Climate change is only a symptom, part 1

No one is telling the truth of our addiction to overproducing and overconsuming.

This week the United Nations came out with its latest report on climate change. Here’s a synopsis, by the Guardian UK:

• The UN stated goal is to prevent the rise in global temperature to 1.5C.

• Current pledges from countries would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world.

• Existing carbon-cutting policies would cause 2.8C of warming. (Editor’s note: There is large doubt that large countries will abide by their climate pledges)

• Global emissions must fall by almost 50% by that 2030 to keep the 1.5C target. (Ed: Current climate projections show a 10.6 percent increase instead)

• There is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place.”

• “We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster. Every fraction of a degree matters: to vulnerable communities, to ecosystems, and to every one of us.” - Inger Andersen, UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

I quoted Zach Bush last week:

We're currently in in the midst of our 6th extinction, in the last 150 years, we've desertified over 1/3 of the land of the earth. We're losing the function of the planet. We're going to lose another third in the next 20 years if we don't change our behavior. Longer term, we'll probably flatten out somewhere around a loss of 80-90%.

We are the consumptive, destructive, chemical force on the planet, and for that we are all depressed. Twenty five percent of American adults are on an antidepressant into anxiety. drug; fifty percent will have severe clinical major depression in their lifetime.

That's not a description of vitality as a species.

No one is telling the truth.

I hope you see the connection between ecological collapse, and the continued consumption. But as a society, we spend more time worrying about inflation, productivity, and GDP than we do about the eroding container that those things occur in. While the UN tells us we need to slow down, World Bank tells us that we have speed up. we need to grow the global economy by at least 3 percent per year to avoid recession.¹ In other words, we have to stop emitting carbon AND we have keep producing and buying more. Which is more important?²

I learned in six years of working on climate change issues that no one is really telling the truth.³ Or more charitably, you can't tell the truth if you want to get anything done. You have to accept the premises of the system. And the premise of the system is a growing economy is more important than shrinking ecosystem. In order “to make a living,” (interesting choice of words) you have to agree to the premise. Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, once wrote:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Similarly it is difficult to get someone to tell the truth when their salary depends on not telling the truth. We only offer and accept solutions that we get paid to offer and accept. And that is capitalism writ large: you can’t tell real truths. You can only tell little-truths, truths that appease the system, which in the real scheme of what we’re facing, are effectively lies. My friends working in sustainability jobs get paid $100,000+ promote “people, planet, profit.” They fly first class to Europe or Asia to attend climate conferences. But earning a living by offering incremental technological solutions to an urgent problem is to be part of the same hypocrisy.⁴ No one wants to talk about the real root of why this planet is dying: we are needlessly producing and buying more and more every year. And thinking it makes us happy.

Because I no longer work for anyone: here’s the real truth: our ecosystem is collapsing due to our consumption. It’s not corporations’ consumption, corporations only emit carbon to sell us products. It’s not the 1%'s consumption, the 1% only profit from our consumption. It's us and our internal not-enoughness.

You’ve heard the whole thing that humans are a cancer of this planet:

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, would object, saying that humans are part of the environment, but it’s our colonialist, separatist ideology that creates our spiritual deprivation, our not-enoughness.⁵ Whether it's in our nature or it's been learned, I heard this for cancer treatments:

We only have solutions for cancer that produce profits: pharmaceuticals and surgery.⁶

Similarly we only entertain solutions for climate change or desertification or ecological collapse that produce profits, have an “ROI”, or at the very least, are “cost-effective.” When I was a government sustainability officer I would suggest that we needed to prioritize the preservation of the planet’s carrying capacity over producing more stuff. I was told, “Douglas, you’re being unrealistic. Telling people to stop consuming doesn’t work politically. We need concrete practical, workable solutions.”

Is continuing the rate of consumption (dictionary: to destruction) realistic?

“Making friends with reality”

One of my favorite definitions of spirituality is “making friends with reality.”

What’s more real, capitalism, the United States political system, or the ecological world? The last one. The ecological world will last longer than capitalism or the United States. But we’re pretending the opposite.

We discussed this previously (here) but the money-carbon nexus is unavoidable. It's real. The more money you earn, the more you will spend, and the more carbon you will pump into the air. And you think that you're being a success.⁷

We are stealing from the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.

~ Paul Hawken

In the meanwhile, we’re getting solutions that clearly do not fit the urgency of the problem. The U.N. says we have eight years to cut carbon emissions by half. Instead, we’re more focused on fixing a slowing economy that produces less (why do we need “more?”). All we’re concerned about is increasing our ability to consume more and more each year. We’re all like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, one of the great climate change deniers, who said in the 1993:

“I assumed like everybody else, way back when everyone was talking about global warming and all that, I assumed that that was probably right, until I found out what it was going to cost.”

