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Foreign Policy

No, It’s Not Too Late to Save the Planet

Doomism robs people of the agency and incentive to participate in a solution to the climate crisis.

Climate denial may be on the decline, but a phenomenon at least as injurious to the cause of climate protection has blossomed beside it: doomism, or the belief that there’s no way to halt the Earth’s ascendant temperatures. Burgeoning ranks of doomers throw up their hands, crying that it’s too late, too hard, too costly to save humanity from near-future extinction.

There are numerous strands of doomism. The followers of ecologist Guy McPherson, for example, gravitate to wild conspiracy theories that claim humanity won’t last another decade. Many young people, understandably overwhelmed by negative climate headlines and TikTok videos, are convinced that all engagement is for naught. Even the Guardian, which boasts superlative climate coverage, sometimes publishes alarmist articles and headlines that exaggerate grim climate projections.

This gloom-and-doomism robs people of the agency and incentive to participate in a solution to the climate crisis. As a writer on climate and energy, I am convinced that we have everything we require to go carbon neutral by 2050: the science, the technology, the policy proposals, and the money, as well as an international agreement in which nearly 200 countries have pledged to contain the crisis. We don’t need a miracle or exorbitantly expensive nuclear energy to stave off the worst. The Gordian knot before us is figuring out how to use the resources we already have in order to make that happen.

One particularly insidious form of doomism is exhibited in Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, originally published in 2020 and translated from Japanese into English this year. In his unlikely international bestseller, Saito, a Marxist philosopher, puts forth the familiar thesis that economic growth and decarbonization are inherently at odds. He goes further, though, and speculates that the climate crisis can only be curbed in a classless, commons-based society. Capitalism, he writes, seeks to “use all the world’s resources and labor power, opening new markets and never passing up even the slightest chance to make more money.”

Capitalism’s record is indeed damning. The United States and Europe are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s emissions since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, yet the global south suffers most egregiously from climate breakdown. Today, the richest tenth of the world’s population—living overwhelmingly in the global north and China—is responsible for half of global emissions. If the super-rich alone cut their footprints down to the size of the average European, global emissions would fall by a third, Saito writes.

Saito’s self-stated goals aren’t that distinct from mine: a more egalitarian, sustainable, and just society. One doesn’t have to be an orthodox Marxist to find the gaping disparities in global income grotesque or to see the restructuring of the economy as a way to address both climate breakdown and social injustice. But his central argument—that climate justice can’t happen within a market economy of any kind—is flawed. In fact, it serves next to no purpose because more-radical-than-thou theories remove it from the nuts-and-bolts debate about the way forward.

We already possess a host of mechanisms and policies that can redistribute the burdens of climate breakdown and forge a path to climate neutrality. They include carbon pricing, wealth and global transaction taxes, debt cancellation, climate reparations, and disaster risk reduction, among others. Economies regulated by these policies are a distant cry from neoliberal capitalism—and some, particularly in Europe, have already chalked up marked accomplishments in reducing emissions.

Saito himself acknowledges that between 2000 and 2013, Britain’s GDP increased by 27 percent while emissions fell by 9 percent and that Germany and Denmark also logged decoupling. He writes off this trend as exclusively the upshot of economic stagnation following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. However, U.K. emissions have continued to fall, plummeting from 959 million to 582 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2007 and 2020. The secret to Britain’s success, which Saito doesn’t mention, was the creation of a booming wind power sector and trailblazing carbon pricing system that forced coal-fired plants out of the market practically overnight. Nor does Saito consider that from 1990 to 2022, the European Union reduced its emissions by 31 percent while its economy grew by 66 percent.

Climate protection has to make strides where it can, when it can, and experts acknowledge that it’s hard to change consumption patterns—let alone entire economic systems—rapidly. Progress means scaling back the most harmful types of consumption and energy production. It is possible to do this in stages, but it needs to be implemented much faster than the current plodding pace.

