By Hoffmann the Organizer
It must be hard for a Ukrainian or a Russian in the border areas or a Palestinian in Gaza to imagine what it would take to create a world without war. We seem to have reached that point in our own relatively comfortable corner of the globe in regard to escalating heat waves.
In “It’s Getting Hot in Here,” the New York Times of July 14th echoes the almost ubiquitous chorus of those urging us to “adapt to an ever-hotter planet,” with tips on “how to stay cool amid rising temperatures.”: As we “prepare our cities” for the heat, the Times suggests we learn “how Indigenous communities survive in the driest, hottest places on the planet.” Survivalism has gone mainstream liberal, it appears.
I suppose it’s a bit churlish to grouse about people wanting to learn how to endure “what is,” but what happened to “what ought to be”? Was it so far in the past that we read about preventing this situation from the likes of Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, William Ophuls, or Bruno Latour? Stern prophets all, but still committed to saving a human-sustaining eco-system IRL (“in real life,” fellow Boomers). Is the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito so behind the times that he still implores us to “Slow Down” and save what we once had (and apparently will not have again)?
Something about extreme heat really calls the question. Dying from it is like being burned alive in a fire-bombing or thermonuclear explosion but in slower, more excruciating motion. If what we are facing this summer is the new normal, well, people have endured worse. But it isn’t. It’s just another way station on the road to an uninhabitable environment.
Sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has thrust this scenario before us quite viscerally in The Ministry for the Future, his recent manifesto-in-fictional-clothing. The book opens with a heat wave in India, one that crosses that threshold that lies a few years, a few months, or a few days away for the Asian sub-continent or elsewhere. Millions die as water supplies are consumed, air conditioning conks out, and the neighboring lake slow cooks rather than relieves those who immerse themselves in it. That first chapter of his 500-page cri de coeur is really all we need to know.
But we know it and . . . we plan to adapt to it! The current flood of articles urging us to set up “cooling centers” and retreat to our air-conditioned bunkers express a profound resignation. After all, air-conditioning makes the situation worse. “Because of the electricity it uses?” a self-proclaimed environmentalist asked me. Well, yes, it uses very high levels of power. But even if our power is 100% renewable (except for underage cobalt and lithium miners in the Congo or the Andes), AC pumps hot air into . . . the hot air. There’s nothing quite as demoralizing as walking past someone’s huffing window unit on a 95-degree day.
So, are we crossing a tipping point between laying climate-change-denial to rest and accepting the end of a human-sustaining environment without even a final attempt to stave off such an incomprehensible disaster? Incomprehensible to some of us, I guess, since many are preparing to join Elon Musk on Mars or build giant domes or burrow underground. All those decades of Space Age imagery seem to have prepared us for no other future. But gaga as I was watching Star Trek as a child, my aging body tells me there’s no better environment for me than this one-in-a-million planet in this one-in-a-million-years epoch of its existence. Mars, the space colonies, the enclosed cities . . . they don’t have what we need to thrive.
We do have the means to avert the choice between the slow boil or a desperate evacuation, though whether we have the time . . . well, only time will tell. First things first: let’s walk back our march to a militarized world. Nothing heats the atmosphere more than a little nuclear war, but even bombs, missiles, spy satellites, tanks, and all the rest burn energy at the greatest extremes of human activity.
Then, or better, simultaneously, let’s cut our energy use in half. From a comfortable consumer’s point of view, that is very easy – those of us in the developed world, and especially the richest 20% of the world’s population everywhere, use energy quite profligately. We of the privileged 20% could all do half as many car trips, half as many plane trips, cut our heat and AC down, eat less beef, and on and on, without the slightest diminution of our quality of life, perhaps even improving it. That would buy us time even if it doesn’t solve the problem, reducing both carbon emissions and the rapacious demand for rare earths and metals. (BTW, even the least carbon-centered energy still HEATS).
There’s one little hitch in this latter plan: The Economy. There’s an old Yiddish saying, “Wi kumt di Kats ibern vaser” (“How does a cat cross over the water”). Our economic system is that cat.
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Hoffmann earned his pen name and sobriquet “the Organizer” through years of work on campaigns for peace, economic justice, and environmental sustainability in numerous cities and regions of the US, as well as in Europe.