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Climate Logic and Imagination Together

Author: Douglass Carmichael Issue: 2023-08-16

Climate: Logic and Imagination Together

by Douglass Carmichael

Imagination - How To...

To have a chance against the death-dealing climate challenge, we need an unleashed imagination. Innovation, often expected to “solve” the problem, is too narrow and technical in practice. It deals with technical pliability, not the world of humans, dreams, closer to the world of art, drama, demons, and gods. Imagination is close by, but we act as though we are tied up and prevented from moving into it. We’ve got to get past that and explore the freedom of our minds. Here is a simple proposal: start (this is something to actually do) by writing a sentence that reflects your thinking about climate, maybe a dumb thought. For example:

Could we make locusts that eat up CO2?

What about something like goldfish, same weight as air, that could swim in the atmosphere and live on CO2?

Or simpler:

Both of these could turn toward challenging, maybe even helpful, ideas. In each case, the second sentence would never have come to mind without the first.

The point is that imagination is close by, but we act as though we are tied up and prevented from moving there. We’ve got to get past that and explore the freedom of our minds if we are to have a chance against the climate challenges.

New Writing Makes Communication About Climate Harder

With the flood of new writing - blogs, institutes, seminars, international meetings - it is hard to keep up. Each addition means each person has more choices; a new choice is competing with other new choices, and the result is that we are more diffuse, distributed, dispersed from each other. Coherent communication is becoming more difficult.

I am thinking of it this way. We have spent years building the sandcastle of modern society, assuming it is stable, but unaware of the tides that are coming. As the sandcastle falls apart, each grain moves apart from most of the others, and connections become more random.

Not only do oil company executives want to sustain their activity, but so too do “progressives” who are not paying attention to the obvious fact, or what at least ought to be obvious, that their project produces CO2, if only in the form of electricity needed to run their computers. And they want to hold onto their activity to try making it successful without realizing that the connections they create help stabilize society, which sounds good, but makes change harder.

David Brooks has an important article in the New York Times, What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?

He says that the professional class, which had taken over the Democratic Party, is systematically undermining the middle and lower class. This is the kind of article that ought to get more discussion and probably will not. If you put this in the context of Gibbon’s class analysis in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you can see the possibility of a major conflict emerging through the media and the election in 2024.

Toynbee’s Study of History shows how civilizations (not nations) come into conflict as elites and the proletariat diverge in interest. Toynbee’s large scale is complementary to the more detailed texture of the lives of leaders provided by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. These are the kinds of things we should be reading and discussing. And are not.

How to Speak About Climate Challenge

I am puzzled, along with everyone I know. How to speak in a time of crisis? That is not so hard if it seems we are discussing a crisis we are going through and expect to come out the other side. But if the crisis is probably extinction? To speak pessimism is to scare. To speak optimism is to lie.

Two approaches that seem tolerable and ethical. The first is scenarios: to examine parallel paths into the future, comparing them. But the problem doesn’t go away because we find that the examination in the scenarios process leads to some scenarios that are not plausible and hence rejected, and some seem plausible because objections are not yet fully considered. It is much easier to show that a scenario does not survive facts, but much harder to show that a scenario is going to happen.

The second ethical approach is to develop a single narrative of what is happening without drawing conclusions. “The food system in Burunai [made up] is collapsing.” But not moving on to conclusions like, “Therefore the population dies.” Outs are possible. The problem is the speaker is very likely holding back thoughts already thought of how bad the loss of the food system will be with impossibly large migrations and no substitute crops. Is the speaker lying? I don’t think so, but the speaker will feel corrupted by the process.

Another approach is philosophy. “The major task of philosophy is to learn how to die well.” You were going to die anyway; only the timing is in doubt. The loss of a life is inevitable. So maybe we should just opt out, find some shade, play your guitar, write a poem, and try to make sense of what is happening. Venus became a dead planet through temperature, part of the process of planet formation, sphericalizing until uninhabitable. “This issue confronts us. Do the best and accept the inevitable.”

But maybe staying engaged, we might find a few more tolerable days, and this is worthwhile. It is what we have been doing anyway before COVID and climate. My own preference, so far, is to tell it exactly as facts and reason tell us. No solution proposed scales to the size of the problem. The mass of CO2 (already in the atmosphere produced by several billion vehicles over nearly 200 years, it would require a similar effort to take it out); population; especially when we include other species; the weight of trash, all slowly accumulated; these are all beyond the reach, so far, of our technologies and our politics.

My belief is that hard facts are needed more than soft hopes. And we need radical imagination and radical actions.

Cutting CO2: Who Will Do What and When Will They Do It?

The task is to face how hard this is while looking for actions that can make a significant difference. These both require imagination.

Start with imagining the possibilities for a CEO of a major oil company. She sends out an order to shut down all drilling. The process of sending such an order is obscure to those of us who are not insiders.

I think of some recent interviews with military generals on whether Trump could have launched nuclear weapons. No. The general staff restraints come into play. The order does not get implemented until procedures are in place to prevent damage to equipment and safety measures are in place. An orderly process needs to be invented.

Since stopping the drilling means less crude to the refineries, the refiners must sign off on the shutdown order after making sure the equipment is safe and people and communities are safe. But meanwhile, the refinery operators are looking for alternative sources. As we know, or will soon learn, the big oil companies have been selling off small refiners and drillers in order to “protect” them. If drilling by the main company stops, lots of small drillers are ready to fill the gap.

The process might end when the board fires the CEO who tried to issue the order. Bureaucracies act a little like self-repairing inner tubes, filling any gap with enough goo to maintain the system’s “integrity.”

Next idea? Wait. Let’s see what we have learned and can apply. Perhaps the executive team needs to see that the way things are currently run means that nature is being forced to “leak” its wealth, and we should look at the safety of the current energy regime. And that drilling is actually like a hole in the inner tube we need to plug up.

So, instead of issuing a cease-drilling order, the CEO starts an executive team discussion about the encasing reality of the company’s operations.

That is, society and nature.

Given the way such things work, she probably knows who on the board would support this inquiry, and they might be invited to the staff conversation (uh oh, regulations on what a board member can do and who they can talk to will come into play).

This kind of imagination just starts what has to be a detailed process.

Two Kinds of Imagination Needed.

Habit keeps us in the rut.

“Habit is the great flywheel of society. It keeps the farmer at the plow and the sailor deep at sea.” [William James, Principles of Psychology]

Habit is the enemy of change, while imagination is its companion. Or we will never break out of the iron grip of contemporary habits.

Two kinds of imagination needed: accurate imagination, to discover what is. Experimental imagination, to try out what is new. Thinking of paths forward requires both kinds of imagination. We need to be much tougher and ride this invisible tiger.

We need to build on a solid foundation of good facts. For example, transmission lines are necessary for an electrical option. An example of a bad fact: Replace gas automobiles with EVs, cutting CO2 emissions to zero. But there is no way we can build and replace 8 billion cars. Cost, time, energy, and materials.

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