How should we decide our future during extreme heat?

This is Part 3 of my reflections following the conference where I met James Hansen, one of the most important living climate scientists. Part 1 is about Jim speaking out, and Part 2 was on the here and now of termination shock.

Is there any chance of us governing global climate interventions in a way that works for humanity? Bearing in mind that, as I’ve written in the last two posts, that these technologies are already being built and deployed, don’t we need at least to have the conversation about governance?

I don’t think we have much grasp on the technologies we use. We certainly don’t understand how the human technologies of a social system operate, in that we cannot know all of the variables or complex interactions between people in a system. So how could we possibly understand SRM-tech and their deployment within (or on) this human system?

But that is why I support talking about these issues. If we don’t, then the tech-bros and the former IDF staff who are now building a private geoengineering company, will be the only people talking about it.

One of the many reasons I wanted to talk with Jim at the Helsinki conference where we met is that, for me, talking about geoengineering and what technological interventions we could possibly make into earth systems, is a good way to talk about capitalism.

It’s actually obvious, when you think about it. Talking about SRM is a really good way to talk about capitalism and not-capitalism, because capitalism is all about who gets to profit from the control of the means of production and consumption — and so far, most of the technologies being researched and created are being built within this capitalist paradigm.

At the conference where I finally met Jim, we spoke to lots of people about different approaches to governance. If people are going to do earth-systems-level interventions, how would we govern them, given that we can’t even govern the global economy or carbon pollution? (Carbon pollution, which is already an earth-systems-level intervention.)

There are a lot of well-intentioned people doing this research and thinking about how different approaches to participatory and democratic governing could work. And it is true that if you want to do this kind of thing, say, in the Arctic Circle, there are indigenous populations that you must engage with, as well as other populations if it is an international project. For example, how much of a say does the country or the territory covered by the SRM intervention get, in whether or not their land is used to launch experiments?

One thing that I think it tells me for certain is that these geoengineering “solutions” cannot be done within a capitalist framework. That’s because businesses whose primary purpose is profit will never make the kinds of decisions that need to be taken for the overall health of the living beings and systems on this planet (just look at how they’re handling the decisions around AI).

So for me, the geoengineering conversation is not just an issue of justice, fear, speculation, hubris, or a challenge to multilateralism. It is all of those things, but it is also the perfect place for us to talk about the incentive structure that drives decision making that has led us to this point, and for which we will need different priorities at the top of our list if we want to make different decisions. And that incentive structure is profit-based capitalism.

So, yes, it would be nice if we could all sit around little tables and host assemblies and think about what we should do about the multifaceted, intersecting shitshow. But there is a far more fundamental requirement upon us: to replace profit and money with something else at the top of our decision making tree. And if we don’t do that, we really are fucked.

The actual security we need — capitalism can’t offer it. Capitalism can’t manage a strategy for the common good — in fact, it’s designed not to. So we need to get off of the capitalism decision matrix and into a different decision matrix.

It feels at the moment as if everything is being reframed in terms of security and defence. And the security/defence decision matrix is often imagined as a “war footing” which means governments act with other priorities than profit, where security becomes the priority.

This isn’t to undersell the disastrous impact of the military-industrial complex which absolutely makes a killing and drives war and defence spending. So capitalism is perhaps always a war-capitalism, which begs the question if security and defence, a “war footing” frame, is really a different decision matrix?

But if it is, does it mean there is no other decision matrix available to us, to assess whether or not SRM is a good or bad thing to do?

Can we have a “peace footing” and a peace decision matrix instead?

This is important. Even if you think of it only in terms of framing, new and different frames do reveal the kinds of decisions we need to make, and how we are making them. So calling it a “peace footing” or a “peace decision matrix” and expanding and redefining the definition of security (as Al Carns did in his resignation speech recently) opens up the matrix on which decisions are made to a whole load of different inputs and values: care, freedom, bioregionalism…

Perhaps what we need is not a military-industrial complex but a civic-making complex. To be credible, a “peace footing” still needs to make difficult and robust decisions about security, defence, energy, prisons, resilience, etc, and about SRM. But who is to say we can’t?

Something that is very useful about using myth and Bible passages and ancient stories, as Jim Hansen does with the Faustian Bargain, is that they come from a time when money was not the only driver of every decision.

They remind us that humans have lived in many different ways over many thousands of years and that capitalism has not been around for very long. Neoliberalism and the state being captured by corporate interests have been around for an even shorter time frame.

So, if we can situate ourselves in the long arc of human history, and remember what it means to live by stories, I think we may help ourselves, to sit in this headspace, that allows us to think and do things differently.