“amplified calls … for a Green New Deal — which is now… the basic conceptual model for all new Keynesian government spending globally, however poorly the phrase may poll…”
The above quote is from an article written by David Wallace-Wells entitled, Why is the World Ignoring the Latest U.N. Climate Report? published on March 14, 2020 in The Intelligencer section of New York Magazine.
This answer that Wallace-Wells offers, implying that “government spending globally” is the way we are going to take action on climate inaction, gives voice to the unvoiced assumption that pervades climate science and climate activism, that GOVERNMENT is the answer to the climate crisis; that government bureaucrats can legislate and regulate and tax & spend our way to a future made climate secure.
This, I imagine, is why the World does not appear to climate scientists and climate activists to be listening to climate science and climate activism.
I also imagine that the World is listening, and that we are hearing climate science and climate activists shout STOP! and YOU MUST DO SOMETHING!, and that the World is stopping and considering what we can do, and hearing only various versions of this proposed plan of action: GOVERNMENT MUST MAKE THE BAD FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES STOP ACTING SO BADLY BY SELLING US FOSSIL FUELS TO POWER OUR PROSPERITY!
And I imagine the World is saying, quietly, in an unvoiced exercise of our common sense, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense. If we just stop burning fossil fuels, without replacing them with something else, that will be a catastrophe for our prosperity. And we are not hearing any plan for what we are going to replace fossil fuels with that makes any sense. So, why choose to create one catastrophe, in order to avoid another?”
I imagine the World is listening, and hearing, and waiting, for a DREAM of a future made climate secure that will inspire us, and for a PLAN to realize that dream that we can rally around.
I imagine that a dream that says we can just replace fossil fuels with renewables fails to “stir [the] blood” of popular imagination for two reasons at least. One is that in the common sense of everyday people, we feel, intuitively, the truth that the prosperity we have now, that we power with fossilized hydrocarbon combustion, cannot continue exactly as is with a simple replacement of fossil fuels by renewables. The problem is more complicated than that, and the solution has to be more nuanced and more sophisticated than. that. Another is that a plan that says “we’ll make Government make Industry do it” is not really a dream. It’s a fantasy.
I imagine the World is listening for a plan for pursuing a dream that makes sense to the common sense of reasonable people.
Consider this recent action by UK climate action advocacy group ClientEarth, suing the directors of fossil fuel super-major, Shell, for failing to design a plan for taking the company to Net-Zero.
This action raises a number of common sense questions that I imagine leaves the World, well, bemused.
One question is, what is the point of individual companies going “Net Zero”? Isn’t the problem, according to Climate Science, that the global economy is returning once-fossilized carbon back to earth’s atmosphere by combusting fossil fuels to power our prosperity, thereby increasing the carbon density in our sky chemistry that is lowering the rate of radiant cooling of the earth that is resetting the thermodynamic balance between solar heating (= new energy from the sun) and radiant cooling (= energy leaving the earth and going out into Space) so that the earth is getting warmer, which is causing long term, large scale global weather patterns that we call climate to change, which is causing local habitats to change, which is causing the physical reality of our daily lives to change in ways that might and probably will be catastrophic to our ability to just keep going, living the lives that we are living?
If that is the problem, then isn’t the solution finding a new way to power our prosperity?
So, what’s that plan?
If the only plan is to make others come up with a plan, that doesn’t really feel much like a plan, does it?
Also, how is a fossil fuels company that is owned by the public markets, and so party to a social contract with the markets that own them to constantly grow the market clearing price for their corporate shares traded in those markets, because constant growth in market clearing prices is what allows those market to clear, and clearing the markets is what the markets are created by design to do, supposed to stop being a fossil fuels company, and transform itself into something else (What else? We don’t know. It’s up to them to figure that out, right?), while still keeping the market clearing prices for their corporate shares going up.
Common sense feels, intuitively, that they can’t. This plan just doesn’t make any sense.
And so the World waits.
For climate science and climate activism to come up with a plan that does make sense.
Here’s my plan.
Let’s Mobilize Fiduciary Money to Divest from speculation and Invest in negotiation, buying up fossil fuels companies out of the public markets, and relieving them of their obligation to grow their share price (because after such a buy-out there will no longer be any shares, and so also no share price, and so no social contract to grow the [nonexistent] price for those [nonexistent] shares) and making them central to a new global energy supply strategy of Commissioning new bio regionally ecologically appropriate energy enterprises to Decommission existing fossilized hydrocarbon combustion enterprises sized and timed to avoid climate-change-driven changes to earth’s habitats that may and likely will be catastrophic to our ability to continue our present prosperity and keep our modern society ongoing.
This plan requires a Dream for what the new energy economy can and should be made to be, and the devil, as always, will be in the details of that dream.
My plan for wrestling with those details is to mobilize Science to lead an exercise in applied imagination to design the new bioregionally ecologically appropriate energy economy we need for climate security and sustained prosperity, so that Fiduciary Money can then go ahead and finance those details, a financing that sustains modern society, and maybe makes it better, without violating the laws of Nature.
Which means the new social obligation of climate activism is not to call out Industry or Demand Action from Government, but to call on Science to engage with Fiduciaries in designing enterprise for powering a climate secure future that does not cost us our present prosperity.
THAT is truly radical!
Also, if you think about it, it makes a lot of common sense.