Ugly truths
In a fight with economy, humanity loses
There are certain ugly truths about society that Bank of Nature accepts, not because they are valid, but because they aren’t going anywhere. These truths are engrained so deeply in the way we live on this planet, that we are stuck with them – even if they are ultimately fatal to us, even if this generation and the many before us did not choose this outcome.
Bank of Nature leans into these ugly truths, because we must, and looks for ways to make them work for us instead. That’s the creative strategy with the potential to sidestep (or, if you prefer, push through) the governmental, industrial and economic barriers to our climate response.
For example, Ugly Truth 1): From now through a climate-changed future, the one thing we will preserve above all else is the economy.
That’s the notion that we need jobs, currencies, markets and industry to live as we do – more than we need human health, dignity and survivability. I sense that we talk around this idea but not in ways that change the climate conversation toward a new set of priorities. The COVID response and the push to re-open economies is proof that the economy is more important that human health. I half-joke that the most powerful human social construct in the universe is the economy, and the more I research this idea the less funny it is.
Economy is the theory and practice of government and industry. The basis of the theory, and economists will correct me, is that resources (like the planet) are scarce and that provides the formula for wealth creation. My argument, still developing, is that our theory of economics is incomplete without an accounting for nature. We don’t account for nature beyond academic explorations of negative externalities or lip service to stewardship.
So, 2): Another ugly truth is that the well-being of nature, the reason we have an economy, is not in fact a beneficiary of our economy.
Quite the opposite, actually. It’s a glaring and lethal oversight. By our current logic, the greatest wealth comes from the complete depletion of natural resources that contribute to the viability of our species in this peculiar and thin biosphere. Bank of Nature is a proxy for nature and its well being.
And, 3): Government and industry are completely conflicted by our allegiance, compelled either legally or by default, to a scarcity-driven, value-obsessed growth economy.
They may talk about climate mitigation, but they must cast that work in the realm of profit and economy and may have to overuse other natural resources to execute on those more climate-oriented ideas. There needs to be first a good business plan before there is a climate fix. Government and industry are not geared to fix climate when it comes at the expense of economy and its access to nature.
This is why Bank of Nature says we have the wrong people in charge of the climate crisis. Artists, scientists, proxies for nature… they are more likely to work in concert with nature.
IPCC
With this as a backdrop, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an initiative of global government and 195 nation states signed on to the Paris Accord, published yet another harrowing overview of our climate situation yesterday, Aug. 9. It’s the summer of 2021 with more intense wildfires and floods, in a morphing pandemic, punctuating our very slow and ineffective/iterative historical response — not to the climate per se, but to our specific behaviors that make climate unfriendly to our species.
The New York Times, among the many to report on the latest (the sixth) IPCC report wrote this headline: “A Hotter Future Is Certain, Climate Panel Warns. But How Hot Is Up to Us.”
How many times must we see this movie to know the ending is unhappy?
Not all is lost [writes the NYT] and humanity can still prevent the planet from getting even hotter. Doing so would require a coordinated effort among countries to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by around 2050, which would entail a rapid shift away from fossil fuels starting immediately, as well as potentially removingvast amounts of carbon from the air. If nations fail in that effort, global average temperatures will keep rising — potentially passing 2 degrees, 3 degrees or even 4 degrees Celsius, compared with the preindustrial era.
The bolded text is emphasis by me.
“If nations fail?” Have they not already? When is the test?
Hands up. Which country is ready to stall scarcity-based economic growth in a competitive world of nations states wary of their neighbors’ economic advantages? Which industries? Which shareholders? Anyone?
Well, then, which of you are “potentially” ready for an “immediate” “rapid shift” maybe by “2050” with unspecified loss? Everyone? Fantastic. Humanity should rest easy.
4) Another ugly truth: Humanity has nothing to do with it.
There is a difference, important and often conflated, between what it means to be a human and what it means to be led by a society whose priorities are inhuman — I mean, literally.
“How hot?” is not a question for us. Rather, it’s a challenge to our growth-centric, scarcity-based economy and its language of transaction and value. The risk is not to human survivability. Climate-based collateral damage is already sanctioned by government-backed necropolitics.
So, if the risk isn’t to human survival, what is at risk? The hard answer is nothing, which is why society placates climate outrage and makes it worse at the same time. We fool ourselves that humanity has any role to play. We are bystanders to value creation.
Ouch, right? But, it’s truth.
This is where Bank of Nature comes in — acknowledging these hard and ugly truths about society and using society’s own tools to work for the environment. A proxy for nature, a missing player in our climate crisis and the scarcity economics that rule both government and industry, allows for our society to continue its growth narrative, only if nature gets even bigger. Paying nature first and with interest means we have a full accounting of what things cost in this society, without artificial subsidies and including externalities, fiduciary duties to our future generations and our replenishing Earth’s bounty.
How hot is too hot?
I’m not sure what makes this year’s appeal from the IPCC more urgent than the earlier reports that had language like “the worst is yet to come” without the the results of meaningful action. The UN has zero leverage to compel the kind of behavior it says it wants. If it’s to take this leadership role, it must know that it’s fruitless to argue against our society’s growth narrative — an ideal to which, the UN itself, ascribes.
Scarcity economics will always win in a contest with human survivability, because government and industry are in a conflict of interest. GHG emissions and growth are symbiotic despite aging, statistical, one-off outliers that somehow prove that they can be decoupled.
The real question is at what temperature does economic value start to fade?
I suspect this to be 5) another ugly truth: We have lots of room to get hotter, past the temperature of optimal human survivability.
Fossil fuel exploration and extraction, the chief bogeymen in our climate drama, continue and earnest protest for climate fixes also continues. It’s not that we should expect the worst from humans, but that we have built a system that optimizes value in spite of humans and in spite of the negative consequences to our dwindling natural resources.
So, ugly truth 6): We can expect to the next IPCC annual report to be distinguished by even more dire language and warnings to nation states,
but they are starting to wear out the thesaurus. Maybe the limitation of adjectives is the hardline in the sand.