one time humanities here Case Western Reserve University and I'm pleased to welcome you to the opening keynote event in the Baker Nord centers calendar for the fourth annual Cleveland humanities festival on the theme of nature whatever that means the Cleveland humanities festival is a collaborative event coordinated by the Baker Nord Center for the Humanities during which we celebrate the great educational and cultural institutions of our city and Northeast Ohio this event and several other events in the festival are supported by the residents of Cuyahoga County and so I want to especially thank Cuyahoga Arts & Culture for their continuing support for the festival and the Baker Nord Center the festival provides a platform to explore from the perspective of the humanities subjects that matter to us as a society and as a nation this year we have more than 30 partner institutions offering programs on the theme of nature many of you will have already attended some of the lectures symposia film screenings exhibits and more here on the campus and throughout our city at our partner institutions and you can pick up programs at the entrance to find out about future events it's a pleasure to see so many of you here tonight and I hope that you'll take the opportunity to attend some of those many other events and the festival most of which are free and open to the public we have defined 2019 theme of nature very broadly to address the important subject of our physical environment from of our variety of perspectives in the humanities in our colleges and universities we are considering our relationship with our physical environment and its representation in literature in the arts climate change its past history future consequences and the ethical problems it presents in our constantly growing understanding of the science of nature and its impact on culture and society in theaters and cinemas we are viewing films and plays that provoke important conversations about how we confront the natural world in our museums and in exhibitions around the city we are contemplating the significant events significance of events such as the 50th anniversary of the burning River the triggered a wave of environmental activism here in Cleveland and around the country one of the emerging themes throughout the events taking place around our cities the importance of the perspective of the humanities in contextualizing and one hopes eventually coming to grips with the critical realities of our changing natural environment our keynote speaker this evening is one of the most important voices in these conversations Naomi Oreskes who is professor of the history of science an affiliated professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University is a world-renowned geologist historian and public speaker she's the author of over 200 books articles and opinion pieces on the role of science in society in merchants of doubt' published in 2010 co-authored with Erik Conway her s keys describes how science can be corrupted for political purposes to mislead the public on issues such as tobacco use pesticides and the reality of climate change this theme runs through succeeding publications including the collapse of Western civilization in 2014 discerning experts in 2019 why trust science in the same year and her forthcoming book science on a mission American oceanography from the Cold War to climate change Moreschi supplied the introduction to the Melville House edition of the papal encyclical on climate change and inequality laudato si in her opinion pieces on climate change have appeared in leading newspapers around the globe including the New York Times Washington Post Los Angeles Times Times of London in the front for algemene rewards and prizes include the 2016 Stephen Schneider Award for outstanding climate science communication the 2015 public service award of the Geological Society of America the 2015 Herbert Phi surprise the American Historical Association for her contributions to public history the 2014 American Geophysical Union Presidential Citation for science and society she's a fellow of the American Geophysical Union the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of science this evening professor arrestees will explore with us the intersections of the natural world liberal democracy and it actually is that climate change my tent please join me in welcoming our distinguished guests Naomi Oreskes well thank you so much that kind introduction thank you all for being here tonight it's great to be back in Ohio but I have to say when I hear those introductions I don't really like it because I feel really tired so yes I've written a lot and today I'm going to try to the talked a is a little bit of a pastiche from a few different things I've worked on but particularly my book the collapse of Western civilization which is about the end so and also I just wanted to say it's really a pleasure to be here also because as a humanist working on climate change when I first started doing this work a lot of people thought it was kind of odd for historian to be writing about climate change and especially for a historian to be writing about the future which didn't seem to fit most people's ideas of what historians do so it's been fun to kind of dislodge people's expectations but also sometimes a little weird and it's really nice to be in a place where people are increasingly recognizing that climate change is not just a scientific problem it's a social problem it's a problem for humanists and really for all of us to be engaged with so tonight I'm going to talk to you about the question is climate change the end and if so the end of what in 2014 Eric Conway and I published this little book it's a small book about the end of the world and I like to think of it as my accidental book because Eric and I did not have a plan to write this book we didn't write a proposal or try to get a publisher or a contract rather I was asked to write an article for the journal Daedalus about why people weren't acting on the scientific evidence of climate change and I have to say I was a bit chagrined when I got asked to do this because I thought that Eric and I had actually already written that book the whole point of merchants of doubt' was to answer that question why had we not acted on all this abundance scientific evidence of climate change so I did what all good writers do I wrote the same book a second time but in a different way this time as a work of fiction I had spent Eric I had spent five years read millions of pages of documents wrote this extremely factual book with hundreds of footnotes and I thought well if that didn't persuade people if we couldn't persuade people with facts maybe we could persuade them with fiction so for those of you who haven't read it the book takes place in the year twenty three ninety three the narrator is a historian living in the second People's Republic of China and she's looking back on the past on the occasion of what she calls the tercentenary of the great collapse so I'd like to start the talk tonight just by reading from the introduction to this book where Eric and I in our own voices introduced the idea of the book science fiction writers construct an imaginary future historians attempt to reconstruct the past ultimately both are seeking to understand the present in this essay we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and possible future the occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture the dilemma being addressed is how we the children of the Enlightenment failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization in which denial and self-deception rooted in in an ideological fixation on free markets disabled the world's powerful nations in the face of tragedy moreover the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind even those involving imminent threats here our future historian living in the second People's Republic of China recounts the events of the period of the penumbra which she dates is running from 1988 to 2093 the events that led to the great collapse and mass migrations of 2073 to 2093 so it turned out that an awful lot of people were interested in the end of the world the book has been very successful oh sorry we have lots of foreign editions and here's just a few and one of things I love about the foreign editions every foreign edition the picture takes place somewhere other than the place that the book is published so you know the German Edition has big been underwater the French Edition has like the western United States you know it's all somebody else's proud civilization getting wrecked you know we even have an audiobook so if you don't want to read the book you can listen to the music and so it was interesting to us that this little book which we wrote really fairly