Climate change is only a symptom part 3

Excessive heat. Who's responsible?

“Why do we prefer busyness over rest? There is a cost to it. I believe the only solution to our environmental problems is to do nothing. Sit with it and you’ll realize it’s true too.” — Douglas Tsoi

A few posts ago, I made what may have looked like an off-hand comment above. But I meant it. Apparently I write a climate change post every year. There are two parts in 2022, part 1 and part 2. This is 2023’s. And below is 2024’s:

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In my last two jobs, from 2009-2014, I worked on regional sustainability efforts. We used to talk about the anticipated climate changes “in the future.” Last week Portland had five consecutive days of record breaking heat.

Personally, I believe anywhere you cannot be outside due to extreme heat, where you must stay inside in “climate-control,” producing more GHG gasses, is functionally uninhabitable. So:

• Las Vegas had seven straight days of 115 degree heat.

• This week, the heat index expected in Philadelphia is 110 degrees and in the low 100s in New York.

• Last year, Phoenix had a record fifteen consecutive days of 115+ degree heat, 31 straight days of 100+ degree heat. Right now this is what they’re facing:

• More than half the U.S. population — almost 175 million people — faced extreme heat on July 4.

• This May, New Delhi hit 125 degrees, the evenings still over 100 degrees.

June was the Earth’s 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record.

“The future” that they talked about when I worked in sustainability in 2010 is occurring now. The planet is becoming more uninhabitable to humans. And it’s going to get worse. It’s going to be hotter in 10 years than this year. More 110+ degree days. More 125+ degree days. Worse still in 20 years. We’re frogs in a pot.

There’s only one reason for this and you know it: consumption. Yours and mine.

Eating the planet alive

We consume twice as much as we did 25 years ago. Four times as much as 50 years ago. Climate change is a completely foreseeable (and foreseen) symptom of our own spending. You would have to be in deep denial to believe otherwise.

In the future, it’s only going to get worse. It’s going to get hotter and hotter. We also continue to spend more, more, more. And somehow, we act like it’s OK. Almost everyone I know says that they own so much more stuff than when they were kids. Travel so much more. Stay much more busy, do so many more things.

It is not OK.

Despite all the evidence that it’s harming us, we can’t stop. Addicts live in denial, refuse to stop despite the evidence at hand.

It’s easy to blame the Republicans. I wrote about it this last year: we always want to push away responsibility, but you’re likely in the 10% of the population responsible for 50% of GHG emissions.¹ We are climate change. The fact that you receive more money for work isn’t moral justification to emitting more GHGs; in fact I’d argue the more money you make, the more you are already implicated in the systems that create harm for everyone else.

Climate change is a foreseeable consequence of our consumption. As I wrote two years ago, climate change is simply a symptom of our addiction to not-enoughness. Our constant need for more, more, more.

It’s not someone else. I’ve spent enough time with sustainability professionals and liberals to know the lazy talk that happens in those circles, blaming the Other while planning vacations to Bali. But when it comes to spending, there is no Other.

“Jesus is shockingly not upset with sinners… He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners: these denying, fearful, and illusory individuals are the actual blockage.” — Richard Rohr

“The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask.” —Alan Watts

It’s not easy to take responsibility because the reasons behind our consumption, hidden in shadow, are deeply painful. I had a online office hours with my current FF1 students this weekend and one of them talked about how, in our economic and social system, we constantly need to achieve and perform: “you always feel like you’re not measuring up.” And of course the only solution to not measuring up is to achieve more and spend more. Achievement and consumption: the cause of, and solution to, not enoughness. Until we address not-enoughness, things will only get worse.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

Money and climate, material and spiritual

“Money as a tool is both material and spiritual – to get what we need and to reflect on the meaning and purpose of our lives.” — Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life

Through FIRE circles, I became friends with Vicki Robin. A few years ago, she made me lunch:

Vicki told me that when she wrote Your Money or Your Life, she thought it would change the world: when people realized that their spending was destroying the planet, everyone would change their behavior. They would work less, live in voluntary simplicity, and reclaim their lives from capitalism. Her life’s greatest sadness is that she was wrong. I don’t think she understood the depth of the addiction, how big the taboo really was. We continue working and increasing our spending while the planet continues to heat up. Just because everyone else is doing it. The more money we make, the more we spend. Money, a tool both material and spiritual, being used in a pathoadolescent society.

You can’t address climate change without addressing our collective not-enoughness. You can’t address the material without the spiritual. We’re not going to realize this in time to stop climate change and environmental collapse. Or more accurately, I think we’ll finally see our spiritual not-enoughness because of climate change and environmental collapse. Addicts talk about hitting ‘rock-bottom,’ a place where the consequences are so dire and unavoidable that we can no longer live in denial. Then, the Light after the Darkness after the Light. The universal pattern; ascent, collapse, rebirth.

You’re reading this as we crest stage 1 and enter stage 2.² Things are starting to get worse, and will get a lot worse. But perhaps because of the suffering, we’ll begin to see there are no external material answers to our internal deficit, no matter how much furiously we look for them. Through suffering, we’ll learn enoughness. We’ll understand that we don’t need to measure up and never had to. We never had to critique ourselves and never had to judge others. We will come to see all reality as the dwelling place of the Divine and experience liberation from the endless pursuit of power, status, and security.³ Grace. The material and spiritual as one.

My friend Patricia Ryan Madson says that “fighting with Reality is a sure road to suffering.” Continuing to spend more and more while the planet is heating up is fighting with Reality. It’s so illogical. We’re in such denial. But trying to limit our consumption without understanding our need for more, more, more won’t work. Budgets won’t work without facing the source of bottomless hunger: our not-enoughness. My friend Annie Bickerton says spirituality is a growing intimacy with all things. The thing we must get closest to and love is the ugliest thing, the thing we try to deny, our pervasive not-enoughness.

We need a cultural shift, badly.

Global warming, a phrase so unlikeable they had to rebrand it. They changed the name, but they couldn’t change the facts. You can’t fight Reality. Record highs every month, and like I heard 15 years ago, “in the future” it’s going to continue getting hotter. More places uninhabitable. People suffering. Welcome to the desert of the Real.

Apparently frogs that are gradually being heated will eventually jump out of the pot. Unfortunately for us, there’s no place for us to go. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. This is all a foreseeable (and foreseen) consequence of our endless consumption. We simply never have enough. The ever increasing heat is simply inviting us to see our not-enoughness. Our addiction to more, more, more.

When will we stop?

1. i.e. the people who spend the most money in the world.

2. My friend Will Fain said to me today: “We’re so lucky we lived in peak humanity. No one had it any better.”

3. HT Michael Poffenberger