The collapse of western civilization: A view from the future

Daedalus

Volumn 142, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 40-58

  Oreskes, Naomi ^a,b   Conway, Erik M ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^c NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84871798965     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00184     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. For convenience, I use the historical categories of physical science and physical scientists, recognizing the Western convention at that time of studying the physical world in isolation from social systems. I also use the nation-state terms of the era. For the reader not familiar with the physical geography of Earth prior to the Great Collapse, the remains of the United Kingdom can be found in present-day Englascotland; Germany in the Nordo-Scandinavian Union; and the United States and Canada in the United States of North America.
2. http://www.quaternary.stratigraphy.org.uk/workinggroups/anthropocene/.
3. Ronald Doel, "Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military's Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the usa after 1945," Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 535-666
4. Naomi Oreskes, Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
5. A notable exception was the futurist Paul Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968) was widely read in the late 1960s but was considered to have been discredited by the 1990s.
6. China took steps to control its population and convert its economy to non-carbon-based energy sources. These efforts were little noticed and less emulated in the West, in part because Westerners viewed Chinese population control efforts as immoral, and because, in the short run, greenhouse gas emissions were increasing dramatically in China. However, by 2020, China's emissions were falling rapidly. Had other nations followed China's lead, the history I am recounting here might have been very different. On the various forms of Chinese population control.
7. Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
8. At the time, most countries still used the archaic concept of a gross domestic product, a measure of consumption, rather than the Bhutanian concept of gross domestic happiness to evaluatewell-being in a state.
9. http://unfccc.int/meetings/copenhagen_dec_2009/meeting/6295.php.
10. Michael Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
11. A less known but crucial incident was the seizing of scientific notes from scientists who had documented the damage caused by the 2011 bp Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Though leaders of the scientific community protested, scientists yielded to the demands, thus helping set the stage for further pressure on scientists from both governments and the industrial enterprises that governments subsidized and protected.
12. See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/bp-scientist-emails/.
13. Seth Cline, "Sea Level Bill Would Allow North Carolina to Stick Its Head in the Sand," U.S. News &World Report, June 1, 2012, http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/01/sea-level-bill-would-allow-north-carolina-to-stick-its-head-in-the-sand.
14. One comedian at the time made a satire of the law; little did he know what impact it would later have.
15. See Stephen Colbert, "The Word-Sink or Swim," The Colbert Report, June 4, 2012, http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/414796/june-04-2012/the-word---sink-or-swim.
16. Government Spending Accountability Act of 2012, 112th Cong., 2012, H.R. 4631, http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/WALSIL_032_xml.pdf.
17. Hansen et al. v. United States, 1025 U.S. 722 (2032).
18. Hansen was deceased when the case reached the Supreme Court, nine years after the original conviction. In a speech following the ruling, co-defendant Kevin Trenberth stated, "There is nothing good to be said about this decision, except that I am relieved that James Hansen is not here to witness it"; http://www.independentscientificvoice.org.
19. The most enduring literary work of this time is a science "fiction" trilogy by an American writer; see Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting (New York: Spectra Publishers, 2005-2007).
20. Sculptor Dario Robleto also "spoke" to the issue, particularly species loss; his material productions have been lost, but a responseto his work is recorded in Naomi Oreskes, "Seeing Climate Change," in Dario Robleto: Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens, ed. Gilbert Vicario (Des Moines, Iowa: Des Moines Art Center, 2011).
21. Some environmentalists also anticipated what was to come, notably the Australians Clive Hamilton and Paul Gilding. Perhaps because Australia's population was highly educated and living on a continent at the edge of habitability, it was particularly sensitive to the changes under way.
22. See Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010), http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/
23. Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
24. For an electronic archive of predictions and data as of 2012, see http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/. An interesting unpublished paper found in the translocated archives of the University of California, San Diego, addresses the issue of under-prediction
25. see Keynyn Brysse et al., "Climate Change Prediction: Erring on the Side of Least Drama?" paper submitted to Global Environmental Change, 2012. Whether this paper was ever published-or read-is unknown.
26. David F. Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1992)
27. Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2007)
28. Rebecca Herzig, Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005)
29. Naomi Oreskes, "Objectivity or Heroism? On the Invisibility of Women in Science," OSIRIS 11 (1996): 87-113.
30. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), chap. 5, esp. 157 n.91-92.