quickly and really had no plan for became so successful but in retrospect I think perhaps it's not so surprising it turns out that books about the end are very popular and some of you may have read two famous bestsellers the end of nature by Bill McKibben pertinent to the theme of tonight and the end of history by Francis Fukuyama both of which were bestsellers in fact the theme of the end of history is so widespread now that there's even a genre about the end of the end of history and even the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon so he says all history up to this point has been spent preparing the world for my presence and the responses hmm four and a half billion years probably wasn't long enough if you go to Amazon and Google and of or put an end of you get over 50,000 results now admittedly these are not all bad news stories there's the end of Alzheimer's for example and how to end the autism epidemic although unfortunately that one is a vaccine rejection polemic so I'm not recommending it and it seems that in general people are actually more interested in endings than beginnings if you go on Google Images there are a lot more sunsets than there are sunrises so I'm not really sure why this is but maybe because there's a kind of drama in the ending there's a kind of tension we all want to know how it all turns out so how is climate change going to turn out what is kind of change the end of that's what I'd like to talk about tonight and so as I was preparing this lecture I thought well there are a number of possibilities one is the obvious one it's the end of climate as we've known it another one is also fairly obvious it's the end of nature as we have known it and also the end of the Holocene period of geologic time so I'll talk a little bit about those three ideas but then I want to talk about a few things that are maybe a little less obvious and that we raise in this book another is the idea that it may end up being the end of science as we've known it the climate change is such a challenge that we may have to rethink what we even think it means to do science or to be scientists it may be the end of capitalism the end of liberal democracy and perhaps as we suggest here at the end of Western civilization so let's talk first about the most obvious one the climate system as we've known it this is incontrovertible because it's already happened our climate is already substantially different than it was prior to the late 20th century build-up of greenhouse gases now why does this matter well I think most people in this room know many of the changes that are happening make the climate system more severe that is to say for example more energy in the climate system gives us more intense rains more intense rains contribute to worse floods as we've just seen in the last few days here in the United States and we know why this is so this is no mystery a warmer atmosphere it's basic thermodynamics a warmer atmosphere can carry more moisture so the amount of rain that can fall in any period of time is now greater than it used to be it's basic physics and this means that storm drains get overwhelmed and rivers overflow their banks just this week we've seen a tragic cyclone cyclone EJ you know if that's how it's pronounced that hit Africa now of course there are many factors that control the damage associated with severe storms such as the robustness of the info structure but one of the factors is climate change and again as we know increased energy in the climate system overall combined with warmer ocean waters and warmer atmosphere creates the potential the physical potential for stronger more deadly storms and if the storm like that hits an area with weak resilience weak infrastructure the possibilities for enormous damage are very great even if it reaches an area with good infrastructure like a city like New Orleans the possibilities for damage are very great now it's a popular denialists talking point to claim that the increased damage associated with major hurricanes in recent years is greater only because we have more people living in coastal regions that claim is incorrect it is true there are more people living in coastal regions and so it is true that monetary damages the billions of dollars in houses lost or whatever that by itself is not a reliable indicator of the impact of climate change on storms but we have a number of physical parameters perimeters that have nothing to do with where people live such as the lowest recorded pressure in the eye of a storm the largest geographic extent and the length of the hurricane season all of which have been breaking records and none of which have to do with where people live so one of my favorite examples can be think it's really telling is that in the Atlantic Basin we now have hurricanes occurring both before hurricane season has started and after it has ended and that's really telling because what does it even mean to have a hurricane season that's a historical expectation based on what used to be the case of when hurricanes we typically hit places like Florida and Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Bahamas but because the ocean is warmer than it used to be hurricane season is now longer or if we look at the barometric pressure so this is an absolute physical parameter measured by scientists by crazy scientists who fly airplanes through the eyes of hurricanes if we look at the most intense Atlantic hurricanes as measured by the lowest barometric pressure we see that 8 out of the 10 most intense hurricanes since reliable record-keeping has begun in the 1850s eight out of ten of these have occurred since 1980 we can also look at heat waves heat waves are one of the most serious and also most incontrovertible effects of global warming obviously as the earth gets hotter we have more heat waves and summer heat waves as people most people know are very serious it's not just an inconvenience they can be fatal particularly for the elderly and people without access to cooling one particularly well studied example is the European heat wave of the summer of 2003 and I like to talk about this one because I was there with my family in Paris right smack in the middle of this heat wave and my children were looking at me like mom why did you take us to Paris and they still talk about this terrible thing I did when they were young how I took them to Paris in the summer of 2003 temperatures about across Europe were 20 to 3 20 to 30 percent above normal and again that is a statistical normal from the period before climate change the temperature reached 99 degrees Fahrenheit 37 cents Celsius for more than a week in August in several parts of Europe and there were 70,000 excess human deaths 70,000 and above and beyond what would normally be expecting an ordinary August week at that time there were also significant livestock and crop losses now one irony of the very and there's a long list of impacts that I could go into if we had more time but one of my favorites is because it's so ironic defenders of nuclear power like to say that nuclear power is the or one of the important solutions to climate change but the fact that people invoke that shows how people don't think about the way in which technology is not separate from human systems and not separate from natural systems because in fact the high water temperatures and low water levels during this period shut down the French nuclear reactors just when the man was peaking so the very heat wave that seems to make nuclear power something you might want to have actually made those facilities shut down at this crucial moment now there's been a lot of scientific analysis of the 2003 summer since that time and it's now been demonstrated there was probably the hottest summer in Europe's in at least ad 1500 so in other words this heat wave was like nothing like anything that any of us in the modern period have experienced detection and attribution studies have concluded that anthropogenic global warming has doubled the likelihood of the heat wave of this type most recently Christina's at Allan a paper in Nature climate change wrote quote events that would occur twice a century in the early 2000s are now expected to occur twice in a decade so 10 times is more from for free as free ten times more frequently and noticed there comparing to the early 2000s so this is an increase a tenfold increase just through last 15 years for the more extreme threshold observed in 2003 the return time reduces from thousands of years in the late 20th century to about a hundred years so in other words a kind of heat wave that would be more or less unheard of in a millennial a millennia of life in Europe now will occur at least once a century and possibly more so all of this tells us that climate as we've known in the climate around which people