This is why Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at the University of Oxford, is infinitely more pertinent to the public discourse on climate than Saito’s esoteric work. Ritchie’s book is a noble attempt to illustrate that environmental protection to date boasts impressive feats that can be built on, even as the world faces what she concedes is an epic battle to contain greenhouse gases.

Ritchie underscores two environmental afflictions that humankind solved through a mixture of science, smart policy, and international cooperation: acid rain and ozone depletion. I’m old enough to remember the mid-1980s, when factories and power plants spewed out sulfurous and nitric emissions and acid rain blighted forests from the northeastern United States to Eastern Europe. Acidic precipitation in the Adirondacks, my stomping grounds at the time, decimated pine forests and mountain lakes, leaving ghostly swaths of dead timber. Then, scientists pinpointed the industries responsible, and policymakers designed a cap-and-trade system that put a price on their emissions, which forced industry into action; for example, power plants had to fit scrubbers on their flue stacks. The harmful pollutants dropped by 80 percent by the end of the decade, and forests grew back.

The campaign to reverse the thinning of the ozone layer also bore fruit. An international team of scientists deduced that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) in fridges, freezers, air conditioners, and aerosol cans were to blame. Despite fierce industry pushback, more than 40 countries came together in Montreal in 1987 to introduce a staggered ban on CFCs. Since then, more countries joined the Montreal Protocol, and CFCs are now largely a relic of the past. As Ritchie points out, this was the first international pact of any kind to win the participation of every nation in the world.

While these cases instill inspiration, Ritchie’s assessment of our current crisis is a little too pat and can veer into the Panglossian. The climate crisis is many sizes larger in scope than the scourges of the 1980s, and its antidote—to Saito’s credit—entails revamping society and economy on a global scale, though not with the absolutist end goal of degrowth communism.

Ritchie doesn’t quite acknowledge that a thoroughgoing restructuring is necessary. Although she does not invoke the term, she is an acolyte of “green growth.” She maintains that tweaks to the world’s current economic system can improve the living standards of the world’s poorest, maintain the global north’s level of comfort, and achieve global net zero by 2050. “Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact,” she writes. For her, the big question is whether the world can decouple growth and emissions in time to stave off the darkest scenarios.

Ritchie approaches today’s environmental disasters—air pollution, deforestation, carbon-intensive food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing—as problems solvable in ways similar to the crises of the 1980s. Like CFCs and acid rain, so too can major pollutants such as black carbon and carbon monoxide be reined in. Ritchie writes that the “solution to air pollution … follows just one basic principle: stop burning stuff.” As she points out, smart policy has already enhanced air quality in cities such as Beijing (Warsaw, too, as a recent visit convinced me), and renewable energy is now the cheapest form of power globally. What we have to do, she argues, is roll renewables out en masse.

The devil is in making it happen. Ritchie admits that environmental reforms must be accelerated many times over, but she doesn’t address how to achieve this or how to counter growing pushback against green policies. Just consider the mass demonstrations across Europe in recent months as farmers have revolted against the very measures for which Ritchie (correctly) advocates, such as cutting subsidies to diesel gas, requiring crop rotation, eliminating toxic pesticides, and phasing down meat production. Already, the farmers’ vehemence has led the EU to dilute important legislation on agriculture, deforestation, and biodiversity.

Ritchie’s admonishes us to walk more, take public transit, and eat less beef. Undertaken individually, this won’t change anything. But she acknowledges that sound policy is key—chiefly, economic incentives to steer markets and consumer behavior. Getting the right parties into office, she writes, should be voters’ priority.

Yet the parties fully behind Ritchie’s agenda tend to be the Green parties, which are largely in Northern Europe and usually garner little more than 10 percent of the vote. Throughout Europe, environmentalism is badmouthed by center-right and far-right politicos, many of whom lead or participate in governments, as in Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sweden. And while she argues that all major economies must adopt carbon pricing like the EU’s cap-and-trade system, she doesn’t address how to get the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, to introduce this nationwide or even expand its two carbon markets currently operating regionally—one encompassing 12 states on the East Coast, the other in California.

