by Robert Jay Lifton, The New York Times, August 23, 2014
AMERICANS appear to be undergoing a significant psychological shift in our relation to global warming.
I call this shift a climate “swerve,” borrowing the term used recently
by the Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt to describe a
major historical change in consciousness that is neither predictable nor
orderly.
The
first thing to say about this swerve is that we are far from clear
about just what it is and how it might work. But we can make some
beginning observations which suggest, in Bob Dylan’s words, that
“something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.”
Experience, economics and ethics are coalescing in new and important
ways. Each can be examined as a continuation of my work comparing
nuclear and climate threats.
The
experiential part has to do with a drumbeat of climate-related
disasters around the world, all actively reported by the news media:
hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and wildfires, extreme heat waves and
equally extreme cold, rising sea levels and floods. Even when people
have doubts about the causal relationship of global warming to these
episodes, they cannot help being psychologically affected. Of great
importance is the growing recognition that the danger encompasses the
entire earth and its inhabitants. We are all vulnerable.
This
sense of the climate threat is represented in public opinion polls and
attitude studies. A recent Yale survey, for instance, concluded that
“Americans’ certainty that the earth is warming has increased over the
past three years,” and “those who think global warming is not happening
have become substantially less sure of their position.”
Falsification
and denial, while still all too extensive, have come to require more
defensive psychic energy and political chicanery.
But polls don’t fully capture the complex collective process occurring.
The
most important experiential change has to do with global warming and
time. Responding to the climate threat — in contrast to the nuclear
threat, whose immediate and grotesque destructiveness was recorded in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki — has been inhibited by the difficulty of
imagining catastrophic future events. But climate-related disasters and
intense media images are hitting us now, and providing partial models
for a devastating climate future.
At
the same time, economic concerns about fossil fuels have raised the
issue of value. There is a wonderfully evocative term, “stranded
assets,” to characterize the oil, coal and gas reserves that are still
in the ground. Trillions of dollars in assets could remain “stranded”
there. If we are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and
sustaining the human habitat, between 60 and 80 percent of those
assets must remain in the ground, according to the Carbon Tracker
Initiative, an organization that analyzes carbon investment risk. In
contrast, renewable energy sources, which only recently have achieved
the status of big business, are taking on increasing value, in terms of
returns for investors, long-term energy savings and relative
harmlessness to surrounding communities.
Pragmatic
institutions like insurance companies and the American military have
been confronting the consequences of climate change for some time. But
now, a number of leading financial authorities are raising questions
about the viability of the holdings of giant carbon-based fuel
corporations. In a world fueled by oil and coal, it is a truly stunning
event when investors are warned that the market may end up devaluing
those assets. We are beginning to see a bandwagon effect in which the
overall viability of fossil-fuel economics is being questioned.
Can
we continue to value, and thereby make use of, the very materials most
deeply implicated in what could be the demise of the human habitat? It
is a bit like the old Jack Benny joke, in which an armed robber offers a
choice, “Your money or your life!” And Benny responds, “I’m thinking it
over.” We are beginning to “think over” such choices on a larger scale.
This
takes us to the swerve-related significance of ethics. Our reflections
on stranded assets reveal our deepest contradictions. Oil and coal
company executives focus on the maximum use of their product in order to
serve the interests of shareholders, rather than the humane, universal
ethics we require to protect the earth. We may well speak of those
shareholder-dominated principles as “stranded ethics,” which are better
left buried but at present are all too active above ground.
Such
ethical contradictions are by no means entirely new in historical
experience. Consider the scientists, engineers and strategists in the
United States and the Soviet Union who understood their duty as
creating, and possibly using, nuclear weapons
that could destroy much of the earth. Their conscience could be bound
up with a frequently amorphous ethic of “national security.” Over the
course of my work I have come to the realization that it is very
difficult to endanger or kill large numbers of people except with a
claim to virtue.
The
climate swerve is mostly a matter of deepening awareness. When
exploring the nuclear threat I distinguished between fragmentary
awareness, consisting of images that come and go but remain tangential,
and formed awareness, which is more structured, part of a narrative that
can be the basis for individual and collective action.
In
the 1980s, there was a profound worldwide shift from fragmentary
awareness to formed awareness in response to the potential for a nuclear
holocaust. Millions of people were affected by that “nuclear swerve.”
And even if it is diminished today, the nuclear swerve could well have
helped prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
With
both the nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a
crucial ethical component. People came to feel that it was deeply
wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an
awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat
and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren.
Social
movements in general are energized by this kind of ethical passion,
which enables people to experience the more active knowledge associated
with formed awareness. That was the case in the movement against nuclear
weapons. Emotions related to individual conscience were pooled into a
shared narrative by enormous numbers of people.
In
earlier movements there needed to be an overall theme, even a phrase,
that could rally people of highly divergent political and intellectual
backgrounds. The idea of a “nuclear freeze” mobilized millions of people
with the simple and clear demand that the United States and the Soviet
Union freeze the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons.
Could
the climate swerve come to include a “climate freeze,” defined by a
transnational demand for cutting back on carbon emissions in steps that
could be systematically outlined?
With
or without such a rallying phrase, the climate swerve provides no
guarantees of more reasonable collective behavior. But with human
energies that are experiential, economic and ethical it could at least
provide — and may already be providing — the psychological substrate for
action on behalf of our vulnerable habitat and the human future.
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