The War to Solve Climate Change
One of the questions raised in the book "Slouching Toward Utopia" is whether "history" is contingent or structural. Let's define (as I understand those terms):
"Contingent" history means that historical turns and events depend upon the actions of individuals at moments of crisis and opportunity. Example: Lincoln was necessary for the Union to win the Civil War; FDR was vital to prevent a fascist America.
"Structural" history means that historical turns and events are the result of social- and world-wide forces converging in a manner similar to plate tectonics creating earthquakes and tsunamis. The actions of individuals ultimately don't matter.
I'm thinking it isn't that black and white, that history is neither contingent or structural, but maybe-- systematic?
Take the Russia-Ukraine War, for example. What caused the war? Putin's ambitious delusions? NATO's extension into a traditional Russian sphere of influence? Politics? Money? Pride? Stupidity?
No. In my view, the Russian-Ukraine War is a global systematic response to-- climate change.
Buried in all the horrible news about the Ukraine War is a sliver of recent good news that mostly has gone unnoticed:
A climate scientist reported that in his view of the data the Ukraine War has pushed Europe (and probably the industrial world as a whole) over the tipping point into embracing renewable energy. I think he's right.
If he *is* right, then the horrible suffering of millions of Ukrainians (and Russian soldiers) (and third world countries hit by food restraints) is a system trade-off against the future suffering of *billions* in a post-2degree world.
But how could such an outcome be anything but accidental rather than a result of systematic processes, you ask? (I'm presuming you ask. Maybe you don't ask. So I'll ask.)
Here's my thesis of how our human global system works:
I'll use the example of an ant hill. An ant colony needs food. It sends out a bunch of individual ants in every f**king direction to look for it. 99 percent find nothing, keep wandering, die. One lucky ant finds a fallen fruit.
Lucky ant heads back to the colony, says, hey guys, I've found a fruit (actually he leaves a pheromone trail, but whatever) and pretty soon hundreds of his buddies are all over that fruit, and the colony eats well.
Eventually there's no more fruit left and one of the other doofus ants who's been wandering around finds a pile of garbage. Whee, repeat, etc.
At no point did any individual ant's plans or decisions matter-- there were no hero ants solving the colony's food source problem. Just a bunch of random dudes, a few of whom got lucky, who helped the colony survive.
Think of humanity as a whole as that ant colony. As a species, we want to survive, grow the colony, spread out. Period.
So we send out a bunch of random dudes to do random stuff until something sticks and the colony benefits:
Like the ancient precursors to humanity who started in Africa and spread out across the world, 99 percent of them probably dying off, undiscovered, until a few lucky randos ended up in the Middle East, and Europe, and Asia, and across a land bridge to America.
Which of those randos was their generation's Lincoln or FDR? Were *individuals* required for the mass migrations that created our worldwide human species? No. Our spread was the result of a system powered by our species' imperative to thrive.
Because we're accustomed to thinking of history in terms of human-span lifetimes, we don't see the larger, systematic picture. We're studying individual trees in the middle of a forest.
Back to climate change and the Ukraine War.
Our species-level need to thrive pushed millions of random humans over time to eventually develop what we, in our individual human perspective, call the Industrial Revolution, which required/was enabled by compact high-density extractive fuel.
First coal, then crude oil, then refined oil, then gas. Individuals were involved in developing all this, but in a systematic sense they were really just rando ants who got lucky.
Eventually, of course, industrial development dependent on extractive compact high-density fuel created a threat to the species as a whole-- climate change. This is not a problem individuals even acting as groups can fix. It's a species-level problem.
And on a systematic level, the species as a whole is in the process of solving the problem. Because that's the sole unique power of the human species: We solve problems.
In the case of climate change, the systematic solution is actually inherent in the nature of the problem, and if you step back sufficiently far you can see it and it's actually elegant and beautiful.
We know from historical experience that extractive economies (like those of ancient rural societies, extracting food from, say, a limited natural resource like the Nile delta) lead to monopolies of power as the control of a single resource centralizes authority.
We've seen that over and over-- resource based economies almost inevitably turn authoritarian, because elites gain control of the single resource, and the most aggressive member of the elites eventually gains control over the weaker elites.
In that way the species as a whole, when dependent on an extractive compact high-density fuel, becomes dependent on the whims of single aggressive elites.
This is not optimal for the species, obviously, and the system works to undermine that dependency with counterbalancing forces-- again, without the necessity of individual actors consciously working to do so.
Remember the ant colony, remember the fruit, remember that the fruit eventually gets depleted but the colony thrives because meanwhile a bunch of other wandering rando ants had discovered new sources of food?
Remember that some of the wandering early humans who found the Tigris-Euphrates Valley didn't stop there, but kept wandering? To Europe, and Asia, and across land-bridges and by sea to distant islands?
The system provided fuel to enable the species to thrive. Eventually that source of energy threatened the species. The system provided a solution:
Extractive resource economies produce centralizing elites. Centralizing elites produce aggressive totalitarian super-elites. Aggressive totalitarian super-elites act out their aggressions. Their aggressions threaten the species' ability to thrive.
So the species' system responds.
The specifics of the response occur at a human scale and produce immediate suffering on the human scale, but for the species as a whole, the result is positive and the species continues to thrive.
But how, you may ask (and if you don't, I will on your behalf), does responding to acts of aggression fueled by the economics of extractive resource control amount to a species response to climate change?
To which I reply (to myself, if not to you), think in terms of systems.
Human-caused climate change is a systemic global result of the extractive fuel resource economy. The extractive resource economy leads inherently (for reasons described above) to the control by *individuals* of a resource required by the species as a whole.
That *isn't* in the species interest, and because such control isn't ultimately responsive to the species' need to thrive, the *system* will push to undermine or destroy that control once it threatens the species as a whole.
Climate change is the threat. The Russia-Ukraine War is part of the system's response.
Is it Putin's war? Sure. But if he hadn't started it, some other extractive economy leader in his stead would have. Extractive economies eventually produce highly aggressive authoritarian leaders. (Look at MBS.) Aggressive authoritarian leaders create wars. (MBS/Yemen.)
The more money a highly aggressive authoritarian leader can extract from the economy, the more ambitious he becomes.
I don't think it's much of a stretch to describe this as inevitable.
Step back far enough and you can see the species system at work-- the push to extend and thrive (ants in all directions/lets build machines), the discovery of a resource (fruit!, coal and oil), the depletion of the resource (eaten fruit, abandoned oil wells), or, alternately, its control by a hostile counter-force (wasps!, climate change and/or authoritarians), and the move to a different resource (pile of garbage, renewable energy and/or nuclear power).
At our individual human level, from our personal limited lifetime viewpoint, all of this seems glacially slow-- the looming threat overwhelming, our individual helplessness a source of despair.
But we aren't alone, we're members of the most successful species on earth (apart from the dinosaurs, who actually make a good case for how long species can survive in balance with the world if the planet doesn't get hit by an asteroid). Our special species skill is solving problems.
We're in the process of solving one of the greatest problems we've ever faced.
I'm pretty sure we'll succeed, as we have thousands of times before, and will, again, a thousand times forward into the future.
