Villainy was easier to grasp in stories depicting the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, the intuitive analogy to climate change, which ruled American culture for a generation. That was the whole cartoon of Dr. Strangelove—that the fate of the world sat in the hands of a few insane people; if it all blew up, we’d know exactly who to blame. That moral clarity was not Stanley Kubrick’s, or a projection of his nihilism, but something like the opposite: conventional wisdom about geopolitics in the then-adolescent nuclear age. The same logic of responsibility appeared in Thirteen Days, Robert Kennedy’s memoir of the Cuban missile crisis, which endured in part because it comported so neatly with the lived experience of its average reader through those weeks in 1962: watching the prospect of global annihilation wax and wane in a protracted game of telephone being played by two men and their relatively small staffs.
The moral responsibility of climate change is much murkier. Global warming isn’t something that might happen, should several people make some profoundly shortsighted calculations; it is something that is already happening, everywhere, and without anything like direct supervisors. Nuclear Armageddon, in theory, has a few dozen authors; climate catastrophe has billions of them, with responsibility distended over time and extended across much of the planet. This is not to say it is distributed evenly: though climate change will be given its ultimate dimensions by the course of industrialization in the developing world, at present the world’s wealthy possess the lion’s share of guilt—the richest 10 percent producing half of all emissions. This distribution tracks closely with global income inequality, which is one reason that many on the Left point to the all-encompassing system, saying that industrial capitalism is to blame. It is. But saying so does not name an antagonist; it names a toxic investment vehicle with most of the world as stakeholders, many of whom eagerly bought in. And who in fact quite enjoy their present way of life. That includes, almost certainly, you and me and everyone else buying escapism with our Netflix subscription. Meanwhile, it simply isn’t the case that the socialist countries of the world are behaving more responsibly, with carbon, nor that they have in the past.
Complicity does not make for good drama. Modern morality plays need antagonists, and the desire gets stronger when apportioning blame becomes a political necessity, which it surely will. This is a problem for stories both fictional and non-, each kind drawing logic and energy from the other. The natural villains are the oil companies—and in fact a recent survey of movies depicting climate apocalypse found the plurality were actually about corporate greed. But the impulse to assign them full responsibility is complicated by the fact that transportation and industry make up less than 40 percent of global emissions. The companies’ disinformation-and-denial campaigns are probably a stronger case for villainy—a more grotesque performance of corporate evilness is hardly imaginable, and, a generation from now, oil-backed denial will likely be seen as among the most heinous conspiracies against human health and well-being as have been perpetrated in the modern world. But evilness is not the same as responsibility, and climate denialism has captured just one political party in one country in the world—a country with only two of the world’s ten biggest oil companies. American inaction surely slowed global progress on climate in a time when the world had only one superpower. But there is simply nothing like climate denialism beyond the U.S. border, which encloses the production of only 15 percent of the world’s emissions. To believe the fault for global warming lies exclusively with the Republican Party or its fossil fuel backers is a form of American narcissism.
That narcissism, I suspect, will be broken by climate change. In the rest of the world, where action on carbon is just as slow and resistance to real policy changes just as strong, denial is simply not a problem. The corporate influence of fossil fuel is present, of course, but so are inertia and the allure of near-term gains and the preferences of the world’s workers and consumers, who fall somewhere on a long spectrum of culpability stretching from knowing selfishness through true ignorance and reflexive, if naive, complacency. How do you narrativize that?
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Beyond the matter of villainy is the story of nature and our relationship to it. That story seemed for a very long time to be contained within the simple logic of parables and allegories. Climate change promises to transform everything we thought we knew about nature, including the moral infrastructure of those tales. We still tell them at nearly every age, from the animated movies toddlers watch before they learn the alphabet, to fairy tales lifted from earlier eras, to disaster movies and magazine features about the fate of endangered species, and segments on the nightly news about extreme weather, which rarely mention warming.
Parables are a teaching tool and work like glass dioramas in natural history museums: you pass by, you look, you believe that what is contained in the taxidermy scene has something to teach you—but only by the logic of metaphor, because you are not a stuffed animal and do not live in the scene but beyond it, outside it, observing rather than participating. The logic is twisted by global warming, because it collapses the perceived distance between humans and nature—between you and the diorama. One message of climate change is: you do not live outside the scene but within it, subject to all the same horrors you can see afflicting the lives of animals. In fact, warming is already hitting humans so hard that we shouldn’t need to look elsewhere, to endangered species and imperiled ecosystems, in order to trace the progress of climate’s horrible offensive. But we do, saddened by stranded polar bears and stories of struggling coral reefs. When it comes to climate parables, we tend to like best the ones starring animals, who are mute when we do not project our voices onto them, and who are dying, at our own hands—half of them extinct, E. O. Wilson estimates, by 2100. Even as we face crippling impacts from climate on human life, we still look to those animals, in part because what John Ruskin memorably called the “pathetic fallacy” still holds: it can be curiously easier to empathize with them, perhaps because we would rather not reckon with our own responsibility, but instead simply feel their pain, at least briefly. In the face of a storm kicked up by humans, and which we continue to kick up each day, we seem most comfortable adopting a learned posture of powerlessness.
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Plastic panic is another exemplary climate parable, in that it is also a climate red herring. The panic arises from the admirable desire to leave a smaller imprint on the planet, and a natural horror that the environment is so polluted by detritus passing through our air, our food, our flesh—in this way, it draws on a very modern obsession with hygiene and lightness as a form of consumer grace (an obsession familiar from recycling). But while plastics have a carbon footprint, plastic pollution is simply not a global warming problem—and yet it has slid into the center of our vision, at least briefly, the ban on plastic straws occluding, if only for a moment, the much bigger and much broader climate threat.
Another such parable is bee death. Beginning in 2006, curious readers were introduced to a new environmental fable, as American honeybee colonies began to suffer an almost annual mass die-off: 36 percent dead one year; 29 the next; 46 the next; 34 the next. As anyone with a calculator might have figured, the numbers didn’t add up: if that many bee colonies collapsed each year, the total number would be very rapidly approaching zero, not steadily increasing, which it was. This was because beekeepers, who were mostly not adorable amateurs but industrial-scale livestock managers trucking their bees across the country in an endless loop of pollination for hire, were simply rebreeding their bees each year, offsetting the die-offs with new hives that were more than paid for by the industrial-scale profits they were pulling in.