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Communicating Complex Problems

When the world economy melted down following the Great Recession of the early twenty-first century, many governments declared the banks that were responsible for the crisis too big to fail. The resulting bailouts at taxpayer expense fueled a spiral of public sector and wage austerity that continues to this day. One may debate the wisdom of the methods used to stave off economic collapse, but one thing seems clear: much the same economy that produced the crisis - and that is driving the environment to extinction - was restored. There were few changes to the operating logic of risky, debt driven, and speculative growth. Nor were many changes made to tax and investment policies that send profits up the corporate and investment food chains, and push risk and inequality down to taxpayers and workers. Most leaders and experts spoke of restoring economic growth through much the same economic activities as before.

The folly of restoring the existing economic system was magnified by the Covid-19 pandemic that came along just as many national economies were beginning to recover from the Great Recession. One glaring warning sign was that at the peak of the health crisis in 2020, with factories, offices, travel, oil production, and many other normal operations cut back, CO2 emissions were reduced by 5.5 percent in the first quarter, and projected at around 8 percent by the end of 2020 by the International Energy Agency.1 Even though that represented the largest drop in emissions ever recorded, it roughly corresponded to the estimates of 7.6 percent reductions each year from 2020 to 2030 deemed necessary by scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to hold rising temperatures below the danger line of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Beyond that red line, life conditions for life on the planet are expected to move from dangerous to catastrophic.2 The implication is that the existing global economy must stall in order to meet minimum requirements for ecological survival. And yet, similar to the bailouts following the financial crisis, many governments propped up airlines, oil companies, and other polluting businesses deemed necessary to continue "normal" economic activities. Unless thinking about environment and economy become integrated in ways that enable imagining a 'new normal' that supports more resilient societies, the second great opportunity of this century will also be lost.3

To apply the economic logic of the financial crisis or the Covid-19 pandemic to the environment, it is hard to imagine what an environmental "bailout" might even look like - beyond the literal image of trying to turn back rising waters by any means necessary. Instead of policies that might work, we hear soothing phrases, from the evergreen idea of sustainable development to more recent political incantations for Green growth. These empty promises amount to magical thinking, involving a simple trick of categorical reasoning: we take an attractive feature of category A (the popular belief that growth is good), and combine it with an attractive element from category B (Green policies are good), mix with appealing language from politicians, and we have a reassuring idea that sounds much better than it works.

Because many citizens have come to doubt such empty political promises, environmental activism has continued at high levels. However, as noted in the introduction, it is easier to sound alarms than to develop broad programs of action that are likely to work. The scale of environmental emergencies makes it easy to see why so much energy is spent sounding alarms. During the summer before Covid-19 stole the headlines, the news reported that vast sections of Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, and other areas inside the Arctic Circle were ablaze. The World Meteorological Organization estimated that the carbon dioxide produced by the fires in just one month equaled the total annual emissions of Sweden. At the same time, something called a "heat dome" settled over Greenland, creating a feedback cycle causing historic levels of ice melt. The same heat system was parked earlier over Europe, breaking temperature records, as Paris soared to 108 degrees Fahrenheit, helping to make July of 2019 the hottest month ever recorded on the planet.

As the earth continued its orbit around the sun, fires and record heat swept Australia. In addition to killing an estimated billion animals and creating some of the worst air pollution on the planet, the fires produced more carbon dioxide than the annual emissions of more than one hundred nations. In something of a theater of the absurd, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, an inveterate climate-change denier, ordered the Sydney fireworks to go ahead to show the world how optimistic the people were, even though fires and smoke had choked the city much of the summer. Undaunted by reality, Australian tourism authorities launched a campaign to lure post-Brexit tourists from the UK to the beaches of Oz. The ads featured Kylie Minogue singing, dancing, and lounging on pristine beaches, even as real Australian beaches were surrounded by fires that trapped thousands of actual tourists.

The language of denial is often as impenetrable as the atmosphere in the regions on fire. In that same fateful summer, more than 70,000 fires burned in the Amazon forests, many of them started to clear land for farming cattle and soybeans. The smoke turned daytime into night as far away as São Paulo, some 1,700 miles to the south. Earlier in the century, Brazil had improved its stewardship of the rainforest, but the election of a radical right government reversed those trends. The new Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro blocked conservation activities, suppressed record keeping by government agencies, and cut funds to environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). He then blamed the fires on revenge from the NGOs and topped it off by accusing actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio of donating money to the organizations that set the fires. Fighting the facts of environmental collapse with conspiracy and disinformation continued as the Brazilian foreign minister declared climate change a Marxist plot. That claim followed the lead of US President Trump, who had long before declared climate change a Chinese hoax.

Beyond the smoke screens of enabling politicians are the realities of too much oil continuing to be burned and hundreds of new coal plants under construction around the world. Prominent energy companies have long covered up the dangers of their products. For example, leaked documents reveal that Shell and Exxon conducted research in the 1980s showing that their products were speeding climate change. Yet those reports were buried in order not to disturb investors and governments. Instead of pursuing other business models, the largest of the energy companies doubled down. They helped fund think tanks to produce disinformation and denials that such changes were occurring. And they have lobbied for more drilling in Arctic regions now accessible due to melting ice.

The locked-in commitments to oil are revealed in business networks that favor profits above all. The leadership of JP Morgan Bank asked Lee Raymond to continue on its board, despite major shareholder concerns that when Raymond was CEO of Exxon and later Exxon Mobil, he presided over the cover-up of known product harms and authorized funding of think tanks and other organizations running major disinformation campaigns. The bank clearly signaled its desire to continue on the path that generated a fortune by being the world's largest lender to fossil fuel companies.

Although pressure from activists and pension-fund shareholders produced a commitment to stop investing in Arctic drilling operations, JP Morgan continued to send mixed signals by criticizing the Green New Deal efforts in the US, while joining a climate action investor coalition and issuing PR statements about its support for renewables. Meanwhile, in Europe, the big energy companies have fought to make sure that the hard-won victories of environmentalists such as the Paris Climate Agreement would fall far short of stabilizing the ominous trends. Exxon Mobil, BP, and Shell spent over $100 million during the decade of 2010-2020 lobbying the European Union to water down its climate policies, including schemes to slow the conversion to electric vehicles in the European Green Deal.4 All of this is about protecting the massive fossil fuel reserves already owned and identified by companies in the coal, gas, and oil business. The profits of those companies depend on being able to continue harvesting, selling, and burning those reserves. According to their stock reports, big energy companies have more than five times the fossil fuel reserves allowed by models simulating extreme climate disaster scenarios. As Bill McKibben put it: "The fossil fuel industry has five times the carbon needed to break the planet, and they're clearly planning to burn it."5 Unless we begin thinking in terms that integrate economics, environment, and politics, and develop a new economic normal we will never end the underlying demand that is burning and poisoning the planet.

The dirty secret here is that as long as our current economic operating systems remain unchallenged, the ongoing demand for fossil fuels will crash the environment, and, eventually, the economy into the bargain. Unless civil-society organizations, funders, and political parties begin to coordinate and spread economic ideas with greater popular appeal, political struggles for the future...