Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

xiv S preface
of what we have already “bought” will still cause great hardship
everywhere. Glib talk about “climate solutions” misleads by conveying
the impression that climate is merely a problem that can
be quickly solved by technological fi xes without addressing the
larger structure of ideas, philosophies, assumptions, and paradigms
that have brought us to the brink of irreversible disaster. The
point is the same as one that has been attributed to Einstein: “signifi
cant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of
thinking we were at when we created them” (Calaprice, 2005,
p. 292). There are certainly better technologies to be deployed,
and far better ones soon to come. But the climate is not likely
to be restabilized by any known technical fi x quickly, easily, or
painlessly. Rather, as geophysicist David Archer puts it:
The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO 2 to the atmosphere
will last longer than Stonehenge. Longer than time
capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of
civilization so far . . . [it] will persist for hundreds of thousands of
years into the future. (Archer, 2009, pp. 1, 90)
Climate change, in other words, is not so much a problem to be
fi xed but rather a steadily worsening condition with which we
must contend for a long time to come. Improved technology, at
best, will only reduce the scale of the problem and buy us time to
build the foundations for a more durable and decent civilization.
In the words of biologist Anthony Barnoski, “stabilizing [climate]
in this sense means global temperature staying more or less constant
for at least hundreds, probably thousands of years. In short,
as far as generations of humans are concerned, we probably never
will revert back to the ‘old’ climate” (2009, p. 29).
The few remaining climate skeptics aside, there are two general
positions that bear on my own views. The fi rst is the belief that
there is a rising tide of groups, associations, and nongovernmental
organizations forming around the world as a kind of planetary
immune system that will transform our politics, heal the widening