There is a crack in reality. Our name for it is energy. From Heraclitus to Lao Tzu to Albert Einstein, deep thinking about energeia , qi , or E has led to mystery. In Frankenstein , Mary Shelley imagined electricity giving rise to the living-dead. To comprehend the quantum energies at the base of reality, the physicist Erwin Schrƶdinger conjured a thought experiment about a cat that is also simultaneously alive and dead. It is a paradox, a superposition, a contradiction.
My thesis comes in two parts. Hereās the first half: As we build a civilization that uses more and more energy, the crack in reality gets wider and weirder. Climate change is this growing uncanniness. The ice at the Earthās poles has long pulsed in and out with the seasons like a pair of frosty lungs. Scientists have a word for systems that change like the seasons: stationarity . It means that the properties that give rise to change are themselves unchanging. Climate change is the death of stationarity (Milly et al. 2008). Itās not just change; it is change in the way things change.
Stable ground is shifting like melting permafrost. The permanent, it turns out, isnāt. The ship of civilization always rose and fell with the tides, but it was anchored to something deep. Now the bottom is falling out. We are falling. We are building such a heavy, such a weightless, world.
I wrote this book in dialogue with students in my college courses. One salient fact framed all of our conversations: Young people today are growing up on a different planet from the one I knew as a kid. A good way to see this is to look at the cumulative global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. Since 1751, 1.54 trillion tons of CO2 have been emitted. Note from Table 1.1 how long it took to emit the first quarter versus the last quarter.
Table 1.1
Cumulative global CO2 emissions
Global CO2 emissions | Historical period | Total years |
|---|---|---|
First 25% | 1751ā1968 | 217 |
Second 25% | 1968ā1988 | 20 |
Third 25% | 1988ā2005 | 17 |
Fourth 25% | 2008ā2017 | 9 |
CO2 emissions reached record highs again in 2018 and 2019. This tells us two things. First, the human condition is accelerating. Second, we are not taking climate change seriously, which is to say that we are not reckoning with the speed or scale of our own actions. We know about the problem, but we donāt really believe it. We have the science, but not the imagination. If ever there was a time to stop and think, well, now might be it.
That brings me to the second half of my thesis, which is about how this growing crack in reality appears to the denizens of a high-energy civilization. As energy grows bigger and stranger, things seem oh-so-normal. Like live wires wrapped in plastic, we are insulated from our powers. How easily we forget just how weird things are. We are yawning through a metaphysical revolution. After reading the dire headlines, we switch on the cartoons. Itās so real itās unreal. So big yet so forgettable. Like I said, itās a paradox.
Climate change requires a change of mind. We have to live in the paradox, the fullness of our reality. This book aspires to help you do that. It explores the origins of our high-energy civilization and the big questions it faces. My children were born on this new planet. When we discuss climate change as it appears, say, in California or Australia wildfires, they tell me it is scary. Then they ask, āAre we going to be ok?ā That is the biggest question of them all.
To be sure, such questions have scientific, technical, and economic dimensions. Yet there is no formula to decide our future for us. We have choices to make, and they will hinge on our visions of moral responsibility, justice, freedom, knowledge, risk, and what it means to be human. The more powerful our science and technology become, the more philosophical issues they raise. Thinking through climate change is a philosophical task, one that requires us to dig down to fundamental issues and zoom out to see the contexts in which other ways of knowing (e.g., science, engineering, and economics) take shape (see Gardiner 2010; Gardiner et al. 2011; and Jamieson 2014).
There is so much information about climate change that itās like drinking from a firehose: overwhelming and confusing. I want to provide orientation by climbing up high, so that we can look down and see the many ways of seeing our situation. I categorize these ways of seeing or worldviews into the orthodox on one hand and the heterodox on the other hand. This is just a first-order divide, because there is diversity within both the orthodoxy and the heterodoxy. The orthodoxy deeply conditions how we think and act. That makes it worth understanding. However, the crack is growing and paradoxes are accumulating that might topple the orthodox order. That makes it worth considering heterodox views.
Here is the book in a nutshell. We are in a moment of exponential growth. Our future is either green growth or degrowth. Either we figure out how to make a project of infinite growth sustainable or we find some measure, that is, a sense of proportion and limit. The former is the orthodox view. The latter is the heterodox view. Energy consumption is expected to double by 2050. Clearly, we are gambling on the orthodoxy of green growth. Climate change is calling our bluff. We should understand the logic of the orthodoxy and pray that it is sound, because it is the hand we are playing in a game with existential stakes (Table 1.2).
Table 1.2
The book in a nutshell
Discourse | Logic | View of humanity | Primary energy | Future | Ethics | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Virtues | Heterodox | Doctrine of the mean, proportionality, limits | One among the earthly creatures | Control of self | Degrowth | Ends and means, fittingness |
Volts | Orthodox | Infinity, linearity, growth | Gods in the making | Control of world | Green growth, decoupling | Means only, convenience |
Now let me offer a more extended summary of the book. It begins with an obvious point that climate change is driven by energy. This is why most stories center on technology: fracking, solar panels, nuclear power, wind turbines, batteries, and more. (As weāll see, even the agricultural and land use dimensions of climate change are about energy. The conservationist Aldo Leopold (1945) was right to call the land āa fountain of energy.ā) The discussion is all about energy transitions, especially from fossil fuels to renewable or carbon-free sources. But in the debates about the means, we lose sight of the ends. In other words, this is all a debate within the orthodoxy, which is limited to instrumental ethics (i.e., we can evaluate means as better or worse, but not ends). To think through climate change, we have to understand energy in broader terms.
The most important energy transition is the one that took us from a world of virtues to a world of volts. Like any energy transition this is messy and incomplete, but it is vital. The virtues are intimately related to the original meaning of āenergyā in the West, one that denoted proportion or fit. The virtues are governed by the doctrine of the mean, which tells us when there is deficiency and when there is excess. There can be too little and too much. At some point, there is a phase change and, paradoxically, what was better is now worse. There is a limit, a threshold, a line you shouldnāt cross.
I use āvoltsā as shorthand for the modern scientific notion of energy. There is no upper bound to volts, no limit or sense of proportion. Its logic is linear, where things keep going up and up with no phase changes. The transition from virtues to volts, then, is from finitude to infinity. It brings with it a shift in our self-understanding from humans as one earth-bound creature among others to humans as gods in the making. This is the metaphysical or religious story beneath the stories about energy and climate. The transition from virtues to volts is the golden thread that I trace in this bo...