have built their lives and their communities and their infrastructures and their expectations that climate no longer exists so what do we lose when we lose the climate as we've known it well obviously lives property money but also maybe a sense of security if we no longer feel secure and safe in our homes and maybe faith in a loving God this is what my colleague Jim Ann tell a trusted minister believes so there's a lot of things that begin to unfold when this world as we know it seems to be changing in hostile ways and of course it's not just physical effects I'm trained originally as a physical scientist so I tend to talk more about the science I know best but we're also seeing many changes in biological systems for example spring thaw is coming earlier now in most parts of the world and this disrupts the cycles of pollination because some plants now bloom before the birds that pollinate them have returned from some of the winter so germs now all of this has happened with a measured mean global temperature increase of just about 1 degree centigrade but we are on track to an increase of 3 degrees or more so this helps us begin to imagine that once a millennium heat wave that became once a century will become once a decade or once a year if climate change continues unabated and this of course leads into the fact then that nature's we have known it has changed as well so long with climate change this is a change that has already happened to again there are many different things I could speak about but the most alarming upsetting really tragic one is what has happened to coral reefs around the globe we have extremely good evidence of the death and destruction of coral reefs because if we go back to the 1960s and this audience looks old enough to remember shocked Cousteau we have fantastic underwater photographs of what healthy reefs looked like back in the 1960s and we could compare those photographs with what's going on today and it's frankly heartbreaking just heartbreaking and some of these changes even though they've been developing over a long period of time this is an example of the whole issue of tipping points that the students and I discussed this morning that in some cases a reef could be doing pretty well until the temperature reaches a threshold value that becomes higher than the corals can survive and when that happens the corals can die rather quickly so we have this one photograph here February 2016 a healthy reef two months later in April 2016 a mostly dead reef now corals are particularly significant in that there they are both biological and physical the living reefs of today are the lime stones of tomorrow ancient reefs are a major part of the geological record and in fact if you study geology as I did as an undergraduate one of the things you learn is to identify the solitary corals that developed in the early Paleozoic and to distinguish them from the reef building corals that evolved later in the Paleozoic this is a major transition in the geologic record because once reef building corals evolved suddenly you get these big limestone formations that you didn't have before so this means that the globe will sink debts of Rhys will be evident in the rock record this will be something that future geologists will see so in other words they won't just learn like I learned about the evolution of solitary corals into reef building corals they'll also learn about the death of the reef building corals so that's kind of tragic and it's this idea that future geologists will see this in the geological record that has led to the conclusion that another thing that has ended is the Holocene the geological time period that we used to live in the geological period in which people evolved we now live in a different geological time period the Anthropocene I'm a member of the Anthropocene working group of the International stratigraphic Commission and a few years ago our group was charged with answering the question has the Holocene ended should the Anthropocene be recognized as a new unit in the geological time scale and if so what are the markers of it and when does it begin so for the last several years this committee has been working we've issued a series of reports papers recommendations we've voted many times and we're voting again even as we speak and we have voted to make a formal recommendation for the Anthropocene to be recognized as a unit in the geological timescale we've concluded that the Holocene has indeed ended and that the scientific community should formally recognize a new geological time period where the effects of human activity are globally recognisable and will remain so into the future we have a number of specific findings that the key geological markers align and therefore define a start for the Anthropocene somewhere between 1952 and 1955 so this is very specific much more specific than earlier geological time periods and this is based primarily on signals from nuclear testing and burning of fossil fuels so in other words already by the 1950s we can see evidence in the isotopic record of changes in carbon isotopes because of fossil fuel burning and the nuclear isotopes from atomic testing not coincidentally these Cohen's are not by accident these coincide with well Stephan's has called the great acceleration a period of exponential increase in population and resource use at the end of World War two the strata that reflect us are globally distributed so we can find the nuclear test signal across the globe even in Antarctica and therefore we can be confident that they will be recognized by future geologists and our next phase of research now is to get that define the type locations for the Anthropocene now these are fairly specific scientific findings and I present them to you just for you to give a sense get a sense of what scientists are talking about when we talk about the Anthropocene which may be different than what historians or sociologists or economists might be talking about to talk about but we still might want to address the question does this matter and I want to argue as a humanist not just as a geologist that the answer is yes because this is the first time in geological history not just human history but geologic history that the human imprint on the planet has become dominant and in this sense I think we can argue that Bill McKibben was right about the end of nature if we understand nature to be that part of the world that was not put there by us and not controlled by us that nature no longer exists it is the end of nature as we have known it moreover the human fingerprint is not only everywhere but in many places its dominant so many places for example the hydrologic cycle is no longer dominated by evapotranspiration and all those things you might have learned in ninth grade geography it's actually dominated by human diversion of water in many areas we find that human forces are now as great or greater than geophysical ones and so the old arguments about human insignificance in the face of geological time are no longer true so when I was studying geology we were taught that one of the most important contributions of geology to thinking to human thinking was that geologists showed us how insignificant we were the humans used to think that we were the center of everything but actually humans were nothing and we had all these different metaphors to talk about how brief human time was compared to geological time so Stephen Jay Gould used to talk about how if geological time was a clock all of human history would be less than one second before midnight on that geologic time or if it was a yardstick and we held out our hand to measure all of geological time all of human history would be less than one swipe of a nail file against our fingernails so just noting and that this was this great contribution for us to understand how nothing we were only now it turns out that actually we're not nothing anymore that's a pretty big conceptual shift and it raises some interesting issues about moral and ethical responsibility in relation to the planet so one example for example I was also told when I was in school that the solution to pollution was dilution how many of you remember that right you know the ocean was giant you could just dump stuff in and it would get diluted and it would all be fine or put-put pollution in the atmosphere as long as your smokestacks were high enough right that's an argument you guys heard here in Ohio it would be okay because it would disperse and it gave us acid rain but okay so we now know that that's not true and that means we need a different way to think about how we use resources and what we do with the waste products of human activity most obviously co2 but also plastic nitrate particulates and a lot of other things Johan rocks from of the Stockholm resilience Institute