Many of these insights may feel as intuitive and familiar as folk wisdom, which in some cases they are, dressed up in academic language. Behavioral economics is unusual as a contrarian intellectual movement in that it overturns beliefs—namely, in the perfectly rational human actor—that perhaps only its proponents ever truly believed, and maybe even only as economics undergraduates. But altogether the field is not merely a revision to existing economics. It is a thoroughgoing contradiction of the central proposition of its parent discipline, indeed to the whole rationalist self-image of the modern West as it emerged out of the universities of—in what can only be coincidence—the early industrial period. That is, a map of human reason as an awkward kluge, blindly self-regarding and self-defeating, curiously effective at some things and maddeningly incompetent when it comes to others; compromised and misguided and tattered. How did we ever put a man on the moon?
That climate change demands expertise, and faith in it, at precisely the moment when public confidence in expertise is collapsing, is another of its historical ironies. That climate change touches each of these biases is not a curiosity, or a coincidence, or an anomaly. It is a mark of just how big it is, and how much about human life it touches—which is to say, nearly everything.
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You might begin the B volume with bigness—that the scope of the climate threat is so large, and its menace so intense, we reflexively avert our eyes, as we would with the sun.
Bigness as an excuse for complacency will be familiar to anyone who has listened in on an undergraduate debate about capitalism. The size of the problem, its all-encompassing quality, the apparent lack of readymade alternatives, and the enticement of fugitive benefits—these were the building blocks of a decades-long subliminal argument, directed at the increasingly disgruntled professional middle classes of the wealthy West, who on another planet might have formed the intellectual vanguard of a movement against endless financialization and unencumbered markets. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” the literary critic Fredric Jameson has written, attributing the phrase, coyly, to “someone” who “once said it.” That someone might say, today, “Why choose?”
When it comes to authority and responsibility, scale and perspective often befuddle us—we may be unable to recognize which matryoshka doll nests inside the other, or on whose display shelf the whole set sits. Big things make us feel small, and rather powerless, even if we are nominally “in charge.” In the modern age, at least, there is also the related tendency to view large human systems, like the internet or industrial economy, as more unassailable, even more un-intervenable, than natural systems, like climate, that literally enclose us. This is how renovating capitalism so that it doesn’t reward fossil fuel extraction can seem unlikelier than suspending sulfur in the air to dye the sky red and cool the planet off by a degree or two. To some, even ending trillions in fossil fuel subsidies sounds harder to pull off than deploying technologies to suck carbon out of the air everywhere on Earth.
This is a kind of Frankenstein problem, and relates to widespread fears of artificial intelligence: we are more intimidated by the monsters we create than those we inherit. Sitting at computers in air-conditioned rooms reading dispatches in the science section of the newspaper, we feel illogically in control of natural ecosystems; we expect we should be able to protect the dwindling population of an endangered species, and preserve their habitat, should we choose to, and that we should be able to manage an abundant water supply, rather than see it wasted on the way to human mouths—again, should we choose to. We feel less that way about the internet, which seems beyond our control though we designed and built it, and quite recently; still less about global warming, which we extend each day, each minute, by our actions. And the perceptual size of market capitalism has been a kind of obstacle to its critics for at least a generation, when it came to seem even to those attuned to its failings to be perhaps too big to fail.
It does not quite seem that way now, standing in the long shadow of the financial crisis and watching global warming beginning to darken the horizon. And yet, perhaps in part because we see the way that perspectives on climate change map neatly onto existing and familiar perspectives on capitalism—from burn-it-all-down leftists to naively optimistic and blinkered technocrats to rent-seeking, kleptocratic, growth-is-the-only-value conservatives—we tend to think of climate as somehow being contained within, or governed by, capitalism. In fact, the opposite: capitalism is endangered by climate.
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That Western capitalism may owe its dominance to the power of fossil fuels is not anything like consensus economic wisdom, but it also isn’t just a pet theory of the socialist Left. It was the core claim of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, probably the single most conventionally esteemed account of just how it was that Europe, long effectively a provincial backwater to the empires of China, India, and the Middle East, separated itself so dramatically from the rest of the world in the nineteenth century. To the big question of “Why Europe?” The Great Divergence offers something almost as simple as a one-word answer: coal.
As an account of industrial history, the reductionist story implied by “fossil capitalism”—that what we conceive as the modern economy is really a system powered by fossil fuels—is in ways persuasive but also incomplete; of course there is more to the network that gives us a whole yogurt aisle in the supermarket than the simple burning of oil. (Though maybe less “more” than you’d think.) But as a picture of just how deeply entangled the two forces remain, and how the fate of each defines the fate of the other, the term promises to be a very useful shorthand. And raises the question, now merely rhetorical on parts of the Left: Can capitalism survive climate change?
The question is a prism, spitting out different answers to different ranges of the political spectrum, and where you fall on that range probably reflects what you mean by “capitalism.” Global warming could cultivate emergent forms of eco-socialism on one end of the spectrum, and could also conceivably produce a collapse of faith in anything but the market, on the other. Trade will surely endure, perhaps even thrive, as indeed it did before capitalism—individuals making trades and exchanges outside a single totalizing system to organize the activity. Rent-seeking, too, will continue, with those who can scrambling to accumulate whatever advantages they can buy—the incentive only increasing in a world more barren of resources, and more mournful of recent apparent abundance, now disappeared.