There is No Good Place to Be on a Warming Earth

As I have remarked time and again, a very large part of contemporary environmentalism--and certainly its more mainstream portion--has been founded on the darkest, most pessimistic Counter-Enlightenment thinking. Premised on postmodernism and Malthusianism; regarding the broad public as a "swinish multitude"; and denying any hope of positive social or political change; it screams about the danger--while being incapable of offering anything in the way of hope.

The result is that defeatism is all that is left to it, one expression of which is its haste to tell everyone that they are about to be dehoused. Live on a coastline? Sorry, you will just have to move. (They seem to especially love telling this to people in places like Miami and New Orleans--their "party town" image, perhaps, which proper Malthusians cannot possibly approve.) Live in an arid region? That's not going to be viable anymore. (The coastal folks have too much water, but they are going to have too little.) The tropics? Better find somewhere else to live. (Go north--to whatever isn't too coastal or too arid.) And this or that realization is followed up by images of latterday Volkerwanderung as millions, billions, relocate. However, anyone of even slight intelligence should be able to see that all of this quickly adds up to there being nowhere left to go--especially as unchecked global warming will mean that the situation will keep worsening, that the sea level will, for example, keep rising, so that areas that appeared safe at one point cease to be so not long after. And it cannot be any other way given that human reliance on freshwater supplies, productive farmland and water transport mean a continued collective dependence on areas particularly vulnerable to any worsening of the situation--while the losses of those areas will mean disruption going far beyond even the colossal human relocations. One would have more people living on far less of the Earth's surface, and getting along on far less of its resources, than they are now.

Meanwhile, how the world has dealt with its current refugee crisis, the worst since World War II but nothing next to the movements those speculating about such movements anticipate, does not inspire great confidence in the readiness of societies to accommodate the displaced on even a much smaller scale than they imagine.

All of this reveals this idea of vast relocations--especially in a world of hundreds of nation-states with all their borders--as the utmost silliness, though in fairness, I strongly suspect that were the troubles to run unchecked the frail international system, already bedeviled by what may be the greatest war danger in human history, would likely have long since escalated to the point of a devastating conflict before it comes to anything like forced mass relocation. (After all, problems like climate change, resource and economic stress, war, do not exist in separate compartments but are all complexly interlinked.)

All of this reminds us that if there is a solution to the problem it is exactly the one that misanthropic, technology- and progress-hating Malthusian-Luddite postmodernists completely reject, namely organization and technology to meet the crisis, with this not a matter of austerity-battered working people displaying great "convenient social virtue" in cheerfully deciding to individually live on less, but large-scale action to accelerate the "energy transition" and decarbonize transport and industry, hack the climate (they can whine all they like about cost and risk--the environmental movement's failures have left little choice but to bet on this route in some form), and minimize whatever damage is actually unavoidable (from slowing the melting of ice sheets to adapting coastal cities to higher sea levels, rather than some individual flight into an ever-shrinking and ever-poorer interior). Some of the technology we need to do all this is available; some exists in only the most nascent forms, and will have to be developed to a point of practical usefulness. Climate "inactivists" will look at acknowledgment of the latter fact and sneer at it as "unrealistic." (Sneering and calling things "unrealistic" are pretty much all that inactivists have in their intellectual arsenal of anti-democracy.) But in contrast with the fantasies of uprooting a planet's people and their life the idea that we can and should support the research and development of practical palliatives is the most pragmatic course--even when this means such exotica as cellular agriculture, or mega-engineering to slow the melting of glaciers.