The Sides of the Argument

Let's play the Polak Game with climate

I want to talk about how we feel about climate change and the planetary crisis in general. In the next few weeks I’ll be introducing what I think are the key attitudes we need to cultivate to address these crises. Before I do that, though, I think I need to frame the discussion by talking about the usual ‘sides’ of the debate and people’s default positions on it.

The Polak Game

I know this great ice-breaker for foresight events—or any situation where you have a room full of people and you’ll be talking about future-related things. It’s called the Polak Game, after Dutch sociologist Frederik Lodewijk Polak. He describes it in his book The Image of the Future. It’s easy to introduce and to play and never fails to get people energized.

All you have to do is go up front and get everyone’s attention. Make sure everybody’s standing, and that there’s room to move (it doesn’t work well in theatres). Then ask the group to do two things:

1. If you believe the future will be better than today, move towards the right side of the room. The stronger your belief or the better you think things will be, the further you should go. Conversely, if you think the future will be worse than the present, do the same to the left.

2. Now, if you believe you have agency—the ability to change the future for good or ill—move towards the front of the room. Follow the same rule about distance as you did for your left-right spacing. If you feel you have no ability to change the future, move to the back.

The Polak game is justifiably famous in facilitation circles, as it never fails to get people interested and talking. They can size one another up based on some pretty fundamental attitudes, but it’s entirely playful.

You can play the Polak game to assess people’s attitudes towards specific futures, such as climate change—just change the questions from belief in the future to belief in it and confidence in being able to address it. It only uses two dimensions, so it’s obviously not good at capturing nuances. It is indeed an ice-breaker. For deeper conversations, a deeper dive is necessary. The global emergency that climate change is a part of, for example, sprawls across many domains and our feelings about the whole mess tend to be complicated. Is there some intermediate level of focus, between the Polak Game and a full-on sociological study, that will help us understand it?

Where We Stand

Many studies have been written about people’s attitudes towards global warming. These almost always ask what percentage of people believe it’s happening, and of those who do believe in it, what percentage think it’s serious. I can see why these questions might be interesting to policymakers, but they’re not necessarily useful to me.

I’m interested in the core arguments people use to justify where they stand—the why, not the what. But that, again, seems too complex; what level of analysis would balance between the simplicity of Polak and the depths of personal motivation? For that, maybe we can focus on what kind of arguments people make about the global crisis.

In conversations and arguments, I’ve found people generally take one of the following stances:

• The first approach is to say that nothing needs to be done. This seems to be a fear-driven response, and an attempt to defend the status quo. Any action that rocks the global boat must be blocked.

• The second approach is to admit that something needs to be done but to insist that it will be easy and return us to the status quo. This is the camp of the technological optimists. This stance acknowledges the problem but believes that technological advancements (like carbon capture, renewable energy breakthroughs, etc.) will solve the issue without requiring massive societal changes.

• The third opinion is that only massive change will save us. But this breaks down into camps:

  • People who believe we can make the needed societal and economic changes and, in some cases, are actively undertaking them.

  • Those accelerationists who believe that humanity is incapable of moving far enough fast enough without a massive kick in the pants. For them, any attempt to forestall disaster is an attempt to preserve the fossil empire. This camp fervently believes that total system change is necessary and that only global catastrophe can make it happen.

  • Those who do not believe it is morally defensible to use catastrophe as an impetus to change and that therefore, we must act to mitigate disaster regardless of whether it perpetuates a system we don’t like.

I freely admit that this breakdown is a hopeless overgeneralization. I’ve also surely missed some important perspective(s). I’m using it because I think it’s illustrative of some broadly common positions, and we can separately discuss all the other options.

The Positions in More Detail

In its entry on conservatism, Wikipedia quotes Michael Oakeshott’s definition:

To be conservative […] is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

Let’s assume that this is an excellent and even noble stance to take. The problem with applying it to the present moment is that nothing like our current situation has ever occurred in human history, or indeed in the history of our planet. We have never faced an emergency on the scale of this one and no existing solution or social arrangement has succeeded in solving it. The climate emergency seems to demand that we face the unknown, try untried solutions, choose possible futures over present catastrophes, plan beyond our lifetimes, and aim for Utopia, even if we know we’ll miss it.

I can see how, when faced with such a prospect, a truly conservatively-minded person might want to walk the other way quickly. You can deny the choices we face, or, even better yet, deny that the problem exists at all. But that won’t make the problem go away.

Denialism is heavily funded; there’s a whole industry around it, fueled by fossil fuel lobbies and industries that would be significantly impacted by climate action. For a good book about this, see Merchants of Doubt. Denialism finds a receptive audience in conservative political circles, certain industry groups, and portions of the public who fear economic disruption or distrust the scientific consensus.

The Achilles’ heel of denialism is its assumption that this is a political argument, similar to arguments about socialism vs. capitalism or religious freedom vs. traditionalist values.

Climate change is not a political movement. It is a scientifically confirmed physical fact. For this reason, I believe the denialist position to be untenable.

Renewables To the Rescue?

On the other hand, you can admit that climate change is real but believe that the actions we’re already taking will be sufficient to make the issue go away. This moderate stance is common among centrist politicians and a significant portion of the public. It acknowledges the reality of climate change but frames solutions in a way that doesn't threaten existing economic and social structures. This camp believes that a global transition to renewables, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and the electrification of industry will reduce CO2 emissions sufficiently so that Earth will avoid the worst climate change scenarios.

Don’t kid yourself that transitioning to renewable energy will ‘solve’ climate change. Catastrophe is locked in by the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere. Let’s also not pretend that we can remove all that CO2 in any reasonable amount of time. To deploy Direct Air Capture (DAC) on the scale needed to return our biosphere to its preindustrial state, we would need to add whole new industries to Earth’s systems. These would come with their own resource requirements, energy needs, and waste streams. It doesn’t work to fix one problem while compounding others.

