To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
August 30, 2022
RE: Re: Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers' Voice
At one climate disaster follows another, more and more scientists and environmentalists have been concerned that unless serious action is taken immediately, there will be irreversible catastrophe. Thus two books have recently been written called “Hothouse Earth”. Last year there was Hothouse Earth: The climate crisis and the importance of carbon neutrality by Stephanie McPherson. And this year, there is Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire. His book differs from McPherson’s and most other environmental statements because it says that hothouse earth has already arrived; time’s up. and hothouse conditions are now inevitable no matter what we do; but what we can do is put some limits on how bad it will be. Or, to put in terms of events since the book was written, the horrible, tragic flood that is presently covering one-third of Pakistan is an example of the grim new normal which the whole world will face, and which we can no longer prevent. But what is still to be determined is whether Pakistan will still be there at the end of the century, and if so, what will it look like?
Thus McGuire writes in his Foreword that:
"This book takes as its starting premise, then, the notion that, practically, there is now no chance of dodging a grim future of perilous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown. It is no longer a matter of what we can do to avoid it, but of what we should expect in the decades to come, how we can adapt to a hothouse world with more extreme weather and what we can do to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further.”
He explains what humanity is going to have to face:
“What I mean by hothouse Earth, then, is not an ice-free planet, but a world in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50°C (122°F) in the tropics are nothing to write home about; a world where winters at temperate latitudes have dwindled to almost nothing and baking summers are the norm; a world where the oceans have heated beyond the point of no return and the mercury climbing to 30°C+ (86°F+) within the Arctic Circle is no big deal.
“To all intents and purposes, this is the hothouse planet we are committed to living on; one that would be utterly alien to our grandparents. ... [There will be] extreme high temperature events beyond anything experienced in human history. A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world than its grandparents. Compared with someone lucky enough to be born in 1960, one study estimates that – on average – they will experience seven times more heatwaves, twice as many droughts and three times as many floods and harvest failures. The reality could very well be far worse, and it will be for the billions of vulnerable people living in the majority [of the] world. Looking at the broader picture, anyone younger than 40 today will suffer ever more frequent bouts of extreme weather that would be virtually impossible in the absence of global heating.”
His book dwells on explaining how the world has reached this situation, and it also says that changes will be needed in how we live. It warns against the complacent belief that last-minute, large-scale geoengineering will restore things to the milder weather of the past. It stresses that, although we have passed various tipping points, this doesn’t mean we can forget the need to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions, as some bounds have to be put on how hot the earth becomes.
But McGuire doesn’t consider how much more serious are the economic and political steps that have to be taken today than they would have been if serious action had started 30 years ago. If there is no change in what we need to demand be done, then what is the purpose of stressing that we are now living in hothouse Earth? Simply to hope that a more vivid description than what was said before will make a difference? That is not enough. There needs to be consideration of how extreme the changes in economics will have to be in order to withstand the future that we are facing, or to limit how bad things will get. There needs to be consideration of what demands should be put forward, who we can expect to take up these demands, and why the environmental movement itself is split on such things as whether to work hand-in-hand with the big corporations.
In the Afterword, McGuire gets around to saying that “0ur climate is being destroyed by unadulterated, free-market capitalism – an ideology that simply cannot be sustained on a small planet with limited resources.” This is very true. Free-market fundamentalism is leading the world to dire catastrophe. But the problem is that McGuire doesn’t envision much of a replacement for free-market capitalism. He doesn’t talk about replacing the dictatorship of the market with regulation of production. He doesn’t even talk about the need to plan in terms of physical quantities. He only envisions changing some of the financial targets the capitalists now use, and how they are calculated. One of his main concrete suggestions is a
“switch to a so-called quality adjusted GDP metric. Under this metric, good things, such as carbon-reduction measures, are rewarded, while bad stuff, for example, those products or services linked to high emissions or which are environmentally damaging, are marked down. A GDP metric that operated along these lines would benefit everyone by linking the money in people’s pockets to national and global indicators of progress on emissions reductions and ecological improvements.”
This might involve a switch in who gets subsidies, and it would be an attempt to provide incentives to firms that do something good. But it still relies on market measures, only insisting on better market measures. It’s like trying to drain a flood with a teaspoon. It would be totally inadequate for dealing with various of the goals that McGuire mentions throughout the book, such as changes in agriculture, opposition to gross inequality, etc. He mentions some important goals, but not how to obtain them. Financial measures, even the best measures compiled by the most impartial economists, cannot replace direct physical measurement of what is going on in an economy. Nor can the pollution of the atmosphere and oceans and farmland be measured in dollars and cents; it has to be measured in the actual physical amount of pollutants that are spread throughout the world. Nor does any measure at all mean anything so long as the governments rely on self-reporting by the polluters.
This was true as soon as the environmental crisis started, but the fact that we have now reached the stage of hothouse earth means that the necessary political and economic changes are going to have to be done much faster and be more thorough-going than before. McGuire’s book has a lot of useful and important information about what’s happening to the environment, and it seeks to tell the truth about how serious the present situation already is, but it also illustrates the paralysis of much of the environmental movement about where to go from here. <>
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