[Excerpt from upcoming book — It’s Getting Hot in Here: Reflections of a climate hawk grappling with the inevitable]
Most of us are familiar with the addiction cycle, if only vicariously via some colourful public figure. The first hit feels good, so we want more. Perhaps we build a tolerance, and need a bigger hit. Pushers make sure we get it. Alarmed, we try to cut back — but it hurts too much. So we keep going: more hits, harder to quit, more hits. Delaying the pain of withdrawal doesn’t help. We need to clean up. If we’re rich or famous we head to the Betty Ford; “forgive yourself, renew, start again!”
We tend to forgive the addict. We believe in fresh starts. At some point in the cycle, though, the addict loses the chance to renew themselves. Getting dry doesn’t cut it. The body has decayed too much. The damage is permanent.
Our use of fossil fuels is akin to addiction. A useful one, to be sure, more like craving calorific fast foods like fatty hamburgers, crispy fries and sugary pop than the more tragic pull of cigarettes or opioids. Just as fat-saturated, sugar-or-salt-filled foods power our bodies, fossil fuels are the energy driver that helped us crawl out of the economic dead end of the pre-industrial world. Our economy revelled in the rush of fossil energy for a couple of centuries. And for a long time, it felt good — just like those burgers. Cheap flights to Mexico. Fun-to-drive fast cars. Air-conditioning in summer and jacuzzies in winter.
By definition, defeating an addiction isn’t easy. Especially if those who provide the product work to increase its addictive potential. The fast food industry engineered those burgers and fries, fine tuning their molecular content to trigger ancient, evolutionary rushes of satisfaction that salt, simple sugars and fats deliver. Soda producers fought to keep pop in schools, knowing how irresistible (and harmful) they are to kids. The fossil fuel industry does the same: fund misinformation campaigns about climate risk; hide evidence of harm; stifle competition; and generally embed their influence up and down economic and political ladders.
All the while, we build more high-carbon long-term energy infrastructure. Our own personal addiction to cars, planes and plentiful energy was easy to justify. It felt good. It corroborated a narrative of plenty.
Meanwhile, the environmental and scientific communities fought to curtail that addition, speaking with ever-more urgency of the dangers it posed. That dynamic defined the ‘good fight’ ever since Jim Hansen first gave testimony to the US Senate on climate risk back in 1989. The bad guys kept us addicted with political influence, and the good guys kept telling us to turn down the thermostat and ride a bike to work.
Advocating a shift to clean energy felt a bit like the local yogi urging a vegetarian diet: it may not feel as satisfying (at least to those addicted to fast food…) but it was healthier, better over the long term, less damaging to our bodies and minds. ‘Boo, no fun!’ most of us replied. Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for wearing sweater in the White House. Almost every climate hawk I know still flies for vacation. Many love a good steak. We’re all addicted, however much we want to lay all the blame at the bad actors’ feet.
The metaphor of addiction extends to the pain of withdrawal. Getting off fossil fuels was always going to be painful: to companies who want to extend profits and to us who love our energy intensive lifestyles. The healthy alternative –renewables, efficiency — was naive at best and full of economic risk at worst. Harm reduction out, one more fossil-fuel driven economic cycle in. Now, decades after Hansen’s warning, we still don’t feel the withdrawal pains of decarbonization: a forced reduction in value of the fossil fuel sector, the purge of its political influence and a recognition of our own role in easy, cheap energy consumption.
Here, the fast food metaphor breaks down. A person can stop eating fast food anytime. Overnight, if they’re motivated. Most of the damage — obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, fatty liver disease — can be undone, or isn’t fatal. Rarely are we too late to follow our good doctor’s advice, and if we are, it’s likely we’re well into old age anyway. We go through the minor pain of withdrawal and we emerge relatively healthy. We’re way past that point on climate. Our body — the planet’s ecosystems — is already on pace to be damaged beyond repair. Worse, we can’t just stop overnight. The most rapid harm reduction we might muster is getting off fossil fuels by 2050. Maybe.
The addiction metaphor only works today if we extend it: because we couldn’t handle withdrawal from our fossil fuel addiction, we now have a compromised body. It’s more like opioids or crystal meth than fast food: if you get off them too late your teeth rot, your brain is damaged or shrunk and your liver cooked. You can’t recover to your prior healthy state. This is what we’ve done: we traded a brief delay in the relatively modest pain of withdrawal for ongoing, permanent systemic collapse. The irony is we still need to go through what will now be an even more painful, rapid withdrawal — but at the end of that herculean effort we still face a degraded future.
