How to Think about the Climate Crisis

A Philosophical Guide to Saner Ways of Living

Graham Parkes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350158870
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350158894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

**Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2021**

Coping with the climate crisis is the greatest challenge we face as a species. We know the main task is to reduce our emissions as rapidly as possible to minimise the harm to the world's population now and for generations to come. What on earth can philosophy offer us?

In this compelling account of a problem we think we know inside out, the philosopher Graham Parkes outlines the climatic predicament we are in and how we got here, and explains how we can think about it anew by considering the relevant history, science, economics, politics and, for the first time, the philosophies underpinning them. Introducing the reality of global warming and its increasingly dire consequences, he identifies the immediate obstructions to coping with the problem, outlines the libertarian ideology behind them and shows how they can be circumvented.

Drawing on the wisdom of the ancients in both the East-Asian and Western traditions (as embodied in such figures as Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Dogen, Plato, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius and Nietzsche), Parkes shows how a greater awareness of non-Western philosophies, and especially the Confucian political philosophy advocated by China, can help us deal effectively with climate change and thrive in a greener future. If some dominant Western philosophical ideas and their instantiation in politics and modern technology got us into our current crisis, Parkes demonstrates persuasively that expanding our philosophical horizons will surely help get us out.

Part One

Reality & Alternatives

Insanity in individuals is somewhat rare – but in groups, parties, peoples, ages, it is the rule.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE¹

1

The Reality of Global Heating

The situation is so absurd that neither Camus nor Ionesco could have made it up. We’re driving the earth’s climate to the point where it’s already becoming inimical to human life, and our political leaders don’t seem to care and remain impotent with respect to changing course. Earlier drafts of this chapter laid out the basic methods and findings of the climate sciences for the benefit of readers who weren’t well acquainted with the topics, and showed how we know that human activities, and especially burning fossil fuels, are the main driver of global heating. I doubt whether anyone who seriously doubts this would be reading this book, but there’s a reliable literature on the topic, and a fuller account is available in the appendixes (at www.bloomsbury.com/how-to-think-about-the-climate-crisis).

I was thinking that students would find the exposition helpful, especially when it came to trying to persuade conservative grandparents that there’s cause for considerable concern. But then I recalled with dismay the research that shows that people who deny the reality of global heating – ‘climate deniers’ for short – are unmoved by presentations of the actual facts backed up by rational argument. For someone who has devoted a career to philosophy, that’s a major disappointment. The power of the fixed ideas that grip the minds of the deniers is capable of making large parts of the real world disappear. Philosophy can nonetheless help us with unfixing ideas and opening up new ways of thinking – so don’t give up on those stubborn grandparents quite yet.

Along with the ingestion of alcohol, narcotics or hallucinogens, human beings have developed a variety of strategies for ignoring reality when they find it not to their liking. According to an extant fragment from the profoundest among the West’s early thinkers, Heraclitus of Ephesus (fifth century BCE): ‘People are oblivious of what they do while awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do while asleep.’ No wonder philosophers have a reputation for being arrogant: he’s saying that people have no idea what their dream lives are like, and don’t have much of a clue about their waking lives either. ‘Most men do not recognize what they experience, but believe their own opinions.’ They just make it up as they go along, ‘Absent while present.’¹

There’s a variety of reasons, from psychological to sociological, for people’s lack of concern about climate change, but over the years I’ve been working on this book the general public has become more concerned, and so the main thing now is to get our political leaders to do their jobs. The degree of that concern depends on who you think you are. In the US, for example, 57 per cent of respondents in a Pew Research Center poll from mid-2019 thought that climate change is ‘a major threat to the well-being of the US’. Among those who identified as Democrats the figure was 84 per cent, while only 27 per cent of Republicans thought climate change is a major threat.² Republican beliefs appear to provide a thick shield against the reality of our situation. As George Marshall writes in Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change: ‘Climate change … exposes the deepest workings of our minds, and shows our extraordinary and innate talent for seeing only what we want to see and disregarding what we would prefer not to know.’³

Cultural and psychological biases let us ignore reality, or simply make it up as we see fit – but that doesn’t work for long when the reality is the forces of nature. Think of the inexorable power of a hurricane, a tsunami, a flood or drought. Or the non-alternative fact that when the wet-bulb (high humidity) temperature goes over 35°C, the human body overheats – even at rest, and in the shade – and eventually expires from hypothermia.⁴ But since we’re reluctant to face the reality of our own mortality, we tend to think that death by heat ‘couldn’t possibly happen to me’. But of course it could.