argues this is the proof that we have to take seriously that there really are planetary limits so even if maybe the Club of Rome people got it maybe they were a little too soon maybe we weren't actually up against those limits yet at that time but there are planetary limits we can't go on forever putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and not expect to see adverse consequences put another way the oceans in the atmosphere are not garbage dumps so this then leads to two interrelated issues one is the issue of science and the other is the issue of capitalism so let's talk about science first emergence of doubt Erik Conway and I were rather mindful and careful about telling a story that was not the fault of scientists that is to say that scientists were primarily the victims in the story what we showed in this story was how people who were ideologically motivated think tanks the fossil fuel industry and a small number of scientists mostly physicists had constructed this narrative that was intended to disparage climate science and discredit climate scientists so those scientists those climate scientists were essentially a victims in the story of a disinformation campaign now of course there were things that we thought scientists might have done differently but we didn't want to get into that in this book because we thought it would dilute the story and in a way distract attention from the main event which was this organized campaign of disinformation disparagement discrediting and denial lots of D words and deception but in some important way I think that we do have to acknowledge that science as it has practiced as we have practiced it has actually failed us and I don't mean that the individual climate science into this in the story necessarily failed but science as an enterprise has not really been able to deal with the problem of climate change so let me explain what I mean by that if we go back to the early modern period the period that historians recognized as the beginning of what we would consider modern science there's been a prevailing assumption a kind of organizing assumption in a way that science sorry that knowledge is power this is associated most famously with Francis Bacon and it was his argument which he made famously in several books including the great inspiration it was his argument for the reason why men should pursue science and why kings and other patrons should support it because science would give us knowledge and that knowledge would give us the power to improve our lives so science was viewed as an empowering thing and that was good in the 20th century the same basic construct this idea that knowledge was power motivated men like Roger Revelle and James Hansen to alert policymakers to the threat of manmade climate change these men assumed that if our political leaders understood the science if they understood the threat they would act on that knowledge they would use their political power to act on scientists knowledge so knowledge would become power by being channeled through a line of communication well as we all know that didn't happen climate change got worse Roger Revelle died before any significant actions were taken to adjust the issue and Jim Hansen got arrested now most of this was not scientists fault as I've already said scientists face the highly organized well fund and very professional network determined to confuse the American people about climate change and to block policy action but it does raise some questions about how scientists have understood what climate science is how they've tried to communicate it and how we've all thought about the relationship between knowledge and power so in general and I'm painting with a broad brush here but I think it's one that's basically true scientists have tend to view climate change as a problem in physical science then it should say we viewed climate change as a scientific problem and the key parameters that climate scientists have focused on have been physical parameters things like the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so we've all heard the number 350 I think we all know that co2 is now past 400 but we hear these numbers about the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere all the time and we also hear numbers like the mean global temperature increase that results when those greenhouse gas concentrations increase now viewed this way scientists have repeatedly stated that the cause of global warming is the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and of course that's true it's something I've quoted many times in my own work we know that climate change is caused by increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation I've said that myself a hundred times but we could equally well say that climate change is a political social and economic prom and that actually it's causes people and that scientists focus on the physical aspects of climate change have actually obscured this point and so I want to read your section now from the book that gets a little bit into this question of how scientists have framed the problem of climate change and with this focus primarily on the physical scientific aspects and not some of the other important elements it is difficult to understand why humans did not respond appropriately in the early penumbral period when preventive measures were still possible many have sought an answer in the general phenomenon of human adaptive optimism which later proves crucial for survivors even more elusive to scholar is why scientist whose job it was to understand the threat and warn their societies and who thought they did understand the threat and that they were warning their societies failed to appreciate the full magnitude of climate change to shed light on this question some scholars have paint pointed to the epistemic structure of Western science particularly in the late 19th and 20th centuries which was organized both intellectually and institutionally around quote disciplines in which specialists developed a high level of expertise in a small area of inquiry this reductionist approach sometimes credited to the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes was not fully developed until the late 19th century oh sorry but not fully developed until the late 19th century was believed to give intellectual power and vigor to investigators by focusing on singular elements of complex problems tractability was a guiding ideal of the time problems there were too large or too complex to be solved in their totality were divided into smaller more manageable elements while reductionism proved powerful in many domains particularly quantum physics and medical diagnostics it impeded investigations of complex systems reductionism also made it different for scientists to articulate the threat posed by climate change since many experts did not actually know very much about aspects of the prom beyond their own expertise and then in parentheses other environmental problems faced similar challenges for example for years scientists did not understand the role of polar stratigraphy the clouds in severe ozone depletion in the still glaciated Antarctic regions because chemists working on the chemical reactions did not even know there were clouds in the polar stratosphere and that's the true story even scientists who had a broad view of climate change often felt it would be inappropriate for them to articulate it because that would require them to speak beyond their expertise and seemed to be taking credit for other people's work responding to this scientists and political leaders created the IPCC the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to bring together the diverse specialists needed to speak to the whole problem yet perhaps because of the diversity of specialists views represented perhaps because of pressures from governmental sponsors or perhaps because of the constraints of scientific culture already mentioned the IPCC had trouble speaking in a clear voice other scientists promoted the idea of system science complexity science and most pertinent to our discussion here Earth System science but these so called holistic approach is still focused almost entirely on natural systems emitting from consideration the social components yet in many cases the social components with a dominant system drivers it was often said for example that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings deforestation and fossil fuel combustion yet they rarely said that the cause was people and their patterns of conspicuous consumption so I want to say that the cause of climate change is people but it's also not old people or that is to say it's not all people equally and this is the central argument of the Pope's encyclical on climate change and inequality that it's