Cloudcatcher, Vevey Switzerland, 2014 by Arno Rafael Minkkinen
Like all fights against nouns (drugs, terror), the fight against climate change is a category error. Climate change is a natural reaction to artificial growth. Centuries ago, colonizers incarnated human greed as corporations, and these now ruling AI have done what they’re programmed to do, grow at any cost. ‘We’ are not even the relevant species to climate change, and now is not the time to do anything about it. As all of you should know from your own lives, sometimes it’s too little, too late, and there are bigger forces going on. Climate change is one of those things and this is just one of those times. Anyone who’s lost love, lost loved ones, or just failed a class or missed a train should know this intimately enough.
‘Fighting’ climate change is saying that actions shouldn’t have reactions and that causes shouldn’t have effects. It is fighting a causal process which is impossible, undesirable, and also completely misunderstanding the problem (which is actually a predicament). As the Merovingian AI said in The Matrix:
You see there is only one constant. One universal. It is the only real truth. Causality. Action, reaction. Cause and effect.
Fighting climate change — in the common understanding of it — is to cheat causality. To have our climate and eat it too. To ‘switch’ to renewables. Switch what? The same artificial growth machine that’s trashing the place in so many ways besides CO₂. The grand plan is to continue bulldozing the world, just with an electric bulldozer now. Can you see the problem here? As Dr. Tom Murphy said in his physics textbook, “if energy became essentially unlimited by some technology, I shudder to think what it would mean for the rest of the planet.”
If we’re going to fight something we should consider A) what do we win B) can we win and C) should we win? I’m afraid the answers are no, no, no! That’s why when it comes to fighting climate change, we should seriously consider losing. If we’re at war with the gods of climate, the best option is definitely surrender.
A) What Do We Win
The goal state of climate change is not clearly defined, so I’m channelling general…