31. M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, "Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An Analysis of the Conservative Movement's Counterclaims," Social Problems 47 (2000): 499-522
32. Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, "Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change among Conservative White Males in the United States," Global Environmental Change 21 (2011): 1163-1172.
33. Justin Gillis, "In Poll, Many Link Weather Extremes to Climate Change," The New York Times, April 17, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/science/earth/americans-link-global-warming-to-extreme-weather-poll-says.html.
34. 2 Emissions," Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (Oak Ridge, Tenn.: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2011), http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/overview_2008.html.
35. Sarah Collins and Tom Kenworthy, "Energy Industry Fights Chemical Disclosure," Center for American Progress, April 6, 2010, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/fracking.html
36. Jad Mouawad, "Estimate Places Natural Gas Reserves 35% Higher," The New York Times, June 17, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/business/energy-environment/18gas.html?_r=1.
37. http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas.
38. Emil D. Attanasi and Richard F. Meyer, "Natural Bitumen and Extra-Heavy Oil, in Survey of Energy Resources, 22nd ed. (London: World Energy Council, 2010), 123-140.
39. David W. Schindler and John P. Smol, "After Rio, Canada Lost Its Way," Ottawa Citizen, June 20, 2012, http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/Opinion/6814332/story.html.
40. http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/08/militarys-plan-for-a-green-future-has-congress-seeing-red/.
41. "Georgia Power Opposes Senate Solar Power Bill," The Augusta Chronicle, February 18, 2012, http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/metro/2012-02-18/georgia-power-opposes-senate-solar-power-bill.
42. For statistics on continued coal and oil use in the mid-twentieth century, see U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Outlook 2011 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Energy), 139, Figures 110-111, http://205.254.135.7/forecasts/ieo/.
43. On twentieth- and twenty-first-century subsidies to fossil fuel production, see http://www.oecd.org/document/57/0,3746,en_2649_37465_45233017_1_1_1_37465,00.html
44. John Vidal, "World Bank: Ditch Fossil Fuel Subsidies to Address Climate Change," The Guardian, September 21, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/21/world-bank-fossil-fuel-subsidies.
45. "Canada, Out of Kyoto, Must Still Cut Emissions: U.N.," Reuters, December 13, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/13/us-climate-canada-idUSTRE7BC2BW20111213
46. Adam Vaughan, "What Does Canada's Withdrawal from Kyoto Protocol Mean?" The Guardian, December 13, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/13/canada-withdrawal-kyoto-protocol
47. James Astill and Paul Brown, "Carbon Dioxide Levels Will Double by 2050, Experts Forecast," The Guardian, April 5, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2001/apr/06/usnews.globalwarming.
48. Acknowledgments to http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2012/Pages/spiceprojectupdate.aspx.
49. IaICEP was sometimes called the Crutzen Project after the scientist who first proposed the idea in 2006.
50. Paul Crutzen, "Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?" Climatic Change 77 (2006): 211-219, http://www.springerlink.com/content/t1vn75m458373h63/fulltext.pdf.
51. Daniel Bodansky, "May We Engineer the Climate?" Climatic Change 33 (1996): 309-321.
52. For a similar project that engendered heated public opposition in the early twentieth century, see http://www.handsoffmotherearth.org/hose-experiment/spice-opposition-letter/.
53. Andrew Ross and H. Damon Matthews, "Climate Engineering and the Risk of Rapid Climate Change," Environmental Research Letters 4 (4) (2009), http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/4/4/045103/.
54. Ian Allison et al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science (Sydney: University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, 2009), esp. 21
55. Jonathan Adams, "Estimates of Total Carbon Storage in Various Important Reservoirs," Oak Ridge National Laboratory, http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/carbon2.html.
56. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120312003232.htm
57. http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.short.
58. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (London: The Folio Society, 1997).
59. Remarkably, this possibility was imagined by the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson.
60. Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011).
61. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.
62. For an example of this characteristic, see Justin Gillis, "Rising Sea Levels Seen as Threat to Coastal U.S.," The New York Times, March 13, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/science/earth/study-rising-sea-levels-a-risk-to-coastal-states.html.
63. Note how Gillis frames the evidence, first stating that "the handful of climate researchers who question the scientific consensus about global warming do not deny that the ocean is rising. But they often assert that the rise is a result of natural climate variability." He then quotes Myron Ebell, who was not a climate researcher, but an economist and paid employee of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that was heavily funded by the carbon-combustion complex and committed to market fundamentalism.
