This Changes Everything (29 page)

Little wonder then that the introduction of Watt’s steam engine coincided with explosive levels of growth in British manufacturing, such that in the eighty years between 1760 and 1840, the country went from importing 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton to importing 366 million pounds
of raw cotton, a genuine revolution made possible by the potent and brutal combination of coal at home and slave labor abroad.
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This recipe produced more than just new consumer products. In
Ecological Economics
, Herman Daly and Joshua Farley point out that Adam Smith published
The Wealth of Nations
in 1776—the same year that Watt produced his first commercial steam engine. “It is no coincidence,”
they write, “that the market economy and fossil fuel economy emerged at essentially the exact same time. . . . New technologies and vast amounts of fossil energy allowed unprecedented production of consumer goods. The need for new markets for these mass-produced consumer goods and new sources of raw material played a role in colonialism and the pursuit of empire. The market economy evolved as
an efficient way of allocating such goods, and stimulating the production of even more.”
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Just as colonialism needed coal to fulfill its dream of total domination, the deluge of products made possible by both coal and colonialism needed modern capitalism.

The promise of liberation from nature that Watt was selling in those early days continues to be the great power of fossil fuels. That power
is what
allows today’s multinationals to scour the globe for the cheapest, most exploitable workforce, with natural features and events that once appeared as obstacles—vast oceans, treacherous landscapes, seasonal fluctuations—no longer even registering as minor annoyances. Or so it seemed for a time.

It is often said that Mother Nature bats last, and this has been poignantly the case for some
of the men who were most possessed by the ambition of conquering her. A perhaps apocryphal story surrounds the death of Francis Bacon: in an attempt to test his hypothesis that frozen meat could be prevented from rotting, he traipsed around in chilly weather stuffing a chicken full of snow. As a result, it is said, the philosopher caught pneumonia, which eventually led to his demise.
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Despite
some controversy, the anecdote survives for its seeming poetic justice: a man who thought nature could be bent to his will died from simple exposure to the cold.

A similar story of comeuppance appears to be unfolding for the human race as a whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson called coal “a portable climate”—and it has been a smash success, carrying countless advantages, from longer life spans to hundreds
of millions freed from hard labor.
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And yet precisely because our bodies are so effectively separated from our geographies, we who have access to this privilege have proven ourselves far too capable of ignoring the fact that we aren’t just changing our personal climate but the entire planet’s climate as well, warming not just the indoors but the outdoors too. And yet the warming is no less real
for our failure to pay attention.

The harnessing of fossil fuel power seemed, for a couple of centuries at least, to have freed large parts of humanity from the need to be in constant dialogue with nature, having to adjust its plans, ambitions, and schedules to natural fluctuations and topographies. Coal and oil, precisely because they were fossilized, seemed entirely possessable forms of energy.
They did not behave independently—not like wind, or water, or, for that matter, workers. Just as Watt’s engine promised, once purchased, they produced power wherever and whenever their owners wished—the ultimate nonreciprocal relationship.

But what we have learned from atmospheric science is that the give-and-take, call-and-response that is the essence of all relationships in nature was not eliminated
with fossil fuels, it was merely delayed, all the while gaining force and velocity. Now the cumulative effect of those centuries of burned carbon is in the process of unleashing the most ferocious natural tempers of all.

As a result, the illusion of total power and control Watt and his cohorts once peddled has given way to the reality of near total powerlessness and loss of control in the face
of such spectacular forces as Hurricane Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan. Which is just one of the reasons climate change is so deeply frightening. Because to confront this crisis truthfully is to confront ourselves—to reckon, as our ancestors did, with our vulnerability to the elements that make up both the planet and our bodies. It is to accept (even embrace) being but one porous part of the world, rather
than its master or machinist, as Bacon long ago promised. There can be great well-being in that realization of interconnection, pleasure too. But we should not underestimate the depth of the civilizational challenge that this relationship represents. As Australian political scientist Clive Hamilton puts it, facing these truths about climate change “means recognizing that the power relation between
humans and the earth is the reverse of the one we have assumed for three centuries.”
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For one of those centuries, a huge white marble statue of James Watt dominated St. Paul’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, commemorating a man who “enlarged the resources of his Country” and “increased the power of Man.” And Watt certainly did that: his engine massively accelerated the Industrial Revolution and
the steamships his engine made possible subsequently opened sub-Saharan Africa and India to colonial pillage. So while making Europe richer, he also helped make many other parts of the world poorer, carbon-fueled inequalities that persist to this day. Indeed, coal was the black ink in which the story of modern capitalism was written.

But all the facts were not yet in when Watt was being memorialized
in marble in 1825. Because it is the cumulative impact of the carbon emissions that began in those early mills and mines that has already engraved itself in the geologic record—in the levels of the oceans, in their chemical composition, in the slow erasure of islands like Nauru; in the retreat of glaciers,
the collapse of ice shelves, the thawing of permafrost; in the disturbed soil cycles and
in the charred forests.