really rich people mostly in Europe North America Australia and Japan something like ninety percent of all the greenhouse gas emissions that have been emitted today have been emitted by about 12 countries and you may say well what about China but the fact is the average American produces three times the greenhouse gases of the average tiniest person nine times the greenhouse gases of the average Pakistani and this brings the Pope to into a discussion of capitalism and so it should bring us there as well so we can't talk about climate change in capitalism without talking about Naomi Klein because this is her central argument in her book this changes everything she argues that capitalism is to blame for climate change so in effect that the cause of climate change isn't actually people it's people living in capitalist economic systems and therefore she wants to say that the only way to stop climate change is to bring the era of capitalism to an end when she says this changes everything what she means is that we have to change our economic system we have to move past capitalism now I find this argument a bit ironic because of course this is what climate change deniers think too they concluded that addressing climate change would put us on the road to socialism and from there on the road to serfdom so that's drawing on Friedrich von Hayek famous book and so they refuse to accept that climate change was real and serious because they couldn't see it anyway they do address it without feeling like we were opening up a back door to socialism and in fact in an early interview when her book first came out the only client said that she first got the idea from her for her book by meeting hours when she realized that she said that the merchants of doubt' were right the capitalism is the cause of climate change well so this is a complicated argument and I think there's a lot in her work to agree with for example she says this which I agree with our economy is at war with many forms of life on Earth including human life what the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity's use of resources what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion only one of these sets of rules can be changed and it's not the laws of nature so here's what I think's right about this argument nearly all economists have agreed that our current economic system fails to account for what they would call external in fact the whole phrase external costs really tells you what the problem is that things like pollution and destruction of habitat that these are viewed as external to the economic system not part and parcel of the economic system and there are many many examples of this the most obvious one in relation to climate change is that when we buy gas the price we pay does not reflect the damage that fossil fuels do but it's not just gasoline it's really all the goods and services we use we don't pay for the waste products we don't pay when we buy anything a computer a book of dress earrings we don't pay for the cost of the waste that have been produced those wastes in most cases are just dumped somewhere and the cost passed on to some communities somewhere that takes that waste but is this really a problem of capitalism this is really I think one of the key questions because we know that environmental destruction was as bad or worse under Soviet Communism than it was under American and European capitalism at that same time and of course just because the merchants of doubt' thought they were defending capitalism freedom doesn't mean they were right about that in fact the whole argument of our book is that they weren't right that they were misguided that they had this misguided association of capitalism with personal freedom that those are actually two different things but in their own ideology they get conflated and so I want to argue that it doesn't follow that the only way to fix climate change is to quote change everything and in fact that conclusion worries me greatly because it seems to me it would be a whole lot easier to change a few things than to try to change everything now obviously there's a lot more we can say about this and I'm happy to answer questions on this point but when I was trying to decide what to say about all this I decided to go to the same website that had the Naomi Klein quotes and to see if they had any quotes from me and they do so that's good and here's the quotation they have from me it's from a discussion of the papal encyclical where I said about the Pope's message it really is a very radical call to reject materialism as our central value and to think about the sanctity of life and what that really means if we take it seriously so one of the questions is can we reject materialism or at least reject it as a central driving force of our economy and still be capitalists or put another way can we find a way to adjust our system so we pay the true cost of goods and services and don't externalize the damage and so that rewards could be more equitably distributed this is one of the things I'm thinking about in my current book project where I'm looking at questions that we've had over the last hundred years about the regulation of capitalism so maybe what we're talking about is socialism but maybe not maybe it's just some kind of full cost accounting capitalism where we actually do account for the true costs of economic activity some people have proposed the idea of a circular economy where we wouldn't just throw away waste but we would reuse them recycle or find some way to consider the waste stream as part of the economy and not external to it or maybe reading the Pope what we're really talking about is a more compassionate capitalism where we find ways to distribute the benefits more equitably and if it's not less a fair how about just the idea of a well-regulated capitalism so these are all ideas that I'm playing with love to hear what you folks think about it so then we get on to the really crux issues the issues of liberal democracy and Western civilization so in the book the end of history which I noted earlier on in this talk Francis Fukuyama linked the so called end of history to the triumph so I made triumph look like Trump that's a Freudian slip to the triumph and universalization of Western liberal democracy he wrote what we may be witnessing is not the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such that is the endpoint of man's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy well that certainly didn't happen we live in a world today where liberal democracy is threatened from many sides and really as a historian the idea that we could ever come to the end of man's eye biological evolution I mean that's just a ridiculous thing in my opinion for it you know speaking from the perspective of the historian the idea that man would stop thinking is actually not only ridiculous but actually a little scary and the idea that Fukuyama could have seen that as a good thing is also a little weird but in any event it might seem sorry it might seem that Fukuyama is not that pertinent to our point but I think he's very pertinent because it's the same kind of ideological self ideologically self-righteous view of liberal democracy that it would inevitably triumph has also informed the market fundamentalism between climate denial so let me explain that point a little more the original climate change denier were cold warriors who were deeply anti-communist their whole worldview had been framed during the Cold War and they accepted a kind of mannequin view of a cosmic conflict between East and West capitalism and communism at the end of the Cold War when Soviet communism failed they declared the end of communism and the triumph of capitalism and they linked that triumph like Fukuyama to the triumph of liberal democracy insisting that these two things went hand-in-hand and this was the core of their argument for the defense of capitalism because by defending capitalism they claimed they were defending liberal democracy but they went further than that they also made the argument that essentially went like this if capitalism is good then the best version of capitalism is its purest form and anything that restricts it is bad environmentalists want to restrict the use of fossil fuels and regulate greenhouse gases therefore environmentalism is bad and this explains which other something which otherwise would be a bit mystifying in this whole story which is this huge shift in the Republican Party which used to be very committed to conservationism environmental protection until the 1970s Republicans were on board with environmental protection in many areas were actually better than Democrats and then this giant shift right around 1988 and public opinion polls and voting and Congress show this right around 98 ad a at the end