Climate Pays, but Politics Doesn’t
Why political problems require political responses & how to clarify our common will.
In a recently published New York Times op-ed, “When We See the Climate More Clearly, What Will We Do?,” author David Wallace-Wells describes the launch in March of MethaneSAT, an $88 million satellite dedicated exclusively to measuring, monitoring, and locating sources of methane pollution on the Earth’s surface. The satellite’s theory of change is simple: understanding the sources of methane emissions - which by some accounts have contributed to a third of global heating since the Industrial Revolution - will enable a global to-do list for methane reduction. Methane emissions are amongst the lowest hanging fruit of the green transition, and a map of where they are happening arguably serves as a strategic pathway of action.
But the map is not the territory: more knowledge does not necessarily drive action, even when that knowledge clearly shows who is responsible. This is especially true in a post-truth social media age where anyone can pretend to be anything. We know, for example, that fossil fuel companies such as Exxon deliberately lied to the public about their impact on climate, and yet subsidies to fossil fuel companies exceeded $7 trillion in 2022, or 7% of world GDP. UN-mediated international agreements such as the Paris Accords have clear consensus on what needs to be done by state actors to prevent catastrophic climate heating, but they aren’t doing it: the $700 million pledged by wealthy countries at COP28 in Dubai for the “loss and damage fund” represents 0.2% of the economic losses these countries face due to global heating.
There are many ways to explain this. One of the simplest is that the climate policies of wealthy countries don’t confront the real power structures at play: the richest 1% of humanity are responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, and climate solutions that don't address that unequal distribution of responsibility only preserve entrenched interests.
Today, much of the political-economic elite’s focus on emission reductions focuses on green tech and market-driven incentives such as carbon offsetting. I don’t want to discount these approaches. Clearly, we need more efficient technologies and placing a financial value on nature is a necessary way to protect and restore it. The issue is who does this end up empowering. Who is it really for?
In her book The Value of Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism, Andrienne Buller argues that existing climate policies are “an attempt to resolve the climate crisis in a way that minimizes disruption to our existing ways of organizing the economy, to existing distributions of wealth and power.” Decarbonization, in turn, becomes an opportunity for “profit-making and rent extraction in that decarbonized future.”
Mainstream climate policies conveniently avoid an essential question: how do we fairly re-allocate resources and re-invent our economies? Granted, small, positive shifts are happening: Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated $3 billion in direct grants to underserved communities. But overall, governments and corporations in the global north wash their hands clean of any genuinely political decisions by allowing the invisible hand of the market to sort things out. This is an ideological move and a sleight of hand, enabling them to not engage politically with their core problems - excess consumption and a growth-driven financial system - whilst distracting us all with self-righteous claims of sustainable development and open markets.
But as Noble-prize winning economist Thomas Picketty and many others have abundantly documented, free markets do not efficiently or fairly allocate resources: unregulated markets amplify existing inequalities. As a result, climate “solutions” cannot solve the climate crisis for the same reason that MethaneSAT cannot solve the methane crisis: neither address structures of power. The hospicing of capitalism, neoliberalism, and neocolonialism require political approaches. That means transfering power and resources into the hands of communities and local decision makers that are restoring ecological and social health, not destroying it. Anything short of that is smoke and mirrors.
This matters because our capacity to act politically - that is to unite together towards common causes - has diminished whilst our capacity to share information has increased. Under the influence of social media culture, we’ve gotten really good at using the right buzz words, and considerably worse at remaining connected to reality, but simply don’t follow through with action.
As a result, so many climate narratives distract us from what we really collectively need. We need real conversations about how to democratize power and capital. We need the urgent de-growth of the global north and equitable adaptation everywhere. We need an alliance between trade unions and the climate movement. And yes, we need technology like MethaneSAT and equitably-governed markets to support all this, but all the optimized data in the world will be useless if they don’t challenge the systems that absorb it.
In his book Climate: A New Story, Charles Eisenstein shares “Only dead things can be reduced to a set of data. A civilization that sees the world as alive will learn to bring other kinds of information into its choices.” Perhaps that new information can come from an understanding of how destructive inequality is to living systems. True north is the equitable redistribution of resources in service to life, not cosmetic adjustments. We have the capacity and means. But do we have the will?
PS: In trickster service to the equitable reading of NYT articles, let me share that you can get around their firewall by pressing Esc as the page loads.
PPS: The title of this post is inspired by the youtube channel Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, in which an uncouth, cursing hairy man botanizes disparate urban and rural ecosystems whilst injecting them with hilarious political-social commentary. Definitely worth a detour.