Pretty Heady Stuff

Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written four books, including Geoengineering: the Gamble and Climate Shock. Before joining Columbia and serving as faculty director of the Climate Knowledge Initiative, Gernot taught at NYU and Harvard. In this conversation I kept coming back to this hope that climate action could be, in some ways, uncomplicated. If the primary goal is to stop greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible in order to deal with this as a genuine emergency, it should be simple. But, within the existing system of global capitalism that we have, though, how is that going to happen? Can it happen? I’ve been trying to think about this by having conversations with people like Gernot, people like Kyla Tienhaara, Seth Klein, Mark Paul and others to try to get to the bottom of it. It’s tough, but these interviews, which I’ll release in the coming weeks, have been helpful. We’re at a point where, according to economists like Robert Pollin, at least 1-2 per cent of global GDP will need to be spent pretty much immediately on investments in renewable infrastructure to radically reduce emissions. Global GDP is about $80 trillion. How does that amount of globally coordinated investment happen under capitalism? It’s a huge shift in the nature of the whole economy. One of the reasons I wanted to return to Wagner’s writing is that I’ve been helped a lot by his explanation of the social cost of carbon, and especially by the way he writes about considerations of equity and justice in determining the social cost of carbon. It radically increases the social costs, or damages created, by emissions if we factor in issues of equity. The number skyrockets, validating any and all investments in climate mitigation and adaptation. How could that sort of information become more central to decision-making and policy-making? We definitely get into the weeds here. I’m still processing the discussion we have about “green growth” vs. the “Green New Deal” vs. degrowth. I still can’t say where I land on the question of whether decarbonization needs to happen in a textbook degrowth way. It’s hard to balance expediency and strategy here, and yet, increasingly, the debate about economic transformation to fight climate change hinges on our receptivity to growth or degrowth. What I like is that there is room here for the debate. We need to rapidly phase-out fossil fuels. That much is certain. In fact, we need to fully ban fossil fuels. How that decision gets made and what form action takes—at what speed and with what consequences—is still an open question.

Casey Williams is a Lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. His research examines the social and cultural dimensions of climate change and energy transition, especially the problem of “climate impasse” and the concept and possibility of a “just transition.” His writing on climate, energy and labor has appeared in The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy, Jacobin, Dissent, and elsewhere. Rhys Williams is a Lecturer at University of Glasgow who works on the intersection between fantasy, narrative and energy. His work also looks to get a better grasp on the relationship between ecology and infrastructure. He’s a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective. He also organizes the Energy and Ecology Group in Glasgow. Right now a lot of his focus is on energy, infrastructure, food, and water. You can read some of that work in Open Library of Humanities and South Atlantic Quarterly.  I think one of the most important takeaways for me in this conversation was this idea that we need to leave more space for real deliberation in our politics, and that this actually means that we need to accept the fact of friction. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but what we call, in this conversation, “frictionful engagements” aren’t really the norm in political communication. What we tend to get is a situation where frictionlessness is tacitly preferred, and so, in Casey’s words, “Capital quietly takes the reins” and we’re left with mechanisms that are meant to do all the heavy lifting in political decision-making. Rhys and Casey see ways that these mechanisms, especially financial mechanisms in the climate debate, really function like a narrative technique – it’s the mechanism that has the agency, not us, and this is the narrative we’ve been largely sold: a kind of politics-without-politics. One of the other big things that I’d underline is Casey’s challenge to those that engage with the climate crisis and who are worried about communicating the risks: he says that there is actually a real political risk involved in treating specific disasters as “metonymic representatives of the climate crisis as a whole.” When we bundle a highly localized disaster into an accumulation of disasters that tell us a story about the agglomeration of impacts and the climate emergency as a whole, Casey says we risk effacing the specificity of the struggles occurring at the local level: struggles not just against the impacts of a transforming climate, but also struggles for social and economic autonomy against global capitalism. I hadn’t thought about it that way before and that sense of being responsible to the specificity of place is something I’ve definitely taken with me from this conversation. There’s a few other things I’d mention: we talk about the “degrowth imaginary” and questions of the scale at which infrastructure ceases to be life-giving. We talk a lot about technology as a thing that gets privileged in science fiction and in popular discourse as a “driver of historical change.” There’s quite a bit of discussion here about the social layers that get subsumed under technology as it gets fetishized in this way. Overall, too, there’s a concern here with how we have been slowly abstracted from nature as such. How we’ve sealed ourselves off from it by instrumentalizing all the life around us, or as much of it as we can control and colonize and commodify. So, in the face of the real need to address the crisis of a destabilized climate system, they talk about what we should include in the discussion that too quickly gets displaced.