- James Inhofe, U.S. Senator, 1993

It’s easy to hate James Inhofe for blocking climate change legislation, but in the end, he’s saying what all of us are doing. Conservatives don’t believe in stopping climate change because it doesn’t fit politics. Liberals believe in stopping climate change, until we find out what it’s going to cost us personally. We pay lip service to it, and continue doing consuming more than conservatives. There’s no difference between a climate change denier and a climate change believer who doesn’t change their behavior. Nature doesn’t care what you think, it only cares what you do.

We’re all in climate denial.

The solutions, unfortunately, are all internal

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.” — Gus Speth, founder of the NRDC

This is why I teach personal finance. Money is the most concrete practical manifestation of selfishness, greed, and apathy. Or the Buddha’s three poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance.

Our firm belief on our individual selves, our tight group on our egos, is the root of the environmental problems.

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is in the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.” - Albert Einstein

Perhaps we can have that spiritual and cultural transformation in time to prevent ecological collapse. Perhaps we’ll realize the outside world is only an manifestation of our inner lives before the suffering starts.

But I don’t think so. We’re not going to grow up in time to prevent ecological collapse. We’re going to grow up because of ecological collapse. We’re going to realize that consumption is not our savior; that our overriding obsession with our individual material growth is simply an addiction taking us no where. I heard the Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr speak this week, “You learn from your shadows not your light. You don't learn from getting right. You learn from getting it wrong.”

In a rare moment of unfiltered truth, George W. Bush said, “America is addicted to oil.” But the problem is larger than that. America addicted to capitalism. We’re addicted to overproducing and overconsuming. Like an addict, we know we’re doing something wrong, but we can’t really stop it. So we lie and say everything is OK. And we’ll continue to do because our lives still feel pretty comfortable. We’re not anywhere close to the first step of admitting our lives are unmanageable. Maybe rock bottom is necessary for us to wake up. We will only learn by getting it wrong.⁸

We need to stop overproducing and overconsuming. If we did, I can promise you two things. First, we would destroy capitalism. And second, we would save the planet from climate change and ecological collapse.

Stop participating in capitalism. I know that sounds good to you theoretically, but what does that mean practically? It means working 45,000 hours of your life, instead of the expected 90,000 hours of your life. It means living on around $35,000 a year instead of the American average of $70,000 a year (that’s the entire household). And I know it sounds hard to you, but I know it can be done. For the last 25 years, I’ve lived on $25,000 per year. You know what I got from that? I only had to work 30,000 hours instead of 90,000 hours. And that’s the prize: literally 60,000 more life hours, and the preservation of the world that our children were supposed to live in.

The only way out is we have to stop overproducing and overconsuming. Be honest with yourself now: can there be any other way? Anything else is a convenient lie.

Recycling, driving an electric car, buying organic, all convenient lies. Telling other people to “go green,” that we don’t need a spiritual and cultural transformation, that we can continue with this life even though in our inner hearts it doesn’t feel right, all convenient lies.

Maybe this is the way it has to happen. We learn from our shadows not our light. We don't learn about selfishness, greed, and apathy from getting right. We learn about selfishness, greed, and apathy from getting it wrong.

We need to make friends with reality. Nature doesn’t care what we think, it only cares what we do.

Climate change is the outer manifestation of our inner not-enoughness.

Climate change is our awakening.

If you could get rid of yourself just once,

the secret of secrets would open to you. 

The face of the unknown, hidden beyond

the Universe would appear on

the mirror of your perception.

Rumi

1. The world’s billionest man, Elon Musk, bought Twitter this week for $44 billion. In doing so, he said: “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.” Twitter isn’t a news platform, it’s an advertising platform. Twitter, Facebook, Google, the New York Times, and generally all of the internet are all advertising platforms (that’s why they’re free). You are the product, not the customer.

2. Avoiding recession is more important to Joe Biden than preserving a world that we can live in. Same as Donald Trump. Same as Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton.

3. From 2009-2012, I was a sustainability coordinator for the local government. Then from 2012-2014, I was a program manager for a regional energy efficiency nonprofit.

4. “You spent decades doing what you thought was the right thing to become successful... We have a society that was told to march to the following metrics of success, that were all extractive, destructive at their foundation, all of them inherently disconnected from natural systems… And so you became an employee that moved up the ranks.” - Zac Bush

5. Super deep dive here. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition/. Thanks, Kalvin!

6. We spend a lot of money on cancer, $190.2 billion in 2015. Interestingly, patients only cover less than $6 billion of that. The rest is covered by health insurance premiums and the government.

7. More radically, and I don’t have the numbers, but I’m pretty sure I’m right: ALL the money you earn will eventually be converted into anthropogenic carbon into the atmosphere. All the money you earn will eventually be spent. And all spending, whether directly in goods or indirectly in services, will be spent eventually downstream on carbon-producing activities. As a FF student once put it, all money you spend will eventually be converted into trash.

8. “They could not see other life as being as important as their own. They could not see past ideological blinders to the intrinsic value of life”