Pessimistic hope

Bill McKibben has been warning us about climate change for nearly as long as Al Gore has. He addresses the subject with a kind of hopeful pessimism.

McKibben is a Methodist — the sort of Methodist who would’ve made John Wesley proud. As such, he regards despair as a sin and hope as a duty. Books like his latest — Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future — are an expression of that duty.

Such hope can inspire, but it is also somewhat suspect. If McKibben’s hope is a religious duty then it is, in part, a matter of faith, and no more or less substantial than any other matter of faith. It may be reasonable, but it does not arise purely from reason, nor is reason — primarily — what sustains it. It might well therefore prove to be unreasonable. (I find McKibben’s hopefulness reasonable, but of course I also share his faith, so my take on this is also somewhat suspect.)

James K. Galbraith reviews Deep Economy in the current Washington Monthly (see “The Sins of Affluence“), and worries that McKibben may be a bit too hopeful:

Can we actually feed ourselves for less? Can we do it without sowing millions of tons of petroleum, in the form of fertilizer, into the Iowa soil, and without the billions of gallons of oil required to process grain and meat and move them around the world? McKibben thinks we can, and he has tried it, personally, with good results; local farming works in the Vermont woods if you have a good freezer to get the vegetables through the winter. The Cubans have tried it too, and they’ve gotten back the calories they gave up when their Soviet markets collapsed. From this follows a larger lesson: when the oil-and-coal economy ends, some of us will get along fine, eating local potatoes and cheese. …

It’s a beautiful tale, but it can’t be altogether right. The climate collapse — which may bring the flooding of New York, Boston, London, Calcutta and Shanghai — will be a calamity next to which the end of the Soviet Union will seem very small. Long industrial chains, for jet aircraft, automobiles, telecommunications, electricity, and much else, will crumble, as they did in the USSR and Yugoslavia, particularly if new interior boundaries form and countries break up. And interior boundaries will form, as those on the high ground seek to defend it. …

This brings us back to the sphere that … McKibben … largely ignore[s]: public policy. The function of the government, in principle, is to foresee these dangers, and avert them. The powers of the government exist to permit the mobilization of resources required. And only government can hope to do the job.

This is bleak news not only in the present climate of thought, but also given the decay of the public sphere since at least 1981. Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today. A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush’s FEMA, is no one’s idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. …

Therefore: government will have to be rebuilt. The competencies necessary will have to be learned. The necessary powers will have to be legislated. Safeguards — against corruption, against abuse, against predation, against regulatory capture — will have to be designed. The corporate consumer culture will have to be brought to heel, and the long food production chains McKibben warns against will, indeed, have to be shortened. At the same time, a new project of physical, technological and urban social engineering will have to get under way.

I’d rather it didn’t. But, to borrow Margaret Thatcher’s famous words, “There is no alternative.”

So Galbraith encounters McKibben’s hopeful pessimism and responds with a bit more pessimism and a bit less hope — but not no hope. “I’d rather,” it were otherwise, “but … there is no alternative,” is not without hope, or something like its Stoic equivalent.

I think Galbraith is correct here about the need to rebuild government in order for it to be competent to deal with the challenges that climate change and the end of cheap oil will bring. Here is an interactive map that lets you take a look at what coastlines might look like a few decades from now in a warmer world. Much of New York City will be, like New Orleans is now, below sea level. But the challenge of keeping New York dry will not be as difficult as the challenge of keeping New York fed when those “long food production chains” that McKibben and Galbraith describe can no longer be sustained. This will not be a job for a Paul Bremer, a Michael Brown, a Donald Rumsfeld or a George W. Bush.

One of the things I particularly like about McKibben is his straightforward use of the words “sustainable” and “unsustainable.” These have gained the status of buzzwords such that “sustainable” is little more than a tepid synonym for “eco-friendly.” But when McKibben describes our long food production chains as unsustainable he means exactly that — they cannot be sustained, i.e., they will fail. Knowing this leaves us, as Galbraith says, with no alternative but to plan for something that can be sustained.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment, of course. McKibben’s critics believe — or, rather, hope — that he and Al Gore and the IPCC are wrong. They hope that the unsustainable will be sustained and that, therefore, no further planning is needed. “I’d rather it didn’t,” they say, “so I hope it won’t.” That is, in my opinion, an unreasonable hope.

(The picture, a screencap from the flood map site, shows Kennebunkport, Maine, as it would appear should this happen.)