Anything we do to ‘fix’ climate change will make the problem worse, it seems, because it’s our doing itself that’s the cause of the problem.

So is ‘degrowth’ the answer? Should we just stop, somehow? Clearly, humanity needs a smaller footprint, and infinite growth is not possible in a finite world. Prior to the current mania around degrowth, this was already a well-studied area; I have three books on my shelf, Robyn Eckersley’s The Green State (2004), Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth (2009), and Peter A. Victor’s Managing Without Growth (2008) that covered the issues over a decade ago. Degrowth is necessary; but it’s also not sufficient because, once again, the existing CO2 is locking us into catastrophe even if we shrink our economies.

For all these reasons, I don’t think a simplistic optimism about our ability to mitigate disaster is warranted. We need a stronger sense of urgency—one, however, that is not driven by despair or anger.

The Moral Traps of System Change

It seems that only massive change will save us. I used to believe that it was possible to accept this as a fact in a neutral way, but I’ve learned that people taking this position often (even, usually) have some strong moral stance motivating them. It’s important to learn what that moral stance is.

According to Nietzsche, even the most supposedly ‘objective’ argument will always have some buried moral bias. You can find it if you look. For example, in an online conversation about climate mitigation technologies, I was told this:

The problem with tech is that it's human - we are smart monkeys but we can't comprehend complex ecosystems that have developed over millions of years. To claim such a thing would be preposterous. And yet, we will need to be humbled for our hubris pretty badly by nature itself within the coming years.

The key words here are ‘humbled’ and ‘hubris.’ During the conversation it became clear that my interlocutor wasn’t motivated by a desire to repair the damage we’ve caused to the environment; they wanted to punish humanity for its sins.

This passage showcases three common themes I encounter with accelerationists: 1) belief in the impotence of human technical systems; 2) equal certainty that technology is inherently evil—by its very nature it can’t solve the problems it has caused; 3) Nature as not a separate magisterium with inherent value, but a proxy for God in judging the failings of humanity.

For this person, in other words, Nature has value only insofar as it relates to us.

Unfortunately, this last attitude runs like a subterranean river beneath many mitigationist arguments. I think it’s a great idea—even essential—that we work to minimize the impact of global warming right now, even if that means engaging in practices such as geoengineering. The question of why we want to do that is always hanging around, however, and the answer is often “to prevent war, famine, mass migration, and loss of global GDP.” In other words, it’s all about us, again.

It’s possible to want to mitigate the worst effects of climate change because one cares about the world itself, even if we weren’t in it. But it’s also possible, and prevalent, to want to do it because we want to retire comfortably. What worries me about that motivation is that it will push people to do just enough to maintain a sense of relative comfort, and no more. The acceptable level of mass extinction is whatever doesn’t impact economic growth too much.

To Polak—

Here’s my (personal, biased, and unreliable) take on where people with the philosophies described above would go stand if they played the Polak Game:

• Return to Status Quo: people who believe in climate mitigation and think that what we’re doing is enough. These people see the future as negative, but something we can bear.

• Mitigationists: people who believe in radical change, but also in preserving the natural world while we do it. Possibly the most optimistic of the group—but they may fall prey to technological quick-fixes that won’t in themselves work.

• Status quo / Deniers: people who don’t believe climate change is a thing. They may be broadly representative of the general public in any other opinion they have about the future, so I’ve placed them centrally.

• Accelerationists: those who feel we will only change when Mother Nature forces us to, and the best we can do is help her along. It seems to me that they have the least sense of agency when it comes to the future.

I’m not trying to find some kind of accuracy in placement here, that would be nonsense. Consider this chart (like this whole exercise) as a tool for thinking. One result of charting things out this way is that the lower left quadrant, the negative future/low agency stance, is shown to be absent from my rogue’s gallery of arguments.

I do have one friend who argues that our planet is, quite simply, doomed; but one is not a demographic. Most people who promote a highly negative future do so, in my experience, in an attempt to frighten others into acting. This doesn’t imply a low sense of agency in them. So the absence of a truly pessimistic, shrug-and-give-up movement is telling. (Unless it’s prominently out there and I just edit it out of my sensorium; that would be telling too.)

—And Beyond

In upcoming posts, I’ll emphasize two different framings of our problematique that, if we put them in the above chart, might land in the very center, very top. The first is audacity, and the second, my own version of posthumanism. (I’ve written elsewhere about a third position, a personal one that can help you avoid despair in the face of massive environmental change: I playfully called it Adornment Theory.)

• Audacity means that it is time for us to admit how powerful we actually are, collectively and individually. For reasons I’ll go into, doing this is difficult for our generation.

• Posthumanism is a term with a lot of definitions. My take on it is not like, say, transhumanism, or some of the other varieties I consider weird and even cultish. For me, posthumanism is simply the recognition that our planet has intrinsic value, not just value for us. (I actually prefer the term nonhumanism for my exact position, but I’ll stick with posthumanism here because I’ve used it before so I should at least try to be consistent.) This is because all human systems are always already embedded in larger, nonhuman systems. To resolve the problems we’re causing, we have to (try to) take the perspective of these larger systems. This sounds hard, but it can be boiled down to a simple question: what does the rest of the planet demand of humanity?

I’ve talked about attitudes before. A great introduction is Peacock’s Tail, from last March. My ideas in that still stand. But there’s more to be said. We’re close, I think, to developing an ethos that will allow us to engage confidently with the crises of the 21st century. In upcoming posts, I will describe what that could look like in detail.

Earth is the end, not the means. Let’s see what’s possible if we take that idea to heart.

—K