Amanda Boetzkes is a professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics and art as these relate to ecology. I reached out to her because I’ve been trying to understand the problem of plastics for a long time. If you remember, I spoke to Heather Davis, Mark Simpson and Sarah King back in February about this intimidatingly large problem. I had been reading Amanda’s book Plastic Capitalism and couldn’t stop thinking about some of the challenges that it makes. We talk a lot about the ideas in that book, but also unpack some of the more recent writing she’s done. Incidentally, I’m excited about the project that she’s currently working on, which focuses on the different ways we can visualize different environments, and especially the environments of the circumpolar North. One of the most important observations Amanda makes in this conversation is that when art reveals something, it’s not necessarily “revealing something that’s hidden.” Often, what art does, she says, is drag us “deeper into the mud.” Instead of illuminating some obscured part of social reality or offering up epiphanies about society and our relationship to wild nature, art that engages with waste communicates that we are awash in waste but don’t know what to do with it; we have tons of plastic but not much plasticity; we’re bent on accumulating energy but don’t really value energy expenditure in any radical way. Most of it is mindless. If we don’t get to the bottom of why this is such a feature of the modern human condition, we aren’t likely to address the climate emergency. We’re more likely to just replace fossil fuels with some other energy input like solar and change nothing about our arrogant attitude towards the fuels we extract for energy. There is a lot in this conversation on the need to be more conscious and critical about energy consumption. After all, it is dangerous to be anything else. But what Boetzkes is asking is whether we are in denial, too, about the “irrevocable” damage we’ve already done to the biosphere. Art, ecology and ethics form a “big knot,” as she puts it, and what is implicated is nothing short of how we choose to live on the Earth. She leaves us with the idea that, while art “must be political,” science is undermined if it’s is too political. And yet, the examples she explores in her work question that assumption, or the opposition between art and science, in ways that help us rethink the distinctions that determine funding and influence our means of knowing the world before, during, and after oil.

Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa with a focus on community development and environmental sustainability. She is a Co-Founder of the Feminist Environmental Research Network and a prolific writer. Her books include Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada's Chemical Valley, Biopolitical Disaster, Creating Spaces of Engagement: Policy Justice and the Practical Craft of Deliberative Democracy, Life Against States of Emergency, and very soon the book Hot Mess: Becoming a Mother during a Code Red Climate Emergency, which is set to come out from Fernwood Press in the near future. I wanted to talk to Sarah about what she calls the “points of connection” between “emotive” or “narrative” forms of communication and the work of “policy transformation.” There’s a point in this conversation where she admits that she’s still searching for examples of this in her work, and is clearly thrilled when she can find it, but it’s difficult to locate because we expect any sort of policymaking or deliberative process to be this cold, calculating thing, a means through which we reach consensus by rationally looking at all the data. But what can we make out of moments where the data of human experience radically exceeds the sorts of colonial logics that make policy? Sarah has a lot of faith in the power of arts-based strategies of policy transformation and affirming life against states of emergency. Part of the point is to convert anxiety into anger, despair into dedication, and the typically transactive parts of treaty into something far more transformative or iterative. What I really appreciate about the way that Sarah thinks through difficult problems is that she’s a settler scholar who doesn’t think it is acceptable for communicators to reduce the lives of Indigenous peoples to crisis. She realizes that there is power and import involved in naming and declaring an emergency, but grasps how focusing exclusively on crisis misrepresents and misunderstands the autonomy and vitality of Indigenous communities. So, the point, in some ways, is to identify and critique all of the colonial constraints–the siloed bureaucracy, the stunting education, the rapacious greed–that limits the flourishing of such communities. She describes this conundrum in terms of the “paradox of emergency,” or the paradox of locating democracy and democratic values in the context of emergency. It’s hard, when a crisis hits, to think about politics, but crises are inherently political, and the forms of expression that are licit or legible at the inception and in the perpetuation of crisis matter because they get to determine our response.