of the Cold War this big shift where Republicans turn against Environmental Protection and environmental regulation so that's at the end of the Cold War that's sort of right between 88 and 92 that we see this very big shift in Republican thinking on environmental issues but it's not just Republicans we see this and what I call the neoliberal extension which takes place begins in the 1990s under Clinton and runs through the 2000s this idea that regulation in general is kind of a bad thing that we should try to avoid it as much as possible that we should try to deregulate financial markets trucking it actually begins on your Jimmy Carter with trucking in an aviation but then it gets picked up a lot more in the Clinton era with the deregulation of the financial markets loosening of regulations on pharmaceuticals which not incidentally gives us the opioid crisis that's a whole other story and this actually has a name it's called the Washington Consensus and it was very much promoted by Bill Clinton in conjunction with Tony Blair in the UK but what have we seen since that time what we've seen is that the market has failed to fix climate change or even to respond seriously and now we face the threat that disasters may displace millions of people cause food shortages disease outbreaks perhaps even research and famine and our argument in this book and in our continuing work is that the liberal democracies are going to find it very hard to address these crisis in liberal ways and we're going to find it very hard to continue to defend the ideas of personal individual liberty and autonomy in the face of these massive crisis and so with that I'd like to go back to the book one more time and read the section of the book that deals explicitly with this argument given the events recounted here it is hard to imagine why anyone in the twentieth century would have argued against government protection of the natural environment in which human life depends yet such arguments were not only made they dominated the public sphere the ultimate paradox was that neoliberalism meant to ensure individual freedom above all led eventually to a situation that stated large-scale government intervention classical liberalism was centered on the idea of individual liberty and in the 18th century most individuals had precious little of it economic or otherwise but by the mid 20th century this century this situation had changed dramatically slavery was formally outlawed in the 19th century and monarchies and other forms of empire were increasingly replaced by various forms of liberal democracy in the West individual freedoms both formal and informal probably peaked around the time von Hayek was writing so here we're referring to Friedrich von Hayek who we discussed earlier in the book or shortly thereafter so that's around 1944 by the end of the 20th century Western citizens still held the formal rights of voting various forms of free thought and expression and freedom of employment and travel but actual freedom was decreasing first as economic power was increasingly concentrated in a tiny elite who came to be known as the 1% and then in a political elite propelled to power as the climate crisis forced dramatic interventions to relocate citizens displaced by sea level rise and desertification to contain contagion and to prevent mass famine and so the developments that the neoliberals most dreaded centralized government and loss of personal choice was rendered essential by the very policies that they had put in place and this is a point that I think historians would do well to discuss more because many people have forgotten if we think about times in US history where there have been gigantic violations of civil rights personal rights human rights often they've been associated with disease and contagion or with the articulation of a threat as a form of disease and contagion so if we think about forced sterilization of American citizens during the eugenics period much of that argument was made based on the idea that eugenics was a medical threat or I should say eugenics was a response to a medical threat and we know that over 30,000 people in California alone were sterilized without their consent during that period and many more in other states we know more about California because they kept better records but we know that many of people in other states were similarly affected so this theme that the disasters that climate change will bring are the sorts of things that will justify or seemingly even necessitate the loss of individual liberty we felt was such an important theme that we tried to make it sort of up front and central in the film version of merchants of doubt' and so I wanted to show you one clip and then I'll end with one final reading again that just tries to underscore this point so this is from the ending the last few minutes of the film version of our book is that people don't and we'll see more money dealing that none of these disasters there'll be billions of dollars in real-estate losses but more than that people died that's why members that's why this is meaningful for us and not just for polar bears or people in Bangladesh that's why so many people the scientific community are really starting to talk in very worried tones because there's highly compelling sense in signs in between that we're running out of time to prevent a train so finally we get to the question of Western civilization as a whole and for that I'd like to read from the epilogue of our booklets as the devastating effects of the great collapse began to appear the nation states with democratic governments both parliamentary and Republican were at first unwilling and then unable to deal with the unfolding crisis as food shortages and disease outbreaks spread and sea level rose these governments found themselves without the infrastructure and organizational ability to quarantine and relocate people in China the situation was somewhat different like other post communist nations China had taken steps toward liberalization but still retained a powerful centralized government when sea level rise began to threaten coastal areas China rapidly built new inland cities and villages and relocated more than 250 million people to higher safer ground the relocation was not easy many older citizens as well as infants and young children could not manage the transition nonetheless survival rates exceeded 80 percent too many survivors in what might be viewed as a final irony of our story China's ability to weather disastrous climate change vindicated the necessity of centralized government leading to the establishment of the second People's Republic of China also sometimes referred to as neo Communist China and inspiring similar structures and other reformulating nations by blocking anticipatory action neo liberals did more than expose the tragic flaws in their own system they fostered expansion of the forms of governance they most upward today we remain engaged in a vigorous intellectual discussion of whether now that the climate system has finally stabilized decentralization and Rida Ma critize ation may be considered many academics in the spirit of history's great thinkers hope that such matters may be freely debated others consider that outcome wishful in light of the dreadful events of the past and reject the reappraisal that we wish to invite here evidently the penumbra Falls even today and likely will continue to fall for years decades and perhaps even centuries to come thank you very much well I just think you may not be quite the right right we're but we appreciate the presentation very much and I'm sure there are some questions or comments from the audience if you raise your hand I will come over with a microphone so that you can be heard hi thanks a lot for a good talk just a quick question what evidence is there that the professed commitment to free market solutions to everything is genuine and not just like a lie that bankers and and fossil fuel companies tell so that it sounds objective and not strictly in their interests Thanks yeah that's a great question actually it was something that Eric um when I really grappled with when we were writing merchants of doubt' and I think like a lot of things the answer is both and in our new book we're actually looking specifically at that question and so what we want to argue is that it is both and that we can actually track an interesting story so we've been going back to the early 20th century and finding what we're calling the roots of market fundamentalism and we can find it going back to debates over child labor in the early century and there's no question that in many of those early debates the market free enterprise argument it's kind of those that time the term free enterprise was sort of the term of art was highly cynical highly cynical