Nature's Evil

The Great Acceleration ended with a global political crisis in anticipation of the catastrophe. With the arrival of COVID-19, a new clinical ecology has melded with the old political economy, but this has not necessitated radical changes. We know that the virus came from a wet market, but these gruesome institutions continue their trade. We know that, to avert the climate crisis, giving up meat is even more important than giving up petrol. But no government that depends on the popular vote will intervene so drastically in people’s behaviour: this demand is no less radical than what the early Christians did or what the Russian Bolsheviks wanted. During the pandemic of 2020, people’s ability to change their behaviour by their own will has been demonstrably lacking, and states have introduced lockdowns. The climate challenge is much tougher. The state or the system of states will have to re-educate people, recondition their ways of life and, if necessary, implement rationing. Leviathan must turn green, or implode. The rest is up to Gaia.

We are talking about deeply unpopular measures. The state remains the only power that stands between the greed of the energy barons and the tragedy of drowned cities. Adequate measures must be long-term, universal and coordinated: this is why we need the state. The climate catastrophe will happen later, but we must rein ourselves in now; people are not wise enough to do this voluntarily. Floods will begin in Holland, but it is also necessary to abstain from meat and petrol in Switzerland; people are not good enough to do this without being reminded. Having survived holy empires and world wars, humanity has never needed a social compact more than today. This must be not a contract between individual citizens but a peace treaty between people and nature. Such a treaty will hardly be concluded without sacrifices on both sides. If democratic politics does not help, then decisions will be taken under a state of emergency. The state of exception, a latter-day version of the Russian oprichnina , will discontinue the rule of law. National efforts will not be enough to cope with ecological crisis. Here we have the free-rider problem, another aspect of the tragedy of the commons: if there is no mechanism of control and compulsion, common efforts will be sabotaged by one of the players, and ultimately by all of them. Nordhaus’s plan would have prevented warming if it had been implemented in the 1990s on a global scale. However, there’s a trap: the American economist did hope to persuade his fellow countrymen to spend more and pollute less. But, for cultural rather than economic reasons, he would have had no chance in other states around the globe, from Mexico to China; and if other states continued to pollute the world, there would be no motive to stop doing it in America. International relations are considered different from internal affairs because individual states have no common interests. If common interests do emerge – for example, protection against pirates or the establishment of the gold standard – then political alliances also develop. The threat of climate catastrophe is the first genuinely common interest – a global goal which cannot be divided into parts. The sociologist Ulrich Beck said in his last book that only global warming could save us. But many – and the doctors of the Christian Church knew this all too well – simply don’t want to be saved.

Four justices

The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled many governments of the world to formulate programmes of action which entail reaching carbon neutrality, removing notorious subsidies from oil producers, subsidising renewable energy and assisting the sick and the underprivileged. But again because of the pandemic, most of these ideas remain on paper. In the USA, the name of the project that is waiting for realisation, the Green New Deal, alludes to the policy which brought relief from the Great Depression. That New Deal was also green – Roosevelt’s administration founded the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed 250,000 people, and was also known as ‘Roosevelt’s Forest Army’. Between 1933 and 1942, the corps planted 3 billion trees, bringing an end to the dust storms in several states. 13 Hopefully, the New Green Deal will do even more. In Europe, the ambitious but underfinanced project of green recovery has been accepted under the pressure of COVID.