History shows that the best way to make progress in the battle to rescue our planet is to work with what we have and build on it. The EU has a record of exceeding and revising its emissions reduction targets. In the 1990s, the bloc had the modest goal of sinking greenhouse gases to 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12; by 2012, it had slashed them by an estimated 18 percent. More recently, the 2021 European Climate Law adjusted the bloc’s target for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions from 40 percent to at least 55 percent by 2030, and the European Commission is considering setting the 2040 target to 90 percent below 1990 levels.

This process can’t be exclusively top down. By far the best way for everyday citizens to counter climate doomism is to become active beyond individual lifestyle choices—whether that’s by bettering neighborhood recycling programs, investing in clean tech equities, or becoming involved in innovative clean energy projects.

Take, for example, “community energy,” which Saito considers briefly and Ritchie misses entirely. In the 1980s, Northern Europeans started to cobble together do-it-yourself cooperatives, in which citizens pooled money to set up renewable energy generation facilities. Many of the now more than 9,000 collectives across the EU are relatively small—the idea is to stay local and decentralized—but larger co-ops illustrate that this kind of enterprise can function at scale. For example, Belgium’s Ecopower, which forgoes profit and reinvests in new energy efficiency and renewables projects, provides 65,000 members with zero-carbon energy at a reduced price.

Grassroots groups and municipalities are now investing in nonprofit clean energy generation in the United States, particularly in California and Minnesota. This takes many forms, including solar fields; small wind parks; electricity grids; and rooftop photovoltaic arrays bolted to schools, parking lots, and other public buildings. Just as important as co-ownership—in contrast to mega-companies’ domination of the fossil fuel market—is democratic decision-making. These start-ups, usually undertaken by ordinary citizens, pry the means of generation out of the hands of the big utilities, which only grudgingly alter their business models.

Around the world, the transition is in progress—and ideally, could involve all of us. The armchair prophets of doom should either join in or, at the least, sit on the sidelines quietly. The last thing we need is more people sowing desperation and angst. They play straight into the court of the fossil fuel industry.

Fanfiction Authors: HEADS UP

(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)

An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:

(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)

I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:

IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.

You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:

HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:

First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.

Select the radio buttons/dropdown options (shown below) to indicate that you are the legal Rights Owner, you have a copyright concern, and it is about a pirated product.

Enter the name of your story in the Name of Brand field.

In the Link to the Copyrighted Work box, enter a link to the story on AO3 or whatever site your work is posted on.

In the Additional Information box, explain that you are the author of the work and it is being sold without your permission. That's all you really need. If you want, you can include additional information that might be helpful in establishing the validity of your claim, but you don't have to go into great detail. You can simply write something like this:

I am the author of this work, which is being sold by [publisher] without my permission. I originally published this story in [date/year] on [name of site], and have provided a link to the original above. On request, I can provide documentation proving that I am the owner of the account that originally posted this story.

In the ASIN/ISBN-10 field, copy and paste the ID number from the pirated copy's URL. You'll find this ten-digit number in the Amazon URL after the word "product," as in the screenshot below. (If the URL extends beyond this number, you can ignore everything from the question mark on.) Once this number has been added, Amazon will pull the product information automatically and add it to the complaint form, so you can check the listing title and make sure it's correct.

Finally, add your contact information to the relevant fields, check the "I have read and accept the statements" box, and then click Submit. You should receive an email confirmation that Amazon has received the form.

Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!

NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!

Like it or not this is what peak femininity looks like. This is the ideal woman.

Not a woman myself, but dang if I don’t empathize with this. Every time I hear people talking about how not having any close relationships is a red flag, it just deepens this feeling like my life has been irreparably fucked up and there’s no fixing it. And like, I know it’s not true and it’s never too late and all that, but damn if it’s not hard to stay convinced of that sometimes.