but at the same time there are other people who I think what happens is sort of a couple of different tracks so meanwhile in Europe you've got Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek the people who are developing neoliberalism a kind of economic framework I think that for von Hayek it actually was authentic and I think it was tied up with his experience of European totalitarianism and if you read von Hayek I mean like a lot of these great thinkers he's much more sophisticated than his followers make him out to be so he's quite sophisticated and he acknowledges that his argument is not an argument for a blanket rejection of government and then he even uses pollution as his as one of his examples of a place where you clearly do need government so one of the interesting things we found in the archive is that when von Hayek's book is published a group of reactionary businessmen in the United States discover it and they begin to promote it in the United States because they say oh look this is great they didn't get the idea from fahad but they realize they can use it and so we've just eric.kolly just sent me some stuff from the archive two days ago J Howard pew who was the CEO of Sun Oil Company he takes out a full-page ad in major newspapers and magazines around the country promoting fun Hayek's book thank you thanks for a wonderful talk welcome you present the threat of climate disaster as a loss a real specter and a loss at the end of liberal democracy and Western civilization although in the narrative form of your presentation of that we get a kind of um reprise of civilization and civilized life in the voice of the person from 2362 whatever in the second China Republic and so in some ways our concerns about the end of civilization are laid because it is revised I wonder if you could speak a little too because in the background of human civilization at that time will be a tremendous loss of biological diversity and the richness of life and I wonder if you could address a little bit the difference between our liberal democracies and civilization a in a rich world and the re-emergence of civilization in the future but the impoverished world yeah that's a great question so we wrote this book originally as an article we it was going to be an article for a journal and then an editor who read it said he thought it would make a nice little book and so we we sort of made a decision not to expand it too much beyond the original article and so there were a lot of other things we could have talked about we also could have talked about ocean acidification that would that's to me like one of the obvious things it's missing no biological side is an obvious piece that's missing the reason we made the decision not to add more to it well one was the editor was happy with it as it wasn't like wow all writers happy with this book as it is maybe just leave it alone but but the bigger reason the conceptual ease and we were really trying to point focus the point on this issue that the merchants of doubt that we say claim that they're defending liberal democracy and I do believe that some of them actually believe that in their own minds but we wanted to make the point that it's not going to work out the way they think it's actually going to go the other way because the longer we wait to fix this the harder it's going to be to manage it with the tools that we have in liberal democracy so that was really the point of the book and that's what we were trying to get to and that's why we didn't then get engaged in some of these other issues about loss about the diversity but you're absolutely right I think that even if we come out of this you know sort of relatively unscathed we won't really be on scape because we will have had this huge loss and sometimes it's hard to talk to people about what that means because I think that so many people live so disengaged from nature nowadays that it's a little difficult sometimes to really even talk about that meaning and I think you know there are a lot of people like West Jackson Terry tempest Williams you know a lot of nature writers like I don't concern myself a nature writer right who are trying to engage that issue and I think it's very tricky and it's also tricky because it's hard to talk about it without sounding elitist right because we often have an image of people who spend a lot of time in the wilderness or you know nature is being sort of rich white people who can afford to do this or afford to you know go diving the reefs of course that's not true either right we know that there's tons of evidence that lots of people of all different sizes shapes colors and economic status enjoy being outdoors and more than just enjoy that it's actually really important for mental health there's a great article that just came out the other day that I tweeted because it was actually a scientific study that showed that adults - people who have spent time more time in nature as children are happier and mentally healthier adults and actually my daughter sent this to me and I said see that's why we dragged you camping so and and there was actually there's I mean there's a lot of interesting things to be said about this when I was in the archives last year I spent some time with the papers of Russell train who was the first head of the Council of Economic Council on Environmental Quality under Richard Nixon train was a really interesting guy he was very much a sort of old-school Republican environmentalist of the almost like the Teddy Roosevelt type he came out of the Conservation Foundation was became interested in conservation because he went to Africa and became enamored of the great animals and wanting to protect elephants and things like that but over time his vision of conservation expand and he wrote an incredibly interesting report in 1968 where he pointed out that after the race riots in the 1960s and Watts when people were asked people those communities were asked what they wanted what would make their lives better many of them said parks green spaces recreation and he pointed this out he said this is not just an issue for rich people right this is an issue for all Americans so he I'm a great admirer of Russell Chan I think he was incredibly insightful person and we've kind of lost sight of that I think I mean not all of us there are definitely people who are working on this issue so I think we need to find ways to talk more about that so that people will understand that the loss of biological diversity is something really profound and it's not just you know ecosystem services I personally hate the term ecosystem services because I feel like it's so utilitarian and it makes it sound like nature's only worthwhile to the extent that we can monetize it and turn it into like drugs or something so it's much more profound than that so we didn't talk about in our book just because we couldn't do everything but it's not to say that it isn't hugely important and then the other piece of course is there's a reason right I mean we're trying to make the point here and in a way this is an anti Fukuyama book right there's this glorification of Western civilization by the neoliberals and a kind of disrespect for knowledge traditions and lots of other places and so we're kind of trying to make the point if anybody's going to come out of this relatively unscathed it may well be China and if you think about it China is the most persistent civilization on earth they've come through a lot of things before so if anyone's going to come through this one it's more likely to be them than us so we may think that we're better and superior but the historical events doesn't really support that hypothesis so my question is about your work around the labeling of the unprecedented the Anthropocene because while we've been waiting for the deliberations in the side of the committee for the so-called Golden Spike the the thing they're going to label that we got an age the last age of the Holocene labeled after a province or state in India the malai melt Memphis you can say about it I can make a lion age that signified that the last 4,000 years of the Holocene was to be named after the drought so that ended in 1950 so in some sense that appears to be coordinated with what you're saying which is that the great acceleration starting the year I was born say to speak is now they're going to be the starting point of the end prophecy so were there conflicts amongst different parties in the geological society around the Holocene and the next age yeah and what what's the downside in your opinion of labeling this next epoch the Anthropocene well of course there's a group of scientists there's like 24 of us who have been majorly active and have been co-authors on some of the papers and then there's like I don't know how many additional people