Raja Swamy is a social anthropologist with an interest in the political economy and political ecology of natural disasters. In this conversation we unpack the ideas in his recent book Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami. This is a disaster that killed nearly 230,000 people. It’s trauamtic, but Raja takes us into that trauma in order to talk about what it meant in the wake of that disaster for states and multinational companies to see it as an opportunity to rebuild in a manner that prioritized profit and alignment with global financial regimes, rather than in a way that put the needs of already existing grassroot networks and forms of collective labour first. Swamy’s generous, generative answers to my questions about his work tell an extraordinary story of globalization and its effects in post-tsunami India. He explores how “gifts” in that context were, in many cases, really a sort of lure or bribe, designed to displace existing worlds through incentivizing the realization of a different, more exploitative one. What he calls the “glib neoliberal rhetoric of reconstruction” really disregarded, and continues to disregard—as we enter a period of intensifying climate impacts—the energy, self-sufficiency, insight and agency of the so-called “developing world” and those whose lives, livelihoods and lifeworlds stand to be most affected by climate change. What would it mean, Raja asks, to look people in these frontline positions as the best guides to the future we want? We’re talking about the use of disaster for the purpose of pushing through opportunistic development, the privatizing of land and the displacement of populations from the world they know. It feels inevitable, this orientation of development toward the dictates of the free market, but it isn’t. Raja poses the question of why it is assumed that, in the interest of gaining autonomy or economic well-being, people should be forced into a position of, really, underdevelopment and neglect under neoliberalism. It’s in this context that he says we should be thinking about how to change the way we talk about things like climate adaptation, this idea of building back better. As he pointedly says: “Better for whom?” As disasters become more frequent and the need to build and rebuild becomes more profound and more pressing, we should be asking what kind of world we want, and who we mean when we say “we.”

Brenna Walsh is the Energy Coordinator at the Ecology Action Center. She’s made a career out of bringing different communities together to strengthen and accelerate climate policy and action. Walsh is focused squarely on understanding what has worked and not worked in the past and on exploring new initiatives to build climate resistant communities. In this interview I aimed to get a deeper sense of the economic reasons behind the policy measure that’s usually referred to as a “carbon tax.” Brenna breaks down how that measure of carbon pricing is just one part of a whole array of emerging measures for addressing the climate crisis. We have Clean Fuel Regulations, a modest removal of some “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies at the federal level, among other policies and incentives. Brenna breaks it all down. I don’t want to spend too much time in this introduction giving an overview of the conversation actually, because the conversation itself is an overview of what we have in terms of tools for limiting carbon and some of the history of those tools. We start by talking about the conceptual and policy tool of the so-called “social cost of carbon,” and how that social cost is calculated in economic terms. The whole goal, though, is to figure out a means of building, really, a different system from the fossil fuel based one that we currently have. Walsh is interested in how to calculate the damages, but she’s more interested in bringing the diverse array of people that feel there is not enough being done into the conversation about crafting and supporting solutions. There are a few invaluable resources that Brenna cites that are included in these show notes. Overall, it’s a matter, though, of using these resources, and conversations like these, as a means of going further faster, of making a complex transition simpler, doable and more seamless for people at the grassroots level. RESOURCES: More Mobility, Less Mining: https://www.climateandcommunity.org/more-mobility-less-mining The State of Carbon Pricing in Canada: https://climateinstitute.ca/reports/the-state-of-carbon-pricing-in-canada/ Ecology Action Centre's Carbon Pricing FAQ: https://ecologyaction.ca/sites/default/files/2023-06/Carbon_tax_FAQ_2023.pdf