Being a girl without close girl friends I spend time with feels like some sort of spiritual jail I've been put in for this particular lifetime and it's such a walk of shame in this day and age like I can't count how many reels or tiktoks I see of girls saying stuff like "girls who don't have girl friends??? RED FLAG!!!" Or like jokes about when you befriend the girl who has no girl friends and then you realize why...yikes! Cause she sucks and is toxic and unlovable! And I'm like ouch, that's tough to hear. I know those narratives are popular because girl friendships can be painful and I'm sure there's lot of people out there who have been deeply unkind whether on purpose or not but I guess it pains me to watch people make laughable comments about lonely women. I feel like being a lonely woman is such a derogatory notion already deeply imbedded in society and sexism that I feel like it's just sort of being reframed in the new age as like "she did that to herself" and that's never true, we are all the result of the love we get or don't and it's definitely our own responsibility how we act and how we heal or don't - but it feels so judgmental sometimes to further "other" women who don't have friends

in the light of today's page...

Continue Escalating

Hmmm. As a sentient swarm of keese, I find news of sudden inexplicable monster death deeply disturbing.

Sorry for going missing without a trace guys, I got eaten by a frox on my last delivery run. It was not a pleasant experience.

Glory to Master Kohga.

hey so i need mad help at a pretty terrible time!!

TL;DR I NEED ABOUT $1900 FOR ME AND MY PARTNER TO GET INTO THIS HOUSE WE GOT WITH SOME FRIENDS. ILL BE ABLE TO PAY RENT ONCE IM IN BUT THESE ARE THE REST OF THE COSTS WE HAVE LEFT BETWEEN ME AND MY PARTNER TO PAY THE DOWN PAYMENT/FIRST MONTHS RENT/PET DEPOSIT FOR OUR SHARE.

not including moving or like, living, during this time into those costs. i already feel bad asking for this much sdklfjslkdfskldf

PAYPAL - chocolatebananapop@gmail.com

VENMO - ceeberoni

KO-FI - ceeberoni

OR IF U WANT ART

COMMISSIONS - REDBUBBLE

ive been boosting my commission post to try and Earn My Money The Noble Way but no ones buyin so i need to do real ebegging cuz im really bad off right now and of course i feel fucking RANCID having to ebeg right now especially when so many other people are in much more dire straits than me at the moment

but im finally getting a house with my childhood friend and his partner (along with my partner) and i will FINALLY be moving out of a house owned by my abusive mom! and i no longer have qualms saying this about her because every one of my friends fucking hates her even when i try to stick up for her and im pretty sure that means shes probably the bad guy and not me but im not sure yet. i will keep you posted

anyway to cut right down to it i got kicked out of my house of 6 years by her cuz my sister and her kids needed a place to live (which like, yeah that tracks, she got all the kids and herself in a studio with a basement but theyve got a roof over their head, the kids at the end of the day are who i number one want a roof over the head of so its fine) and have been house hunting since like idk. late july or early august at this point idr when it was anymore. and it has been such a fucking shitshow but FINALLY after all these months we have a place with our friends and its NOT MY MOMS PLACE and were ALMOST FUCKING THERE

and like right now im in half of a fucking garage with no running water no kitchen no bathroom paying $400/m rent with no bathroom and no ability to save to move and im also paying $200 for mine, my sisters, and my nephews phone bill, no bathroom, i got my car insurance, i got the internet i cant even fucking use anymore that i pay for out of pocket so the kids can watch shit or whatever so do you see where the situation is like fucked up here also i have to walk across the street to take a shit and shower did i mention

umm so any money help would be lit, boosting would also be lit, have a nice day,

thanks to everybody who has sent well-wishes and appreciation and pet pictures, they are all deeply appreciated, have an extremely rough design sketch of the Archipelago Nimbus