were somewhat involved in one degree or another so of course we've had giant arguments about all these things they're been sort of two main levels of the arguments one has been about this issue of what the Anthropocene is like an age a stage an epoch an era you know that like that whole thing and I haven't been that involved in that argument because I'm not a strategy for by training and I haven't had the time to kind of delve into the on that level so that's one thing and that's a you know a technical argument but it also has sort of broader philosophical ramification the main sort of conceptual argument we've had has been about the starting date and what we could call the early middle and late Anthropocene argument so some people have made the argument warned Letterman particularly as associated with this position the humans have been altering the environment ever since we evolved and certainly if you think about Native American communities indigenous people who used fire to transform the landscape we have a lot of evidence of that we certainly have quite a bit of evidence of the human role in the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna so the idea that humans somehow so some people would say if we place the start of the Anthropocene around the time of the great acceleration that that's discounting or downplaying the substantial evidence of human impact before and if the Anthropocene the name is about humans and the will of humans then it's wrong to discount that earlier effect the counter-argument to that is well this is remember this is a geological question not a archaeological or anthropological questions so for geologists particularly for Stratego furs the question becomes yes but when does this become a globally recognized synchronous signal and that argument won the day in our group because remember we're reporting to the International Commission on stratigraphy and we've been asked to view this as Stratego furs or geologists thinking about stratigraphy which is a different question than some other ways it could be framed now when we made that decision there were some people in the group who criticized us for being political and claimed that we were being overly influenced by a notion of the Anthropocene tied up with climate change and particularly associated with Paul Crutzen and that we were not being properly scientifically objective for this reason but that was countered with the organ about global synchronous E and the global synchronous e argument won the day and I support that argument I think that's correct so when we say that the machine starts you know after World War two we're not saying that there's no human impact prior to that but we're saying that the human impact doesn't have the global observability that we absolutely do see after 1945 1950 no it's okay yeah yeah I do I mean I take the argument I mean I take the argument that the human impact doesn't just suddenly start in 1945 and I think that's clearly true and so you could argue and again Warren Rudman did argue this that it would have been better to have started the Anthropocene when humans evolved and had to have an early middle and late anthracene but then he so then I'm not sure if he made this argument or if other people did but then the question so are we in the late Anthropocene but then of course late is a bad term to give to anything that's not finished so yeah I think it was a tricky I think it was a tricky question and that's why in the end we we kept going back to this question of what would be stratigraphically recognizable but there are definitely people you know people who are not static refers who would say this doesn't make sense to them if you think of this as a more historical political and there I know there are some historians who have made arguments for widespread human alteration of the environment let's say in medieval Europe you could think about agriculture for example so there are some historians who would say that what we've done downplays the significance of what we know about human impacts on the environment in the Middle Ages or any other time period you might choose but again it gets back to this issue of the breadth the depth the intensity of the signal so yes Romans moved water around yes I don't know you know Native Americans burned a lot of force right these things definitely occurred and they're definitely meaningfully historically but it's not clear that they reached the level of being a geological signal okay we have we have time for one more question here in this portion but I'll encourage you all afterwards to corral speaker if you if you if I'd missed you somehow thank you thank you for an interesting talk I wanted to speak to very specifically about the intellectual inheritance we we have as often disregarded of the intellectual movement the sort of the concept of the limits of growth and in particularly commend a beacon economist who wrote about that as an economist speaking to other economists Herman Daly yeah yeah yeah and and how that's an alternative way of thinking about alternatives to like the socialist alternative - cut - to capitalism yeah I definitely know Daly's work I've taught it I taught a class for a few years when I was still UCSD called like it was like the informal title is the greatest hits of environmentalism and we did teach daily as one of our books in that class if you know of other things that would be relevant I'd love to hear that from you because what Eric and I are hoping to do in this new book is to have a chapter towards the end the book called alternative capitalism's and the argument we want to make is that capitalism isn't one thing that if you think that look at capitalism you know in the period of Adam Smith managerial capitalism in the late 19th century the Gilded Age capitalism in the time of the New Deal capitalism now I mean there have been very very profound differences in how governments have engaged or not in the marketplace and what kinds of restricts and regulations we have I mean one of the conspicuous things about the neoliberal period here in the United States is the repeal of many of the regulations that were put into place in the New Deal so I was just reading the other day about the holy act of 1935 which was put in place to deal with abuses on the part of monopolistic practices on the part of the electricity industry this was repealed and I think it was 2005 so it's like we almost forgot the lessons of the Great Depression in the New Deal and now we have to learn them again so what we want to argue is just like you know we wouldn't historians would never allow anyone to talk about religion as if it was one thing or the state as if it's one thing right we know now that those terms are way too capacious there have been there are many forms of there's expression there have been many forms of state and government and there have been significant differences in the forms of capitalism that we've seen and so part of the argument we want to make is is there a way to think through this in which we can think about you know what I would like to call a more well-regulated or well managed capitalism that takes into account some of these big problems that unregulated capitalism doesn't deal with but we haven't written that chapter yet so if you have suggestions please tell me because I'd really be interested in hearing from people on that the more entertaining parts of my position that the Humanities Center is to be able to start stimulating conversations one of the more depressing aspects as I have to end them and so at this point I do want to thank Naomi for getting us off to a great start on conversations about nature and the humanities so please join me and thank you for one more time [Applause]
Co-author of 'Merchants of Doubt', Naomi gave a fantastic (understatement) talk in 2019 here. I found this talk absolutely essential to anyone interested in hearing of the impacts of climate change from someone with a large swath of historical knowledge, combined with broad climate impact knowledge.
She talks about the limitations of specialization in the field hindering the community speaking with a unified voice, possible futures, possible solutions, likelihoods, as things stand now, the state of the 'Anthropocene' as it is justified as an identifiable marker for future generations, and just boils everything climate-related down in a beautiful manner of speaking that respects the listener and anticipates their own internal questions as they may be appearing in their minds and addresses them as she goes. My paragraph can't do it justice. It's just too good to boil down. Watch it and report back, if you haven't already seen it.
Fantastic talk and absolutely a must-watch.
Sincerely just posting in the hopes that more people see this. It is just that good.