The Real Reason We Can’t Fix The Climate Emergency

Why we can’t fix climate change by going to a WWII footing and attacking it as if it were an enemy

As my first solo post on Substack I’ve written a response to Daniel Pinchbeck’s video, where he asks why coherent social movements are so hard to build, and also to the recent class in the course he just finished co-hosting with Josh Fox, Embracing Our Emergency, where Margaret Klein Salomon suggested that the best thing to do would be to mobilise the population on a par with what happened at the outset of World War II. Let’s get into it…

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Why can’t we fix climate change by going to a WWII footing and attacking it as if it were an enemy? We can awaken, then harness, the fear of the population, and amazing things will happen in a very short time once people start to wake up.

I do think that great strides can be made on this front, but we need to understand the nature of the problem first: we can’t succeed unless we know what sort of predicament we are in, and we can’t necessarily assume what it is from previous struggles humanity has fought; maybe this is something new.

In World War II, the enemy was a group of other people, the fascist Germans, Japanese, and their allies. Everyone else realised they needed to come together, fight as hard as possible, and hopefully defeat them. This worked, after a long struggle.

Climate change is not a group of people, it is not an ‘other’ that can be directly fought. Solving it is not like that, nor would the solution look something like JFK’s mission to put a man on the Moon.

The current system is mainly driven by fossil fuels and we depend on it for almost everything. (By the way, I’m going to assume here that pretty much everyone reading this has a basic knowledge of how energy, money, and the economy works so I won’t explain the background assumptions I am making).

The debt-based economy has two modes: growth, or collapse. If we stop using non-renewable fuel, growth stops. Millions of jobs are lost, recessions, depressions. Food becomes much harder to produce and is more expensive, and at the same moment people have much less money. But, if we do keep on growing the economy, we use up all the ‘natural resources’ and face further ecological collapse.

So, okay: we need a social movement where we ‘collapse now and avoid the rush’: voluntary degrowth. We create the fabled ‘island of coherence’ and kick off the r-evolution that way. Stop flying, stop eating meat, stop buying shitty cheap clothes that end up in landfills after a couple of uses. Start building small communities, growing our own food, and supporting each other. It could work.

But… we need funding to do that. Anyone who’s tried to buy a property in order to get that sort of thing going, or even started squatting one and then improving it, knows that a lot of money is needed. Solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, wood stoves, roof repairs, infrastructure for water, communications, and so on will all be required.

Also, a lot of time is needed. This means we can’t have a full-time job and make the transition in parallel, using our wages to fund it.

So we need to ask the people who do have money, and we do. But they don’t take us seriously. We don’t take planes, we don’t go to the same restaurants they do, we don’t wear the same clothes as them, or know the same people. We just spent the last six hours literally shovelling shit in the hope that it will turn into tomatoes in a few months. They spent it on a plane to Bali. There is not going to be much, if any, return on their investment. They pass on the chance to help us.

Or if the people who have money are us, from our previous job or a trust fund or inheritance, do we spend it on setting up a way of life that is going to exclude us from being taken seriously by our social group in the future? We look down the road that would open up if we do that and… no more Bali, no more Ibiza, no more seeing our friends in Paris, London, Oslo, SF, or wherever else. We’d slip away from our previous social context, and although our farm is lovely and has the latest Tesla Powerwall batteries and plenty of WWOOF-ers digging swales (this is not feudalism, banish that thought), we don’t speak the same language as the neighbours. We start to feel isolated and regretful. Maybe better not to think about taking that path for now, and carry on as normal.

Of course some combination of the above can occasionally work, one can be lucky, particularly rich, committed or charismatic. But I am explaining why, in general, it’s very hard to leave the current system without becoming isolated and burnt out.

The fact is that the enemy IS US. We - by ‘we’ I mean consumers in the industrialised world - depend on the system. The corporations ARE US. We buy the things they produce. Agreed, there are sociopaths at the helm of many of these companies, and we probably would not personally endorse many of the decisions they take with the goal of simply increasing their bottom line, but they exist because we do consume their products. (And yes, fossil fuel subsidies are a thing too, and should be got rid of ASAP, that at least is simple to grasp).

I’m not trying to make the reader feel guilty. I don’t want to shame or scare you into not flying any more, into veganism or whatever. Take those options if you want. But guilt and shame are part of the problem as surely as anything else.

Rather, as Gregory Bateson explained in the 1940s, we are in a Double Bind. He famously gave the example of the Bread and Butterfly from Alice Through The Looking Glass to illustrate the concept: the nature of the b&bfly is to have a head made out of a sugar cube. He can only drink tea, which causes his head to melt. He either dies of thirst or his head melts. Alice asks ‘And does that happen a lot?’ The b&bfy replies, ‘It always happens’. He’s in a double bind.

The Bread and Butterfly by Tenneil

If enough people go for degrowth and stop using fossil fuels, our economy collapses. If we make a stand and go it alone or in a small group, we become detached from society and the resources we need to survive (predominantly financial). If we don’t do any of that and carry on as we are, runaway climate change likely decimates the human population by the end of this century, if not somewhat before. Our sugarcube head melts in the tea. Or we die of our thirst for non-renewable energy.