How we know

Let’s think about how we know what’s happening in the world, beyond what we perceive of our immediate surroundings. Basically, other people tell you; and if they are reliable reporters and you believe them, you probably do know what you think you know. And if you’re asked how you know, you cite sources, give justification, or provide evidence – rather than say, ‘I just know’. It’s a sad sign of the times that the Trump administration dispenses with this convention: they simply say ‘This is what’s happening’, even though it isn’t, without even pretending to provide evidence.

In the old days, the task of knowing what was going on seemed simple enough. When I was young, we got our news through the newspapers, The Glasgow Herald and Manchester Guardian, and radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Guardian (its current name) was considered a reliable source because it was old and venerable, and owned by a trust that’s dedicated to keep the newspaper free of commercial and political interference (which it still is). You could depend on the BBC in those days because it was a public service broadcaster and similarly non-commercial. In general, news sources that are independent of commercial considerations will be more reliable, less biased by the views of owners eager to make a profit.

Readers of endnotes will notice I rely heavily on the journalism of The Guardian, as well as The New York Times, in the belief that the reporting in these newspapers is generally trustworthy, and because they’re especially good on environmental topics. I always check the studies cited in the articles to ensure that they say what the reporter says they say, and try to consult at least one other reliable source on each topic. I’ve also made considerable use of the Internet, including consulting the Fox News website and other sites on the right, just to ensure that my media intake stays ‘fair and balanced’. But most of what you find over there are alternative facts, and so I’ve seldom found such sources to be worth citing.

When it comes to discovering what’s going on in the physical world, it used to be that research done by scientists at good universities was more reliable than studies by scientists working for industry, who might tend to come up with results that please their employers. When faced with the claim ‘Scientific studies have shown …’, it’s always good to ask who funded the research. Support from the National Institutes for Health is relatively unproblematic; but if studies that show smoking isn’t so bad for you after all turn out to be funded by the American Tobacco Company, perhaps a little scepticism is called for.⁵

One reason why the general public – and most students I’ve taught – aren’t so well informed about the climate crisis is that some people have a stake in keeping other people in a state of ignorance. A central field in most traditions of philosophy is epistemology, the study of how we come to know what we know – an area that in today’s world of alternative facts has become more interesting. And of comparable interest is the new field of ‘agnotology’, which studies what we don’t know, and how ignorance comes about.

Ignorance comes in many forms: there’s one kind that’s a ‘native’ or ‘originary’ state, where knowledge hasn’t yet happened; and another that’s a ‘lost realm’ or ‘selective choice’, where knowledge has somehow faded, or attention has moved elsewhere. But there’s also an ignorance that’s deliberately produced as a ‘strategic ploy’, and this is the most interesting kind.⁶ Why would you want to promote ignorance – unless you had legitimate trade or military secrets to keep? Well, perhaps because you’re making a fortune by activities that cause harm to others, and you’d rather nobody knew about it. (We’ll encounter some good examples in Part Two.)

If we turn to the climate and ask how we know that we’re overheating the planet by burning fossil fuels, the answer is that the climate scientists say so (or some 99 per cent of them do). They understand the connections on a basis of sound evidence. The climate deniers deny that the scientists know – but they deny this on the basis of zero evidence. The problem is that many people have come to distrust experts, and the mistrust is spreading. Some experts can of course turn out to be not so expert after all, but in most cases there are reliable ways of gauging expertise in a particular profession or discipline. (It’s not, as they say, rocket science.)

The issue of knowledge and understanding in the natural sciences isn’t so problematic, thanks to the cooperative, competitive, and self-regulating nature of the enterprise. [1.1] Scientists all over the world are working on various topics in many different areas, and they’re constantly communicating and evaluating the results of their research through the medium of peer-reviewed journals, international conferences and so forth. Within what has been called ‘the republic of science’, it’s not hard to gauge levels of expertise: the top scientists tend to win Nobel Prizes and other awards, publish in the best journals in their fields and are usually hired by the most prestigious institutes and universities – while the hacks do none of this, and instead gravitate toward think tanks funded by climate deniers.⁷ [1.1]

Scientists (like many philosophers) are contentious types who like to disagree and prove one another wrong. So when seven separate studies between 2004 and 2015 show that around 97 per cent of cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introductions (Background and Book)
• Part One Reality & Alternatives
• 1 The Reality of Global Heating
• 2 Specious Promethean Solutions
• Part Two Covert Operations, Outrageous Obstructions
• 3 The Rise of the Libertarians
• 4 The Financial Clout of Fossil Fuels
• 5 The Political Power of the Religious Right
• Part Three Finer Philosophies & Fairer Politics
• 6 Libertarian Limitations, Religion’s Contributions
• 7 Political Philosophies, Greek and Chinese
• Part Four Lower Consumption, Higher Fulfilment
• 8 Sage Advice from the Ancients
• 9 A Good Life with Congenial Things
• Inconclusions (What and How?)
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright