There are so many ways to fiddle while Rome burns, or as this season’s weather would have it, gets torn apart by hurricanes and tornadoes and also goes underwater – and, in other places, burns. One particularly pernicious way comes from the men in love with big tech, who are forever insisting that we need some amazing new technology to solve our problems, be it geoengineering, carbon sequestration or fusion – but wait, it gets worse.
At an artificial intelligence conference in Washington DC, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed that “[w]e’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it” and that we should just plunge ahead with AI, which is so huge an energy hog it’s prompted a number of tech companies to abandon their climate goals. Schmidt then threw out the farfetched notion that we should go all in on AI because maybe AI will somehow, maybe, eventually know how to “solve” climate, saying: “I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”
Eventually is not good enough. A distinguished group of scientists said in a paper published on 8 October: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”
We need to pull back from that brink, but Schmidt is arguing for plunging over it, because guys like him are excited about AI. This is like arguing we should jettison the lifeboats and hang out on the sinking ship because what if there was eventually a totally awesome, new kind of lifeboat we can’t even imagine right now?
We have the lifeboats now – we have the solutions, and we have had them for a while, and they keep getting better, as in better-designed, more efficient, more affordable and adaptable. We just need to implement them, but they’re just not the solutions a lot of the rich and powerful like. Proposing we go for some false or nonexistent solution has become an excuse constantly deployed as an excuse for not supporting the solutions we have.
“Delay is the new denial” became a slogan in the climate movement a few years ago, and maybe “decoy is the new denial” should be added to it, by which I mean proposing we ignore workable present-day solutions in favor of unworkable and nonexistent ones while continuing to burn fossil fuel.
One might think that Schmidt, whose net worth is estimated at around $23bn, would devote some time and resources to organizing us to reach our climate goals rather than excuse himself from acting with his dismissive defeatism. But overall billionaires and the very rich are part of the problem, with their outsized power and the dismal ways most of them use it. And their climate impact is obscene – the richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%.
Scientists and engineers have been telling us for a very long time what we need to do and how to do it, and most of us already know that what we need to do is make a swift transition away from burning fossil fuels. Protecting forests and other natural systems and redesigning how we live, travel and produce and consume also matter, but phasing out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is the big one. Schmidt lives in California, where we’ve been getting more than 100% of our electricity needs met many days this year by sun, wind and water, and storing the surplus in immense battery systems. Obviously not everything in California runs on electricity, but this is a nice demonstration model of how rapidly a renewable system can scale up.
When it comes to some of the tech oligarchs, I suspect the sheer modesty of the solutions – that we should consume less, which means we can produce less, and make this energy transition to a renewable-powered world – is not the kind of gee-whiz rocket science they love. (Though solar and wind technologies are pretty amazing, particularly if you know how rapidly their design has improved, their cost has plummeted and their implementation has spread.) It is in many ways a social solution in which lots of us adjust how we live and how we power our devices, not a grand centralized invention that is super profitable for a few.
I do not know if it would be worse to live in a world in which we genuinely did not have the solutions, or to live in one where we have them but are not implementing them on the speed and scale we know we need to. But I know we have the solutions.
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