Climate-change adaptation must overtake mitigation

The political finger-pointing is just the sad, time-wasting prelude

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The so-called Great Acceleration, or the sky-rocketing expansion of human activity on this planet since 1950, created and creates the world we inhabit today.

So, no surprise, natural disasters keep pace. You can, as Bjorn Lomborg does, note that disaster deaths are way down relative to population size, along with those of pandemics, since 1900. Fine and dandy, because that’s just adaptation — getting better at handling the churn.

I like the Great Acceleration observation because it frees us from having to blame everything on just climate change, and, prior to that, Greenhouse Gases and CO2 emissions — this narrow causal chain from humans to planet just doesn’t seem powerful enough, in many people’s minds, to justify things like “climate reparations” (admittedly a bad idea), the energy transition (great idea), and regulatory efforts to limit CO2 emissions (boring but useful).

That seems like a whole lot of change being demanded merely by theory and projections and modeling and scientific consensus. In my conversations with the public, that’s when I show audiences all the other “hockey sticks” out there (the Great Acceleration lineup above).

The original hockey stick graph

Because, then the causal chain thickens to the point of undeniability and climate change becomes just another dependent variable set in motion by the independent variable that was America’s decision to spread its internal, inter-state ruleset of free trade and collective security to the wider world, unleashing what we now call globalization, reducing global poverty more in half a century than in the previous five centuries, and enabling the rise of a majority global middle class that drives global consumption and activity even further up all those measurements.

Point being, it’s not about adapting to climate change per se so much as it is about adapting to the Anthropocene (human epoch), or the planetary era in which human activity is THE driving force of systemic change requiring systemic adaptation.

So, yeah, it is silly to think we can reverse all this momentum and transformation (forced upon not just humans but all of nature) by simply turning down the great CO2 emissions “knob,” as Lomborg likes to argue. We can’t get fixated on that imagined singular solution because that would address just one sliver of what we’ve unleashed in the Anthropocene.

When you take in this wider perspective, the inevitables become easier to spot, as do the today-seeming inconceivable adaptations that will, with time, strike us all as anything but.

That’s where the decks-chairs-being-rearranged-on-the-Titanic analogy comes in. Does anybody, in their right mind, think that 22nd century histories of this era are going to be all about some superpower competition or this or that isolated war (that we’re constantly bundling up so as to divert our attention to that classic do-nothing standby siren call known as WWIII!)?

Ah yes, Mackinder reveals all! Just grab control of the Eurasian Heartland and you’ll rule the world! This is the sad state of strategic thinking in a world being remapped by globalization, demographic transitions, climate change, and the digitalization of the global economy! What’s all that compared to the “heartland’s” supreme geo-strategic significance or the combined malevolent forces of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea (who are bogged down in Ukraine and just suffered a fabulous loss in Syria, but no matter)?

That’s the great danger of such narrow strategic thinking: it denies the inevitabilities of the Great Acceleration and instead clings to 20th century definitions of international structure, competition, and change. Why? Because history tells us so, or just some Nostradamus-like English geographer from more than a century ago.

Talk about steering by your rear-view mirror.

The LA Fires should be a fairly crystalizing event for the United States, but, instead, it’ll all morph into a totally useless political “firestorm” full of sound and fury and signifying nothing — truly accomplished.

POLITICO: ‘Half the Country’s Thinking Magically’: California Fire Victims Grapple with the Political Paralysis Over Climate Change

Hah! We all get to laugh it off as yet another California folly or karma therein generated.

They deserve this! Those Hollywood Demon-crats!

So, instead of crystalizing, we get paralyzing — the perfect metaphor for a political age that grows more infantile by the day.

Transgender bathroom issues … that’s the electoral ticket!

The Politico story shows just how much in denial we continue to be. The author speaks to those decimated by the fires and what does he hear?

In Washington, President Joe Biden was invoking William Butler Yeats and tying the wildfires to climate change. But I discovered that in fire-gutted, heavily Democratic Altadena, where that kind of message might typically travel, climate change was nowhere near top of mind.

It was the wind, they said when I asked them what they blamed, picking through the rubble of their flattened homes, or hugging their neighbors in the middle of streets filled with sooty air. It was God, or population growth, or the way that Californians tucked their homes into the foothills. It was a lack of investment in infrastructure, or the fire hydrants that ran dry.

The radical acceptance so necessary to elevating climate adaptation to the level of national purpose just isn’t there.

It wasn’t that they disagreed with Biden on climate change …

It was that in our time of partisan stasis, they didn’t appear to see the point of even raising such a seemingly intractable concern. Part of it was the shock of the event — the overwhelmingness of surveying the damage, of grappling with their loss. And part of it seemed to be a kind of fatalism, a feeling that the more existential the threat, the less our society or our political system seems able to address it.

And that is where our aging political leadership class is betraying the public: all those Boomer-led efforts to re-litigate the 1960s and 1970s, all the asinine alt Right-triggered culture wars, all the pull-up-the-drawbridge fear mongering of White Christian nationalists, and all the conspiracy theorists profiting off the social angst they fuel with their nonstop bullshit.

So, we are told that LA’s response to the fires are lacking? Well, that all comes down to diversity issues! DEI is the real villain here!

A more braindead argument is hard to imagine, and yet this is the dominant rallying cry coming out of DC right now as we tee up Trump 2.0.

It makes me shudder to contemplate just what a huge and wasted opportunity this incoming administration will end up being: all that power and momentum put to such stupid and pointless use when we face such a human-wide challenge.

Our latest Nero fiddling while LA burns. History will brand such political leadership as criminally negligent.

But even in LA, the tone is one of radical fatalism. As one resident puts it in the piece:

“We’re in a stage where half the country’s thinking magically about things … They’ve allowed themselves that luxury to be anti-everything — the end of expertise.”

The silver lining?