Post Carbon Institute: La Grande Négociation
La Grande Négociation: while we bargain, our ultimate fate comes down to acceptance
It’s only day 3 of the meetings, but I’ve already come to one conclusion:
As a society, we’re still stuck in the bargaining phase of Kübler-Ross’s Stages of Grief.
Yes, there’s actual bargaining taking place between climate negotiators at COP21. But I’m talking about a larger, more systemic bargaining that’s occurring: Our attempts to respond to the existential threat of climate change while holding desperately to our extractive, growth-and-consumption-based way of life. But as PCI Fellow Bill McKibben likes to say, “Physics and chemistry don’t bargain.”
It’s not only world leaders who are trying to mitigate the climate crisis while maintaining “business as usual.” Too many environmentalists are engaged in their own version of bargaining—placing their faith in the assertion that
all our energy needs can be met affordably from wind, solar, and water technologies by 2050. Now, I would agree with this claim if we thought long and hard about what we mean by the word “needs.” But the (sometimes spoken but more often unspoken) expectation is that we won’t “need” to significantly change how we live.
The rationale, of course, is that “our way of life” is currently non-negotiable and so we must operate within the political realities of the day if we’re to have any hope of making some kind of climate progress. And that’s true to a point. In fact, it’s precisely what’s led to the kind of agreement we’re likely to get out of Paris—incremental, insufficient, with lots of prayers and promises that technology will save the day.
Ultimately, we have no choice but to move from the bargaining stage of grief to that of acceptance. The choice we do have is what grief we’ll have to accept – the end of the American-style “way of life” or the end of humanity altogether.
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