The solution delusion - part one

Environmental communicators should stop lying about solutions, so we can get on with realistic responses.

Humanity will never find “solutions” to climate change. At least, not in the sense of “solving the problem”.

In most people’s understanding, a solution means making something go away, or resolving it entirely.

Humanity will also not be solving species extinction. Nor will humanity be solving toxic pollution. We will simply never possess the control, the resources or the know-how. 

It isn’t true that if only we can get the right actions or sequence of actions these problems will be ‘solved’, in the way a maths problem is solved or a roof is fixed. At this stage these things are now better understood as a context rather than problems.

Another way to say this is that these aren’t individual problems at all, but a vast complex web of tangled predicaments. There is no way to solve them individually, or as a whole. If there even was something that could cut this Gordian Knot, we would still only be left with a lot of loose threads.  

It’s important to emphasise this. Despite repeated claims by the environmental movement, it is not the case that we simply haven’t found the right solutions yet. Neither is it true, as some even more hilariously claim, that the answers are simple, we just haven’t had the will or political pressure to implement them. 

It doesn't matter how clever, lucky, plucky, or resourceful we are. It’s against the laws of physics that govern reality, time and space to put these genies back in their bottles. They are Pandora’s Boxes. We opened them, but we cannot close them now. 

Today, even highly qualified people can end up being quoted as suggesting impossibilities.

Professor Myles Allen is the Principal Investigator of the distributed computing project climateprediction.net. He is Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment, and a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He is head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department. Allen has worked at the Energy Unit of the United Nations Environment Programme. He's worked at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He contributed to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was a Lead Author of the Chapter on detection of change and attribution of causes. He was a Review Editor for the chapter on predictions of global climate change for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. He co-authored the IPCC's October 8, 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC. His research focuses on the attribution of recent climate change and assessing what these changes mean for global climate simulations of the future.

So he knows more about the science of climate change than I ever will.

Yet in a recent article in the Guardian he is quoted as saying: “This is a fixable problem. We could stop global warming in a generation if we wanted to, which would mean limiting future warming to not much more than has happened already this century. We also know how. It’s just a matter of getting on with it.”

This sounds reassuring. But we’re not just dealing with a science problem. Professor Allen isn’t even a leading expert on biodiversity loss, soil depletion and water pollution. That’s important, since these are areas in which we face problems that are contiguous and interconnected with climate change. Although undoubtedly well informed, he’s also not a leading expert in economics, technology, sociology, social psychology, anthropology or politics. These are areas that also actually decide what is possible in the real world, rather than in a lab or computer model. 

In recent years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been pointing out the breathtaking scale and speed at which we would need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to do anything like what Allen is suggesting. And they are inevitably being highly conservative. Everything they say has to be approved by a huge raft of politicians, which is coincidentally how Bangladesh's parliament will be operating by the time I retire. 

They don’t suggest that humanity can return our climate system to a state unchanged by human activity.

Climate changes are not on their way, coming soon, in the future or just around the corner. They have already happened, and are continuing to happen. They are likely to continue to happen for hundreds of years to come, possibly a lot, lot more. The horse has bolted. Because the stable is burning down. 

So I suggest environmental communicators should stop lying about solutions, so we can all get on with realistic responses.  

People do say things like “there’s no silver bullet” for things like climate change. But there’s a part of our brains that relentlessly wishes there was. This temptation for delusion must be constantly kept in check. Or it feeds complacency. 

The idea of solutions plays into our desire to oversimplify. “You’re either a part of the solution, or part of the problem”, for example. It’s a snappy phrase, but is true of almost nobody. The truth is we are all caught up in both. Every time we communicate about solutions we promulgate this binary logic. Something is either a solution or it’s not. People are either environmentalists (good) or not (bad). These futile attempts to polarise the world's problems just polarise people instead. 

This also overflows into vastly oversimplified views of the future. Many articles portray a wind-turbine fuelled nirvana of clean energy. Others an apocalyptic nightmare vision of a toxic world. The truth is that, barring a highly unlikely total apocalypse, whatever future we have will be complex and diverse, just like the past and the present. The experiences, responses and dynamics will vary in a myriad of ways from place to place, or time to time. 

We can already see this in the news. Life in Southern Sudan in 2022 carries many of the hallmarks of our apocalyptic nightmares. In comparison, my life in New Zealand on the same day might seem like a utopia. 

Many say that we have to talk about solutions or people will panic or ignore us. But that's just another oversimplification. Ironically, given that this is often said by people preaching barely credible optimism, it betrays a hugely pessimistic view of human nature and intelligence. 

There are ways of improving how we deal with and live with our situation. A lot of ordinary people know this. There are ways of exploring more ably how this might play out in different cultures and times in our world. Doing this well starts by being honest with ourselves and each other about it. It also involves a lot of work, which the simplifications conveniently attempt to side-step.  

