Ideological Failures at Addressing Climate Change

Your preferred ideology isn't going to do a damn thing to adequately solve climate change or climate change related issues. Capitalism, communism, Christianity, atheism, libertarianism, liberalism, conservatism, and any number of other -isms entirely fail to adequately address the oncoming disasters. This is partially due to the anthropocentric nature of most major ideologies, but more importantly it results from the tendency of most ideologies to use problems they're nominally trying to solve as ammunition to further their own continuation instead. Environmentalism is the only ideology that can really do much about this, but even many flavors of environmentalism itself fall into these traps.

Left: The Aral Sea in 1989, already much reduced to a fraction of its former size by Soviet public works projects. Right: The Aral Sea in 2014. The intervening regime change hardly slowed its shrinkage [Image source]

We can see clear examples of this throughout history. During the Cold War, both America and Russia committed countless environmental atrocities. Russia had Chernobyl, the drying up of the Aral Sea, and countless more environmental disasters. America polluted rivers until they caught on fire, spilled oil repeatedly in sensitive environments, and did their best to match Russia disaster for disaster. Almost everyone critically over-stressed their water resources and built environmentally disastrous dam after dam. When examining the environmental records of countries in that time period, there seems to be little to no correlation between government type and environmental record. The Dominican Republic, a brutal and murderous dictatorship at the time, actually had one of the best environmental records of the twentieth century.

This isn't to say all ideologies are equally bad or good for the environment- some are, in fact, significantly better or worse at carrying out environmentally friendly actions than others. This is, however, less attributable to their own insintric traits than to other factors most of the time. Environmental protection efforts often do better in intellectually heterogeneous climes. This can again be illustrated using an example from the Cold War. During the Cold War, environmental history simply wasn't a discipline of academic study. It wasn't until the end of the Cold War that it bloomed, despite the existence of all the data it needed to blossom significantly earlier. The British historian Bruce M.S. Campbell puts it best in his book The Great Transition: “...the long dominance of anthropocentric analyses grounded in either Marxist theory or neoclassical economics means that scant attention has as yet been paid to the historical roles of environmental processes and forces.” Neither ideology could tolerate any view of the universe that didn't revolve entirely around mankind, and tended to quash any competing ideas. Environmental history's blooming happened almost immediately following the end of the Soviet Union.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall. [Image source]

As pointed out by Campbell, ideologies derived from economics tend to be by far the worst offenders. Courses of action that aim for a strictly economic goal simply will almost never work in the environment's favor, whether said economic goals are profit related or otherwise. There's a long, long list of reasons why: the tragedy of the commons, the persistent shortsightedness of human beings, the greater profitability of greed, and the preference for immediate gratification are just the tip of the iceberg. While ignoring economic goals is an absolutely disastrous course of action for a nation, they need to be balanced carefully against environmental goals. In addition, economic rationales for environmental plans pose significant risks of corrupting and derailing environmental plans.

For most ideologies the problem isn't as clear-cut as it is with economic ideologies. Take American liberalism and conservatism, for instance. The frequent claim of the American left is that the right is intrinsically bad for the environment. In defense of the left's argument, the right is rabidly opposed to a number of environmental policies, and often even entirely denies the existence of climate change. This is not, however, due to some in-built quality of the right. It actually is the result of a deliberate political shift on the part of the right in the early 90s. Led by Newt Gingrich, the architect of so many modern ills, the Republican party moved away from supporting environmental causes as a way to rally their base- environmentalists made convenient foes to circle the wagon against. Prior to this, environmentalism was an entirely bipartisan movement. The American president who did the absolute most for environmental causes was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican.

Teddy Roosevelt posing with John Muir in Yosemite. [Image source]

When we examine the left's screeds against the right's treatments of environmental issues, a common underlying thread pops up again and again. They are, much of the time, advocating more strongly for people to join the left with its stronger environmental credentials than actually advocating for environmentally sound action. This isn't unique, either- every ideology that supports environmental causes bashes other ideology for being less supportive of environmental causes, then advocates joining them as an environmental solution. Advocates of Scandinavian style socialism, for instance, frequently neglect to mention how much of the Scandinavian economy is built on oil revenues when touting their environmental accomplishments.

The philosopher Karl Popper gives us a useful framework here. In one of his books, The Poverty of Historicism, he divided social planning into holistic and piecemeal planning. Holistic planning to Popper was the act of planning out a society with a specific goal in mind, and redirecting all efforts to force society into that plan. Piecemeal social planning still often had a goal in mind, but was quite comfortable just treading water while they fixed a few problems if need be. Even more importantly, piecemeal planning anticipated unexpected results, while holistic planning tended to expect everything to go according to plan.

Popper's essay was, of course, an attack on Communist social planning, but it taps into something important. Societies, like the environment, are exceptionally complex, non-deterministic systems. If you were to create a thousand such complex systems all with absolutely identical starting conditions, you would get a thousand incredibly diverse results. Running the same experiment again would never result in a repeat.

Most ideologies have very specific goals and preferred methods. In essence, filtering environmental planning through most ideologies has the effect of turning it into holistic planning. If we want to succeed at mitigating the worst damage to our global ecosystem, we need to act in a piecemeal fashion. There is no one single solution to our problems- it's going to take an ugly, stitched together collection of thousands of makework solutions, stopgaps actions, and frantic delaying attempts. We have to adapt our thinking to complex systems that interrelate, act unpredictably, and feed back on one another. We have to work on thinking scientifically. No ideology is going to solve our environmental problems- only by focusing directly on those problems and ceasing trying to use environmental issues to score points for our ideologies are we going to make any progress. The only way to win as a planet is to keep our eye on the ball. In the end, we're all on the same team.

I'll be returning to my series of posts on the Holocene Extinction tomorrow- for now, had to get this rant out of the way.

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Bibliography:
Selections, by Karl Popper
The Great Transition, by Bruce M.S. Campbell
Collapse, by Jared Diamond
Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans, by J. Donald Hughes