64. See http://cei.org/.
65. Richard Somerville, The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change (Washington, D.C.: American Meteorological Society, 2008)
66. Stephen H. Schneider, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth's Climate (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Press, 2009)
67. Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, Climate Change: Picturing the Science (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009)
68. James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010)
69. Burton Richter, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
70. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
71. For an analysis of scientists' difficulties in dealing efficaciously with public communication media, see Maxwell T. Boykoff, Who Speaks for the Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
72. For want of space, I have omitted a discussion of slavery. Suffice it to say that this was both a contradiction to the liberal ideal of personal freedom and a violation of free markets.
73. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
74. Scholars noted that even nineteenth-century markets were not free. See Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008)
75. Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).
76. Dennis Tao Yang, "China's Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959-1961: A Survey and Comparison to Soviet Famines," Comparative Economic Studies 50 (2008): 1-29.
77. Here, the terms capitalist and communist appear in quotes to acknowledge that neither system was either purely communist or purely capitalist.
78. George H.W. Bush, "Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards," November 18, 1991.
79. Another irony of this period is that Friedrich von Hayek had great respect and admiration for the scientific enterprise, seeing it as a companion to "free" enterprise capitalism. By fostering commerce, von Hayek suggested, science and industry were closely linked to the rise of capitalism and the growth of political freedom; this view was shared by mid-twentiethcentury advocates for an expanded role of government in promoting scientific investigations (see Naomi Oreskes, "Science, Technology, and Free Enterprise," Centaurus 52 [2011]: 297-310 John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe [Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2006]).
80. However, when environmental science showed that government action was needed to protect citizens and the natural environment from unintended harms, the carbon-combustion complex began to treat science as an enemy to be fought by whatever means necessary. The very science that had led to U.S. victory in World War II and dominance in the Cold War became the target of skepticism, scrutiny, and attack. Science, of course, was also the subject of attack in Communist nations, although for different reasons.
81. See, for example, David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)
82. Nils Roll Hansen, The Lysenko Effect (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004).
83. The precautionary principle was a formal instantiation of what was often thought of as common sense, reflected in the nineteenth-century European and American adages, "A stitch in time saves nine" and "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Yet this traditional wisdom was swept away in neoliberal hostility toward planning and an overconfident belief in the power of markets to respond to social problems as they arose. One of the ironies of the Penumbral Period is that the discipline of economics-rooted in the ancient Greek concept of household management (oikos, or "house," and nomos, or "laws" or "rules")-failed to speak to the imperative of a managed transition to a new energy system.
84. See Late Lessons From Early Warnings: The Precautionary Principle, 1896-2000 (Copenhagen: European Environment Agency, 2002), http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/environmental_issue_report_2001_22.
85. On twentieth- and twenty-first-century subsidies for fossil fuel production, see http://www.oecd.org/document/57/0,3746,en_2649_37465_45233017_1_1_1_37465,00.html
86. Vidal, "World Bank: Ditch Fossil Fuel Subsidies to Address Climate Change."
87. Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 87.
88. Yet another paradox: Classical liberalism was centered on the idea of individual liberty, and in the eighteenth century most individuals had precious little liberty-economic or otherwise. But by the mid-twentieth century this situation had changed dramatically: slavery was formally outlawed in the nineteenth century, and monarchies and other forms of empire were increasingly replaced by various forms of "liberal" democracy. In the West, individual freedoms-both formal and informal-probably peaked around the time von Hayek was writing, or shortly thereafter. By the end of the twentieth century, Western citizens still held the formal rights of voting, various forms of free thought and expression, and freedom of employment and travel. But actionable freedom was decreasing, first as economic power was increasingly concentrated in a tiny elite, who came to be known as the "1 percent," and then in a political elite propelled to power as the climate crisis forced dramatic interventions to relocate citizens displaced by sea level rise and climatic de-inhabitation, to contain contagion, and to prevent mass famine. So the development that the neoliberals most feared-centralized government and loss of personal choice-was rendered essential by the policies that they had helped put in place.
89. For estimates of populations at or near sea level at the turn of the twenty-first century, see Don Hinrichsen, "The Coastal Population Explosion," in The Next 25 Years: Global Issues, prepared for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Trends Workshop, 1999, http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/websites/retiredsites/natdia_pdf/3hinrichsen.pdf
90. http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/websites/retiredsites/supp_natl_dialogueretired.html.