early bout of climate crisis anxiety, and pulled together a group to develop a social science perspective on the issue. Her report suggested developing countries should be given support to set up their own weather modification programmes.

And the idea hasn’t gone away. In 2018, a letter in the journal Nature echoed Mead’s concern, arguing that developing countries must take the lead on geoengineering research. Just this spring, a paper in Nature Communications explored how solar radiation management (reflecting more sunlight away from the planet) could impact not just global temperatures but transmission of malaria, warning that in some scenarios, a billion extra people could be at risk of malaria in a geoengineered world.

Greenpeace’s Doug Parr once famously described geoengineering research as “an expression of political despair”; what you do when you’ve given up all the other options. But it’s worth being politically prepared. We don’t always make the best or fairest decisions when we’re scared.

A fairer future

As we’ve seen, climate change doesn’t only impact us directly. It is also a threat multiplier. This will continue to be the case, even as temperatures rise and impacts become more violent. This doesn’t mean we can’t build a better world while we also tackle climate change. Indeed, if anything, it’s precisely why we have to get to work removing those threats. If you’re worried about climate change, join a climate campaign, sure, but we must also prepare by supporting migrants’ rights groups and mental health charities; fight to unravel legacies of colonialism and gender inequality; build a world where everyone can have access to the greatest advances in science and technology – be that luxury airships, a life-saving drug, solar-powered heating or the best flood defences.

Or, to put it another way, caring about climate change alone won’t build a safe, fair world; fighting for a safer, fairer world will. Could rising climate impacts lead to an increase in eco-fascism? Undoubtedly yes, and we should fight that as we would any other kind of fascism. Could we build a decarbonised world that not only replicates but exacerbates inequalities and human rights abuses endemic in our current fossil fuel economy? Again, it’s all too easy to imagine, and again, we should not allow a veneer of
environmentalism to justify malign behaviour.

We can’t win when it comes to the climate crisis. That (coal-powered) ship sailed a long time ago. But we can win plenty of other fights: fights that will help us to avoid maladaptation, prevent climate change from being used as an excuse for violence, and help us survive the coming storms. It’s not just high time we saved “the planet”, but ourselves.