But the scars are almost phantom ones, given the casualty numbers. The death toll of the incident at Three Mile Island is in some dispute, as many activists believe the true impact of radiation was suppressed—perhaps a reasonable belief, since the official account insists on no adverse health impacts at all. But the most pedigreed research suggests the meltdown increased cancer risk, within a ten-mile radius, by less than one-tenth of 1 percent. For Chernobyl, the official death count is 47, though some estimates run higher—even as high as 4,000. For Fukushima, according to a United Nations report, “no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants.” Had none of the 100,000 living in the evacuation zone ever left, perhaps a few hundred might have ultimately died of cancers related to the radiation.
Any number of dead is a tragedy, but more than 10,000 people die each day, globally, from the small-particulate pollution produced by burning carbon. This is not even broaching the subject of warming and its impacts. A rule change to pollution standards for coal producers, proposed by Trump’s EPA in 2018, would kill an additional 1,400 Americans annually, the agency itself acknowledged; globally, pollution kills as many as nine million each year.
We live with that pollution, and with those death tolls, and hardly notice them; the curving concrete towers of nuclear plants, by contrast, stand astride the horizon like Chekhov’s proverbial gun. Today, despite a variety of projects aimed at producing cheap nuclear energy, the price of new plants remains high enough that it is hard to make a persuasive argument that more “green” investment be directed toward them rather than installations of wind and solar. But the case for decommissioning and dismantling existing plants is considerably weaker, and yet that is exactly what is happening—from the United States, where both Three Mile Island and Indian Point are being closed down, to Germany, where so much nuclear power has recently been retired that the country is growing its carbon emissions despite a state-of-the-world green energy program. For this, Angela Merkel has been called the “Climate Chancellor.”
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The contaminationist view of nuclear power is a misguided climate parable, arising nevertheless from a perceptive environmentalist perspective—that the healthy, clean natural world is made toxic by the intrusions and interventions of human industry. But the main lesson from the church of technology runs in the other direction, instructing us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to regard the world beyond our phones as less real, less urgent, and less meaningful than the worlds made available to us through those screens, which happen to be worlds protected from climate devastation. As Andreas Malm has wondered, “How many will play augmented reality games on a planet that is six degrees warmer?” The poet and musician Kate Tempest puts it more brinily: “Staring into the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.”
Presumably, you can already feel this transformation underfoot, in your own life—scrolling through photos of your baby when your actual baby is right in front of you, reading trivial Twitter threads while your spouse is speaking. In Silicon Valley, even tech critics tend to see the problem as a form of addiction; but, like all addictions, it expresses a value judgment, if one that makes the unaddicted uncomfortable—in this case, that we find the world of our screens more rewarding, or safer, in ways so hard to justify and explain that there isn’t really a word for it other than “preferable.” This preference is much more likely to grow than shrink, which may seem like cultural devolution, perhaps especially to temperamental declinists. It could conceivably also be a psychologically useful coping mechanism for living, still within the consumptive bourgeois tradition, in a dramatically degraded natural world. A generation from now, god help us, tech addiction may even look “adaptive.”
Politics of Consumption
Just before dawn on April 14, 2018, a Saturday, a sixty-year-old man walked into Prospect Park in Brooklyn, gave himself a shower of gasoline, and lit himself on fire. Beside the body, near a circular patch of grass blackened by the flames, lay a note, handwritten: “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide,” it read. “I apologize to you for the mess.” It was a small mess; he had arranged a ring of soil to prevent the fire from spreading too far.
In a longer letter, typed, which he had also sent to the city’s newspapers, Buckel elaborated. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves….Pollution ravages our planet,” he wrote. “Our present grows more desperate, our future needs more than what we’ve been doing.”
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Americans know political suicide by self-immolation from the Vietnam era, when Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk repurposing a spiritual tradition of self-purification for contemporary protest, burned himself to death in Saigon. A few years later, the thirty-one-year-old Quaker Norman Morrison was inspired to do the same, outside the Pentagon, his one-year-old daughter beside him. One week after that, twenty-two-year-old Roger Allen LaPorte, a former seminarian and Catholic Worker, lit himself aflame outside the United Nations. We don’t like to think about it, but the tradition continues. In the United States, there have been six protests by self-immolation since 2014; in China, the gesture is even more common, particularly by opponents of the country’s Tibet policy, with twelve in the last three months of 2011 and twenty in the first three months of 2012 alone. And of course the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor ignited the Arab Spring.
Buckel was a later-life environmental activist. He’d spent most of his career as a prominent gay-rights litigator, and his notes expressed two clear convictions: that the natural world had been made sick by industrial activity, and that much more than the average passersby in Prospect Park could appreciate must be done to halt, and ideally reverse, the damage. In the days after his suicide, it was the first of these which attracted the most attention—his death treated as an alarm, or a bellwether, marking some amorphous shift, perhaps in the health of the planet but certainly in the average Brooklynite’s perception of it. The second insight is more challenging—that the climate crisis demands political commitment well beyond the easy engagement of rhetorical sympathies, comfortable partisan tribalism, and ethical consumption.
It is a common charge against liberal environmentalists that they live hypocritically—eating meat, flying, and voting liberal without yet having purchased Teslas. But among the woke Left the inverted charge is just as often true: we navigate by a North Star of politics through our diets, our friendships, even our consumption of pop culture, but rarely make meaningful political noise about those causes that run against our own self-interest or sense of self as special—indeed enlightened. And so, in the coming years, divestment is likely to be just the first salvo in a moral arms race between universities, municipalities, and nations. Cities will compete to be the first to ban cars, to paint every single roof white, to produce all the agriculture eaten by residents in vertical farms that don’t require post-harvest transportation by automobile, railroad, or airplane. But liberal NIMBYism will still strut, too, as it did in 2018, when American voters in deep-blue Washington state rejected a carbon tax at the ballot box, and the worst French protests since the quasi-revolution of 1968 raged against a proposed gasoline tax. On perhaps no issue more than climate is that liberal posture of well-off enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.