(POLS 2401) Globalising Global Issues Gleefully

Issue Analysis #7 - Climate Change: Looking for Collective Solutions

Drew Gaither

Professor Brown

Honours Global Issues

16 November 2020

Issue Analysis 7 – Climate Change: Looking for Collective Solutions

This week's assigned class video outlines the idea of "climate guilt," a feeling that stems from climate-conscious consumers recognising their own "complicity" in the use of fossil fuels. Hank Green describes this phenomenon when realising as a child that his grandfather worked on an oil rig. He had to reconcile his beliefs that fossil fuel companies "were like the ultimate evil" and the fact that his grandfather, someone whom he loved and was nice, would work within such a place. The reality, of course, is that people need jobs in order to survive, even if they are unsavoury. Until an alternative is PRESENTED, people will always be WORKING in the fossil fuel sector. The PBS narrator explains that "those of us who care about climate change and the role that fossil fuels play in that also live in a world that is made massively better and more comfortable and prosperous thanks to fossil fuels. Hating fossil fuels is easy, but it's not as easy to hate everything they've done for us." He explains that this GUILT is what causes people sometimes to ABANDON and MODIFY their values to adjust to their behaviour and that there is also a sense of POWERLESSNESS that people feel. If people view climate change and our behaviours that lead to it as an individual decision, they are less likely to understand climate change and what it takes to solve it, whereas if they look at it as a collective issue, they are more likely to get it.

The video proposes some interesting points, and I appreciate that it does not claim that climate change is something that can be addressed via any one personal decision. In the Realizeit module, it states that capitalism "the predominant economic system, depends on repetitive expansion. This process of expansion needs and supports industrial processes with insatiable appetites for resources such as oil, coal, wood, and water, and it depends on the increasing use of land, sea, and atmosphere as sinks for the deposit of wastes. Clearly, there is a conflict between the economic system's relentless demand and the world's limited and shrinking supplies" (Snarr, M. T., & Snarr, N. (Eds.). Given this conflicting mechanical system—one in which we are ALL COGS IN—it is very difficult to DECOUPLE our PERSONAL carbon FOOTPRINTS with the COLLECTIVE's "insatiable appetites." Global emissions data shows that only 25% of greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity and heat production, the rest is 24% agriculture, forestry, and other land uses, 21% from industry, 14% from transportation, 10% other, and 6% buildings. While it is true that we benefit from most of these uses, and we have a daily connection to them, we often do not have the power nor capacity to influence the stop of any of these emitting sectors. As capitalist consumers, we are removed from the ability to control the means of production and determine for ourselves what is the best way to combat climate change. A SMALL MINORITY, whose GOALS are PROFIT and SHORT-SIDED, get to CALL the SHOTS and WE as a PLANET suffer.

Michael Moore last year released a documentary called Planet of the Humans (directed by Jeff Gibbs), and while it does have some flaws and outdated climate models, its main premise is one that viewers should seriously grapple with. It postulates that switching to renewable energy alone is not enough to combat climate change and that in the process to get to renewables you will need to use even more fossil fuels and mine even more minerals, only furthering the problem while trying to dig yourself out of it (BIG GREEN TECH COMPANIES). It also challenges the ethics behind the new Green Industry and "Eco-Capitalists" who are jumping on board because it is profitable (a mindset that always leads to unethical production and consumption). 

Moore's documentary explains that there needs to be a shift in our collective values and that capitalist society will have to grapple with its excessive and consumptive practices that accelerate in perpetuity in order to keep the system afloat. Or rather, capitalism itself will never be able to grapple with these things because that is capitalism by its very nature (as quoted earlier). That is essentially what this PBS video states too (albeit not the latter point about capitalism never arising to the occasion); that climate change is indeed impacted by our consumption habits as well as traditional energy, and that these do need to be addressed, but it has to be done collectively, or it will not work. We are POWERLESS as INDIVIDUALS in combating climate change. I would definitely argue that not only will this problem only be solved with collective efforts but that it can never be solved if capitalism continues to exist. Only by abolishing this system of insatiable appetites, and giving power to all people, will we be able to address climate change. As long as a small minority holds all the chips, and we remain DOCILE SLAVES to their WHIMS, this planet will continue to BARREL towards TOTAL DESTRUCTION ("Total War' - William T. Sherman).