Paris Marx is a technology writer. They’ve written for TIME magazine, WIRED, CBC News, Jacobin, and OneZero. They speak internationally on the future of transportation. They also host the award-winning podcast 'Tech Won't Save Us,' which offers a much-needed critical perspective on the history and future implications of Big Tech. Their book, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, was published by Verso Books in 2022. Our conversation mainly focuses on Road to Nowhere, why they wrote it in such an accessible way, the politics of communication in the context of a climate emergency, and what it says that we’re largely programmed to assume that technology—even technology that is produced for a profit by private multinational corporations—will save us. Paris’ book has a lot of answers, but doesn’t answer all the questions. I kinda push them to speak to some of the most problematic issues around public engagement and political mobilization. One of the really useful things about their approach is that it’s rooted in a sense that history is helpful if we look critically at the things we’ve been told are true about our car-centric infrastructure, and compare it with what a rigorous look at that history reveals. The history they offer is startling, in the sense that it shows a number of branching paths where our infrastructure could have looked very different if it wasn’t for powerful sites of capitalist production impinging on policy making in profound ways. There have been moments where massive amounts of public money was spent making a world that doesn’t work. We need to move in a radically different direction. There are nearly 1.5 billion vehicles on the planet. According to Marx, replacing them with more vehicles, this time around powered by batteries, is not a viable strategy. I ask them if we need to leverage the desire for disruptive change. What Paris says is really appealing to me: that “people are much more open to change than we give them credit for;” we are “incentivized to want to keep things as they are,” despite the dire ecological consequences, because the economic consequences of change are made so punitive. For this reason, “in the face of the climate crisis,” Paris points out that we have to push ourselves to understand the intertwined nature of “many seemingly separate struggles, over mobility, housing, health, community, and many others.” So, while the rate of vehicle collisions or pedestrian deaths might feel ordinary now, that doesn’t mean it has to be met with passive acceptance. What if we let it radicalize us again? Here in Halifax, we saw that process happen. A local activist named Steve MacKay organized a protest against political inaction and it was successful in getting traffic calming put on Robie Street. The data shows that vehicular deaths disproportionately occur in poor neighborhoods, and not enough is being done. If part of the problem is just acceptance, the answer might be refusal. Refusing to accept this absurd reality where, as Marx says in their book, “an estimated 1.3 million people are killed [globally] every year in road traffic crashes… more than 3,500 people every single day.” What would it mean to refuse that reality?

Thomas Beller is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and the author of J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, How to Be a Man, and Seduction Theory, among other books. He’s noted that his writing differs in form and genre but tends to share a lot of the same preoccupations: “the dynamics of relationships, a sense of place, and a preoccupation with the nature and effect of time.” We talk in this conversation about his book Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball, which is definitely concerned with this question of time. I ask him about his sense that pickup basketball especially has “its own time… ruled by the sun, or by the night lights… or by the willingness of those with a ball to keep shooting in the dark.” We even circle around to this experience of shooting in the dark and try to see it as a metaphor for players that have a way of approaching the game with a second sight of sorts—players like Nikola Jokic or Kareem Abdul-Jabber: these all-time great titans of the game. But we also zoom in on the embodied experience of putting up shots and what it means for practice to feel like something that is both meditative and ritualistic, mindful and maniacal. Thomas was kind of astonished that I care as much as I do about basketball. And of course this is a podcast that is often very serious, where I am clearly really dedicated to working through some despairing and deeply scary issues with people. So, in a sense, this episode is almost like an interlude between these more serious concerns; but honestly I take basketball pretty seriously too. In the same way that Marcus Boon spoke to me about his personal relationship with music over the years—how music lets us think about the sort of war for our time that people are constantly engaged in—I wanted to talk to Beller because I think his ideas are also about that pursuit of a more engaging, autonomous relationship to time, beyond just being “productive” for the sake of it. As he puts it in the book: there is joy in “being lost in the game… a joy that doesn’t have to be relinquished.” So Thomas and I talk about what we love about basketball, the things about the sport that fill us with ambivalence, and why we keep coming back to it. We both admit that it’s kind of a mystery. In the end, we get to a point where we sort of say we appreciate both the “anarchic” and “analytic” aspects of the game. The dance and the discipline. Why do we care about a sport that still tends to be dominated by a discourse of intense and androcentric competition? Is that healthy? What kind of a use of public space is playground basketball? What effects has professionalization had on the sport?