Indeed, it turns out that coal’s earliest casualties—the miners who died from black lung, the workers in the Satanic Mills—were not merely the price of progress. They were also an early warning that we were unleashing a poisonous substance onto the world. “It has become clear over the last century,” writes Ecuadorian ecologist Esperanza Martínez, “that fossil fuels, the
energy sources of capitalism, destroy life—from the territories where they are extracted to the oceans and the atmosphere that absorb the waste.”
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Jean-Paul Sartre called fossil fuels “capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings”; they are quite literally the decayed remnants of long-dead life-forms. It’s not that these substances are evil; it’s just that they belong where they are:
in the ground, where they are performing valuable ecological functions. Coal, when left alone, helpfully sequesters not just the carbon long ago pulled out of the air by plants, but all kinds of other toxins. It acts, as world-renowned Australian climate scientist Tim Flannery puts it, like “a natural sponge that absorbs many substances dissolved in groundwater, from uranium to cadmium and mercury.”
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When coal is dug up and burned, however, those toxins are released in the ecosystem, eventually making their way into the oceans, where they are absorbed by krill and plankton, then by fish, and then by us. The released carbon, meanwhile, enters the atmosphere, causing global warming (not to mention coal’s contribution to the smog and particulate pollution that have plagued urban society since
the Industrial Revolution, afflicting untold numbers of people with respiratory, heart, and other diseases).

Given this legacy, our task is not small, but it is simple: rather than a society of grave robbers, we need to become a society of life amplifiers, deriving our energy directly from the elements that sustain life. It’s time to let the dead rest.

The braided historical
threads of colonialism, coal, and capitalism shed significant light on why so many of us who are willing to challenge the
injustices of the market system remain paralyzed in the face of the climate threat. Fossil fuels, and the deeper extractivist mind-set that they represent, built the modern world. If we are part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the story
written in coal.

Ever since the French Revolution, there have been pitched ideological battles within the confines of this story: communists, socialists, and trade unions have fought for more equal distribution of the spoils of extraction, winning major victories for the poor and working classes. And the human rights and emancipation movements of this period have also fought valiantly against
industrial capitalism’s treatment of whole categories of our species as human sacrifice zones, no more deserving of rights than raw commodities. These struggles have also won major victories against the dominance-based paradigm—against slavery, for universal suffrage, for equality under the law. And there have been voices in all of these movements, moreover, that identified the parallels between
the economic model’s abuse of the natural world and its abuse of human beings deemed worthy of being sacrificed, or at least uncounted. Karl Marx, for instance, recognized capitalism’s “irreparable rift” with “the natural laws of life itself,” while feminist scholars have long recognized that patriarchy’s dual war against women’s bodies and against the body of the earth were connected to that essential,
corrosive separation between mind and body—and between body and earth—from which both the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution sprang.
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These challenges, however, were mainly in the intellectual realm; Bacon’s original, biblically inspired framework remained largely intact—the right of humans to place ourselves above the ecosystems that support us and to abuse the earth as if it were
an inanimate machine. The strongest challenges to this worldview have always come from outside its logic, in those historical junctures when the extractive project clashes directly with a different, older way of relating to the earth—and that older way fights back. This has been true from the earliest days of industrialization, when English and Irish peasants, for instance, revolted against the
first attempts to enclose communal lands, and it has continued in clashes between colonizers and Indigenous peoples through the centuries, right up to—as we will see—the Indigenous-led resistance to extreme fossil fuel extraction gaining power today.

But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may well see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult
to see a way out. And how could it be otherwise? Post-Enlightenment Western culture does not offer a road map for how to live that is not based on an extractivist, nonreciprocal relationship with nature.

This is where the right-wing climate deniers have overstated their conspiracy theories about what a cosmic gift global warming is to the left. It is true, as I have outlined, that many climate
responses reinforce progressive support for government intervention in the market, for greater equality, and for a more robust public sphere. But the deeper message carried by the ecological crisis—that humanity has to go a whole lot easier on the living systems that sustain us, acting regeneratively rather than extractively—is a profound challenge to large parts of the left as well as the right.
It’s a challenge to some trade unions, those trying to freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their members deserve. And it’s a challenge to the overwhelming majority of center-left Keynesians, who still define economic success in terms of traditional measures of GDP growth, regardless of whether that growth comes from rampant resource extraction. (This is
all the more baffling because Keynes himself, like John Stuart Mill, advocated a transition to a post-growth economy.)

It’s a challenge, too, to those parts of the left that equated socialism with the authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union and its satellites (though there was always a rich tradition, particularly among anarchists, that considered Stalin’s project an abomination of core social
justice principles). Because the fact is that those self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than Canadians and Australians. Which is why one of the only times the developed world
has seen a precipitous emissions drop was after the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Mao Zedong, for his part, openly declared that “man must conquer nature,” setting loose a devastating onslaught on the natural world that transitioned seamlessly from clear-cuts under communism to mega-dams under capitalism. Russia’s oil and gas companies, meanwhile, were as reckless
and accident-prone under state so
cialist control as they are today in the hands of the oligarchs and Russia’s corporatist state.
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And why wouldn’t they be? Authoritarian socialism and capitalism share strong tendencies toward centralizing (one in the hands of the state, the other in the hands of corporations). They also both keep their respective systems going through ruthless expansion—whether
through production for production’s sake, in the case of Soviet-era socialism, or consumption for consumption’s sake, in the case of consumer capitalism.

One possible bright spot is Scandinavian-style Social Democracy, which has undoubtedly produced some of the most significant green breakthroughs in the world, from the visionary urban design of Stockholm, where roughly 74 percent of residents
walk, bike, or take public transit to work, to Denmark’s community-controlled wind power revolution. And yet Norway’s late-life emergence as a major oil producer—with majority state-owned Statoil tearing up the Alberta tar sands and gearing up to tap massive reserves in the Arctic—calls into question whether these countries are indeed charting a path away from extractivism.
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