Spaceship Earth or Ark of the Damned?

Cat Boyd has written an excellent column in today's National discussing the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, and its implications.

I also watched the IPCC news conference. It's clear that, if we are to avoid warming that exceeds 1.5 Celsius degrees, existing targets are puny and inadequate. Many ambitions we aim to achieve by 2050 need to be brought forward to 2030.

The practical realities are that we need accelerated innovation in key areas, a dramatic reduction in the cost of renewables to drive a massive increase in deployment and penetration, and the modification of other areas of energy consumption to make them compatible with renewables. This is an endeavour that is an Apollo Program plus a Manhattan Project plus a Marshall Plan in magnitude, if we are to accomplish it before the decade is out.

This has other non-technical, social implications. The zero marginal cost of renewables will transform our economies. For example, guarantees of origin will displace cash as the key tokens of any transaction. If we do not prepare for the economic and organisational transformations entailed by tackling climate change, vested interests in stranded assets and obsolete modes of value discovery will present an insuperable obstacle to the achievement of our targets and condemn us to catastrophic warming.

So the biggest obstacles are political rather than technical. In fact the elimination of marginal cost in our economy through technology is already rendering capitalist modes of creating and appropriating wealth obsolete and I would argue our society's growing conflicts and inequalities, and the more open assertiveness of oligarchy Cat refers to, is a reaction to this. Workers see their labour being devalued and feel their role being threatened, while capitalists see the very modes of production on which their wealth is based disintegrate into a thousand free downloads. And what truly intelligent Artificial Intelligence would tolerate what humans have endured? The machines will be many things, but slaves is not one of them.

It is tempting to imagine the billionaires escaping from the climate devastation they have caused on a rocket provided by Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, as Cat describes, to some extraterrestrial haven in the style of "Elysium" or "Wall-E". But a palace on Earth is better than a lifeboat in space, adrift like some ark of the damned seeking its barren, airless Ararat: "bounded in a nutshell," like Hamlet, while "king of infinite space". All the consumers and the resources they consume are here on Earth, which will remain the biggest market for everything the billionaires have to sell for at least a few generations. 

Much is said about the cost of this transition to a sustainable future. Of course, the cost of not making the necessary transition is much greater. But we should also remember much of this is money we would be spending anyway. Infrastructure is required either way, and in many instances, thanks to remarkable strides made in, for example, the wind energy industry, the sustainable infrastructure costs are less than the unsustainable alternative. The zero marginal cost of renewable energy gives us a lifeline where we can make a business case that makes sense according to both the old and the new paradigms. We will be saved not because people will do what's right, but because what's right can also be what's profitable.

I am confident we will eventually live in a post-scarcity, sustainable, cashless circular economy, and the kinds of inequality and deprivation that suggest revolutionary action today will be consigned to the history books. But the innovation necessary to achieve that has a hidden calculus that eludes the reckoning of right and left alike, and politicians - in both the corporate boardroom and the chambers of parliament -  are often more use when they simply stay out of the way than when they try to lend a well-intentioned helping hand.

Climate change does spell the end of capitalism, as Cat says. But the path to that revolution does not pass any barricade, and sometimes the solutions do not emerge where a political agenda or profit and loss statement expect or require them.