Climate change is about thermodynamics, not ethics

Why people from poor countries have an easier time seeing this

Toronto, 2019: Climate protests are always about values.

Climate change is a problem of thermodynamics. We developed a suite of technologies, and later we realized that some of their second-order effects were harmful. We grasped we were changing the composition of the atmosphere in ways that trapped energy, in the form of heat. That heat causes a series of problems that are mild now but will likely be serious to severe in coming decades. We urgently need to find ways to make the atmosphere less energetic, by reducing its propensity to trap heat and/or by shielding it from incoming heat from the sun.

It’s a technical problem, it calls for technical solutions.

That’s obvious, when you think about it. Yet that’s not how we usually think about it.

Instead we treat it as an indictment of our society’s values; just deserts for capitalist greed. In this frame, not only is climate change not a technical problem. Seeing it as one is itself part of the problem. The bigger problem is our alienation from nature: greed-fueled mechanized exploitation of the natural world has broken the moral compact between our species and the planet we live on. What we have is not a thermodynamic problem, not really: it’s a moral problem that manifests itself through thermodynamic inbalances.

This is a view with deep roots in the environmental movement. The theme is brilliantly explored in The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World, Charles C. Mann’s exploration of the roots of modern environmentalism. Already in the 1940s, thinkers like William Vogt and Aldo Leopold —the fore-runners of today’s climate movement— were exploring what we would now call degrowth, and building an environmental critique centered on the broken compact between people and nature.

Theirs was a moral mission, explicitly opposed to seeking technical fixes to the problems technology created. They started to build the intellectual architecture the climate movement would inherit and turn into an ideology.

It’s odd that a frame as esoteric and abstract as Vogt’s and Leopold’s should have become so dominant.

Or maybe it’s only odd to me because I grew up in Venezuela.

In my experience, people from poor country find degrowth frames genuinely perplexing. It’s hard to register affluence as a problem if your experience is of pervasive poverty. While greens in North America and Europe worried that their societies had paid too high an environmental price for their affluence, we grew up in places with no excess affluence to fret over.

Alienation from nature is the ultimate First World Problem. In poor countries, people see the natural world, first, as a place to seek the resources they need. We’re all the way down here on the first couple of steps of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. You have to be very secure about your basic material needs before alienation from nature becomes your top concern.

This is why I tend to think the developing world is going to be the place where we find solutions for climate change. Poor countries can’t afford to be precious about this stuff. They’re not not in a position to put ideological preconditions on solutions to critical problems. They’re much more likely to treat climate change as what it actually is: a technical problem, with technical solutions.

It’s noteworthy that research tends to find people in developing countries are more hopeful about climate repair techniques like stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening than people in rich nations. That makes sense to me: environmental ideology—with its focus on reducing resource consumption rather than addressing the actual thermodynamics— doesn’t have much purchase in the developing world. Green ideology was developed by people in rich countries to address discontents of the affluent. It’s nothing to do with us.

Step outside the ideological frame environmentalism has put on it, and it becomes much easier to recognize climate change as what it is. It’s not a spiritual crisis, not a reason to overhaul our societies, not a moral problem at all: climate change is a problem of thermodynamics, not ethics.

Thermodynamic problems don’t call for you to reevaluate your way of life or your values. They don’t call for you to flagellate yourself for your air miles, to question the morality of your economic and political system, they don’t call for personal transformation or collective purification.

Thermodynamic problems call for thermodynamic solutions.

That’s it.