Amy Cardinal Christianson is a Fire Research Scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. Her research on Indigenous fire stewardship, Indigenous wildland firefighters, and wildfire evacuations is important to any sort of comprehensive view of the shockingly intense wildfires that have burned 4 million hectares so far this year in Canada, and that produced almost 60 million tonnes of CO2 in May. She’s also the co-host of the invaluable Good Fire podcast, which I strongly recommend you listen to. She and Matthew Kristoff talk to luminaries on the contemporary reality of fire’s extreme intensity and destructiveness, and what can be done to restore a balanced relationship with fire. She’s the author of an abundance of work in this field, but I’ll just highlight two co-authored books: First Nations Wildfire Evacuations and Blazing the Trail: Celebrating Indigenous Fire Stewardship. Amy is drawing attention to realities and precarities that are too often ignored in the colonial state of Canada. She makes it clear that the impacts of today’s fire are “generational” where First Nations and Metis communities are “not [going to be] able to participate in their cultural activities on their land base for a long time.” While that is criminal—the uneven impacts of wildfires that have been supercharged by greenhouse gases and global heating—the irony is that future-oriented forms of Indigenous fire stewardship have historically been outlawed in Canada, the US and Australia, in particular. Amy helps us understand the history and motivations behind that policing of cultural fire. Her research is tough for a number of reasons, and not least because, she says, even though she is a Métis woman from Treaty 8 territory, it’s hard to earn the sort of trust necessary to learn fully how Indigenous peoples have preserved their cultural fire practices. In her words: “for Indigenous nations there’s a long history of distrust around fire with outside people” and “outside agencies.” It’s also becoming difficult to talk about the practice of prescribed burning because of the ways that climate change is altering the atmosphere and making conditions more volatile. Nonetheless, the things she has learned are eye-opening and progressive, reaching down to the roots of the problem of conflagration and problematizing things like land use planning and building design from a deeply decolonial perspective.

John Vaillant is the award-winning author of bestselling nonfiction books like The Golden Spruce and The Tiger. He’s written articles for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic and The Walrus. His latest book—Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast—is focused on how the conditions that human beings have created through the burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of capitalist development are producing the sorts of enormous wildfires that we’re seeing right now. So far this year 2.7m hectares have burned across Canada, compared to the roughly 150 thousand that we typically expect. That’s an increase of 18 times over the norm. The fire season has never been this extensive or intense. There are wildfires from coast to coast; including in places that have never seen fires of this magnitude. This is a shocking trend, and it is not a trend that will reverse. Our forests sequester carbon, so when a wildfire occurs it leads to an increase in carbon emissions. It shouldn’t be lost in the fear that we’re feeling, as we view the images and videos of huge swaths of the country going up in flames, that wildfire was the biggest source of carbon emissions in Canada last year. Climate warming is driving an increase in the area burned and Vaillant’s book is absolutely clear about the role of global warming and unsustainable development in fueling these fires. Firefighters are acknowledging that modern fire, especially at the border between forests and urban areas, is unlike anything they’ve ever seen. Fires we can’t fight are emerging as normal under the conditions of a code red climate emergency. How can we respond to this reality without succumbing to panic? How can we let it radicalize and mobilize us? I appreciate the pointed ways that Fire Weather grasps the roots of why we are mired in an incendiary sense of what’s normal because of our attachment to fossil fuels. He says that, in the face of that attachment, we have the “incredible confronting inconvenience of climate change.” These shifts in the earth’s balance confront us, but this means we need to confront the drivers. And the drivers are, he says, “unregulated free market capitalism,” a “growth pattern” that mimics the destructive force of these megafires. In Canada, that means confronting a fossil fuel industry that remains mired in business as usual despite all of the signs that the industry must strand its assets, accept a relinquishing of control, and a transition off of oil and gas. In Alberta, the eye of the storm, there is—Vaillant says—a “provincial identity,” a “structure and infrastructure” and a “history” that is “built around petroleum.” What do we do about that province’s politics and its resistance to the necessary change? One thing Vaillant does in Fire Weather is talk about a trauma which people in Alberta, he says, do not want to talk about: the striking and scarring 2016 wildfires that consumed and destroyed Fort McMurray. Almost 100,000 people, he writes, “were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.” And yet it is not engaged with. If there is a lack of a connection, a causal connection, between the aftermath of megafires like this and appropriate climate action, it is because of that unwillingness to engage and the related desire to just resume normal life under fossil capitalism. We are headed, especially after this fire season, for a “moment of collision,” though. We are colliding with climate impacts and we are seeing a collision politically between the obvious need for radical, disruptive changes and an attachment to business as usual. We are facing fires that are differently powerful. So what we confront now is what John calls “a process of integrating this new information.” Figuring out a way forward that doesn’t see this become commonplace, that doesn’t allow complacency to condemn us to combustion.