But, and this ‘but’ is crucial, nobody serious and honest who is in possession of the facts is suggesting that we can make it as if these problems never happened. How would we ‘solve’ climate chaos? With a time machine to head off the industrial revolution or the birth of civilisation? The worst damage has been done in the last 30 years. So maybe we need only go back to the late 1980s and tell people to cut down on their Walkman purchases? 

We can’t make climate change go away. The absolute best we can hope for is a sharp correction to try and keep us within the bounds of the Holocene climate which humanity has lived in for the last 12,000 years. Even that is looking like a long shot, and getting longer every day. 

Solutions are a dangerous impression to leave in the minds of our audiences, even by accident. It is sadly still something our profession does habitually. As environmental communicators we have a responsibility to stop it. We are negligent of our duty to humanity if we keep it up. We are blunting people’s preparedness for what is actually happening.   

According to my old employer WWF, we have halved the number of vertebrate species on this planet in my lifetime. I’m 47. We’re not getting them back. Nobody is even considering attempting it. They’re dead, that’s what extinction means. They’re going to stay dead. Yes, we can save some from the brink. Yes, we can take actions to reduce the carnage.

It’s estimated that between 10,000 and 100,000 species are currently becoming extinct every year. Occasionally conservationists discover a single remote, remnant population. People like me raise millions of dollars to spend decades nursing them back into tiny, potentially viable populations. Then their reserves turn out to be in the way of the next big export earner, or a golf club…

We’ve slipped into a bizarre game of whack-a-mole. “Save the Golden Lion Tamarin...Save the panda...Save this bit of forest. Save this walnut.”

We’re running around the globe trying to put out the latest container load of dropped fag butts, when the whole place is on fire and we’re all smoking like troopers. Never stopping to take on the core drivers of extinction - overpopulation, overconsumption and industrialisation. 

Zoos and wildlife parks are the logical endgame. Today they’re all very keen to prove they aren’t just animal prisons where our kids throw hot chips at the koalas. They’re engaged in ‘awareness raising, research and reintroduction’. 

Except that everybody already knows these creatures are endangered. That’s why we only see them in zoos and wildlife parks. And anyone who is interested knows there’s almost nowhere left to reintroduce these animals. They just get slaughtered for magic cream to rub on your cock. 

We are now in what's called the Sixth Great Extinction. Except, as the wildlife expert Chris Packham has pointed out, it isn’t an extinction, it’s an extermination. We’re systematically exterminating almost all other life forms on Earth. It’s entirely deliberate. We’re choosing to do this.

Extinction is not an unfortunate side effect of industrial civilisation, or a by-product, it is the primary effect of industrial civilisation. It is what industrial civilisation does.

These species are rapidly emptying out of complex and varied biological niches. These are not going to be refilled by new evolutionary flourishes for at least a few thousand years. In the meantime we have landscapes covered in cows. We have hill country sheep wrecked. We have more weight of chickens on Earth than any other bird. 

Only a massive reduction in human impact and many thousands of years of Earth’s own healing systems will undo this. That’s a whole different magnitude of change than almost anybody is imagining. Currently our approach is like telling a Ebola patient they’ll be fine because we’ve painted one of their toenails. 

It doesn't matter what wacky ideas for ocean-going vacuum cleaners or plasticidal algae emerge. We’re not going to rid our seas, landscapes, winds and food chains of all the plastic polluting them. At least, not unless we stop producing it for at least 200 years. That is roughly how long plastic takes to degrade back to its components. Even the remnants are likely to have altered the chemistry of the planet for who knows how long after that. 

This does not mean we shouldn’t make every effort to stop making the situation worse. But at the moment humanity has no intention of stopping plastic production. In fact we’re continuing to accelerate. 

For example, much of the world’s out-of-season fresh foods supply chains rely on soft plastic packaging. There are no effective recycling options for it, and none on the horizon. Currently the best we can do is hide it in asphalt and fence posts, where it will slowly erode back into the environment.

Would you like to say goodbye to foreign fruit in winter? Or would you like us to simply continue burying or burning the evidence that doesn’t end up as litter?

These are the kind of real choices we urgently need to make. We’ve run out of time to wait for ‘solutions’ that allow us to continue. We have to stop and think, properly.   

Maybe we should run the entire planet’s water supply through some sort of mega colander to clear the toxic chemicals, heavy metals and plastics? After that we need to drag the world’s topsoil back out of the sea and we’re laughing.  

Don’t get me wrong. We can slow these destructive processes down. We could, conceivably even end some of them and rejuvenate some of the lands and seas. Mother Nature, for want of a better and less anthropomorphic analogy, is surprisingly robust and good at bouncing back. But that’s not the same as what people think of when we say ‘solutions’. This suggests mopping up all the problems as if they had never happened and carrying on as before. But like any other victim of prolonged domestic abuse, Mother Nature won’t be going back to the innocence of her youth, and she won’t feel better while the abuse continues. 

It’s important we keep this continuously in mind.

This is not about the difference between ‘hope’ and ‘despair’. It is the difference between delusion and reality. It could make all the difference as to whether we take sensible action, or go on flailing around like idiots. 

Sustainabile is published every Monday in Aotearoa New Zealand