News about the impacts that climate change is beginning to have on the natural environment and our society continue to increase. The problem with climate change is that the possible solutions or ways of addressing it proposed have been simplifying. So much so that all we have to do is develop the technology to stop using fossil fuels and plant a lot of trees. These acts would reduce excess man-made carbon dioxide.
Without ceasing to be true, the media have echoed such simplistic examples to mitigate and adapt to climate change, displaying headlines such as:
- “This machine just started sucking CO2 out of the air to save us from climate change” (Fast Company, May 2017).
- “By sucking carbon out of the air, Swiss company wins new climate change funds” (Reuters, August 2018).
- “These companies are leading the fight against climate change” (CNN Business, October 2018).
What is the unspoken message behind this news? Climate change is a kind of monetizable “problem” that business and technology can “solve,” much like solving the problem of a supply chain or public relations crisis.
But is not. Climate change is a political problem and requires a political solution. Much of our society finds itself “collectively hypnotized” by the tech industry, believing that everything can be solved with innovation and more money thrown into the tech sector. If we let technology alone address the problem of climate change, we may be led to examples such as the following: world governments contract carbon capture to a group of technology companies, who are paid by society to rent their equipment and keep climate change steady. If the problem is fixed and all excess carbon is removed from the atmosphere, their services become useless, which works against their shareholders and investors. This has great social and environmental repercussions, since these companies and private agents try to maintain the problem in order to continue obtaining benefits.
The changes we need must be transformative and sociopolitical in nature. The problem is that this requires a greater collective effort. If we look back, we will see that the same or more drastic changes have already been carried out than the current one, which seemed improbable in past times. For example, the freeing of slaves in the US in the 19th century reduced the freedom of their masters, just as later labor and social laws reduced the freedom of employers. Today companies are no longer free to fire their workers and employees for no reason, and they have also lost the freedom to reduce wages below subsistence level. All these laws and prohibitions, unimaginable not so long ago, have ended up limiting man’s freedom to exploit man. Something that, today, we are grateful for and benefits us collectively.
A similar approach is needed in the fight against climate change. We need intergenerational political agreements that, despite reducing our current freedom to some degree, ensure the future well-being of our species and planet. The initial obstacles by companies, governments and even ourselves will be great. But in a few years from now, the limitations and laws that are established to create a more sustainable society will seem not only normal, but even insufficient. Let us remember: climate change is a political problem, not a technological one, and requires political solutions to achieve the social transformation we need.
Julen González Redín
PhD in Sustainable Development
NAIDER