So if I’m right, we have now understood the nature of the problem. It’s not the Manhattan Project, Man on the Moon, WWII, vanquish the enemy. It’s the Bread and Butterfly, wondering how not to die of thirst or have his head melted.

How does one get out of a double bind then? There must be a way. It’s not easy, but, it turns out, it is how beings evolve: evolution literally progresses - in part - by solving double binds.

The double bind theory of evolution, as proposed by our man Gregory Bateson, suggests that the evolution of complex systems, including the human brain, may have been influenced by the need to navigate contradictory demands or messages. This theory comes from Bateson’s work on communication and the concept of the double bind.

In the context of evolution, the double bind theory proposes that the ability to navigate contradictory demands simultaneously may have provided a selective advantage, leading to the development of more complex cognitive systems. This could have been particularly important in the evolution of the human brain, where the need to balance focused tasks (like catching food) with overall situational awareness (avoiding predators and other threats) may have driven the development of a dual-hemisphere brain with distinct specialisations.

So evolutionarily-speaking, we (in this context ‘we’ refers to all bilaterally symmetric animals, fish, and insects) have been here before. Yet, if we’re in a double bind, then it means we are in a pretty serious evolutionary predicament, and success is far from guaranteed. It’s our ‘fish leaves the water and tries to make its way on land’ moment.

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Ironically, there’s a good chance that we got ourselves into this tricky head melty situation through an imbalance in the hemispheres of this very same bilateral brain. If you’re reading this you probably know of Iain McGilchrist’s work which has shown (if we flatten his enormous books down to one sentence) that our current age has come about through favouring left brain hemisphere functions, which is broadly the side of focused attention and dividing things into categories, over the right hemisphere which sees the context and the situation as a whole.

We got good stuff like ‘if you break your leg it’s not over for you, and doesn’t even need to be that painful’ or ‘communicating with someone on the other side of the planet almost as easily as someone in the same room’.

We also got, on the other side of the equation - because we focused too narrowly on short-term gains - ecological destruction, massive wealth inequality, toxic concentrations of power, widespread addictions, goldfish-adjacent attention span, and so on.

Getting out of the double bind, then, involves altering our whole worldview, before we go ahead with any specific action items.

Some suggestions might be:

• Recognise the paradox: The first step is to acknowledge the contradictory demands and the emotional turmoil they create. In short, recognise that we’re in a double bind and we’re struggling like a fish on a hook.

• Drop the question “What should we do?”: Instead of trying to find a solution to the problem, ask ourselves, “What kind of people do we need to become to resolve this dilemma?”

• Embrace the uncertainty: Accept that there is no straightforward answer and that the situation requires a more nuanced approach.

• Seek alternative perspectives: Look for new ways of thinking, fresh insights, or different cultural or spiritual frameworks that can help us navigate the paradox.

• Practice self-reflection and introspection: Engage in a process of self-discovery to understand our own values, needs, and desires, which may help us find a way out of the double bind.

All of these come from a right-brain way of seeing the world as a whole rather than a narrow, left-brain ‘solutions’ approach. People who keep describing ecological collapse as an ‘engineering problem’ just don’t get it. I have written about this in my essay ‘Spreadsheet Brain’ in fact, if you want to go deeper into that.

The Elevator, the project I am currently working with, promotes a fundamentally different ontology, that of ‘consciousness first’ or Analytic Idealism.

If we recognise that the physical world comes out of consciousness - as quantum physics has been compelled to conclude - rather than the other way ‘round, our narrow ‘me first’ individualistic zero-sum view of the world as having to be some kind of Hunger Games scenario starts to dissolve. We undergo ‘The Flip’, as Jeffrey Kripal calls it.

After ‘The Flip’, fresh/ancient possibilities such as psychic powers, life after death, communication with animals, more coherent states of collective being, morphogenetic fields, and so on - all of which appear laughable from a materialist perspective - become newly intriguing.

It’s true that we are up a certain creek without a paddle. The current crises represent an existential threat. It’s also true - from my perspective at least - that we are part of life, which is one eternal consciousness without duality, and therefore without death. The Flip carries the same implications.

Embracing an idealist ontology may therefore, by offering a wider perspective, give us the courage to confront the climate emergency head on. We face it, rather than constantly distracting ourselves from it, and the attendant grief, by diving into our various addictions. This might lead to us having a greater capacity to mitigate its effects, both in the short and long term.

What will happen if we widen our perspective out of the constricted left brain trap, recognise that we are in a double bind, embrace the uncertainty, and stop trying to compulsively fix things? Will the Bread and Butterfly discover another source of nourishment? All the things which are beyond the pale for materialist science, not even worthy of discussion, could be re-examined. Could we find new collective states of coherence which allow us to coordinate from a place of love and compassion, heal ancestral trauma and bring justice to situations which now appear hopeless?

There are things we already can, and must, do, including halting the absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and we should put all our power into trying to get them done now.

At the same time, and on a deeper level, we can give up the illusion that anything fundamental can be changed without adopting a fresh perspective. Evolution demands that we do, and there is no greater power in the Universe.

As Sun Ra said, 'the possible has been tried, and failed, now we have to try the impossible'.

The man we need to be listening to right now - source