Here is what I’m seeing, then: the political contours emerging from the pandemic foreshadow a fork in the road for the politics of climate change.
As long as the goal was to have climate change taken seriously, this could unite us, however different our understandings of what taking climate change seriously might mean.
As we near that goal, though, the differences in understanding come more sharply into focus…
Two paths lead from here: one big, one small.
The big path is a brightly lit highway on which many lanes converge.
It unites elements of left and right, from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad swathe of liberal opinion, to the wilder fringes of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy of the 2020s.
It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance, and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth, and development.
The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths.
It is made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth, and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a world worth living for nonetheless remains.
Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may recognize just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.
Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough.
The big path is a fast track to nowhere.
We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport adverts.
The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy.
But we may well follow that path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent on fragile technological systems that few of us can understand or can imagine living without.
And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path.
Any conversation about the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicized frame of science, will lead inexorably to their solutions.
If I’m anywhere close to right in this reading of the signs of the times, if the new politics of science emerging from the pandemic does stabilize into something like its current shape, then those of us who are partisans of the small path will find ourselves in a strange position.
However far it may be from our political roots, we find that we have more in common with assorted conservatives, dissidents, and skeptics — including some whose skepticism extends to climate science — than with the mainstream progressive currents that have so far had a claim to be on the right side of history when it comes to climate change.
Under the authority of “the science,” talk of climate change will belong to the advocates of the big path, and those of us who do not wish to contribute to that future will need to find another place to start from when we want to talk about the depth of trouble the world is undoubtedly in.
— Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies, 2023 (via)
